Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

Posted by simonw 4 days ago

Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?(www.madebywindmill.com)

771 points | 130 commentspage 2

InfiniteAscent 3 days ago|

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" was built around a one- or two-bar loop sampled from Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby."

Daft Punk determined that this loop had a tempo of 116.527 BPM and played it a semitone higher.

116,527 * 2 ^ (1 / 12) = 123,456 BPM

postit 4 days ago||

I’m not at the computer to check now, but you gotta consider that the music uses a sample from Cola Bottle Baby that was recorded in analog and most likely had transport drift when plagued in a different equipment. A lightly variation on the nominal speed can cause a fractional BPM.

When that is sampled and speed/slowed in software - specially at the time the record was made, you couldn’t get exact on the beat with a digital metronome.

Group_B 3 days ago|

Yes, I am thinking this is mostly just a coincidence.

Pikamander2 3 days ago||

Here's John's Reddit post about his discovery, which he deleted for some reason:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/1phvika/did_i_jus...

gfody 4 days ago||

having a daft punk themed morning, was just looking at this old answer on SO

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10760494

dr_dshiv 3 days ago||

“ Computers have a rough time of this because they don’t really know how to “keep a beat”, and the algorithms that can find the beat do a lot better when they already know the estimated BPM, which is obviously a chicken/egg problem.”

Incredible! Would love some science on this.

matchagaucho 4 days ago||

Seems most likely they used an analog trick, like Varispeed, on the final mix (old Beatles trick from the 60s).

afro88 4 days ago|

Probably. Their final mixing chain is quite interesting too. There's a thread on gearspace that I can't find right now, which details how they record stems into a Roland S760 sampler because it colours the sound in a pleasantly digital way.

tibbon 4 days ago||

I'd have to check, but I wonder what pitch the song is in? Could have it just been sped up ever so slightly in mastering, or even just between tape playback from mixing to mastering?

I have to wonder if this is like Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz - viewers can imply all sorts of intent that is very unlikely to have been there originally. A small mistake or tweak in any layer of processing could have easily done this.

zero_bias 4 days ago|

It’s important for electronic music to have consistent and predictable pitch, otherwise djs on stage will have hard time to play (they loop a start of the song and play it together with tail loop of previous song), so Daft Punk need to intentionally choose fractional BPM as mastering engineers will not change pitch even slightly

InfiniteAscent 3 days ago||

DJs routinely change the playback speed to match tempos.

It’s easier if a track’s tempo stays the same throughout its duration, but even if it changes, DJs will adjust the playback speed on the fly.

As far as syncing is concerned, the actual value of the tempos doesn't matter at all.

Rebelgecko 4 days ago||

Is the tempo continuous? It's also possible the tempo just shifts between 123.4 and 123.5 to average out to 123.45

moomin 4 days ago||

My supplemental question would be: what BPM is Cola Bottle Baby?

alexjplant 4 days ago||

For those not familiar "Cola Bottle Baby" is the Edwin Birdsong tune [1] that Daft Punk sampled for "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". I heard the sample first but think I prefer the original at this point (despite the songs being different genres). Lots of interesting stuff going on with the bass guitar and chorus that's missing in the Daft Punk cut.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiD39jo5Yo4

fenwick67 4 days ago||

This is true with many of Daft Punk's tracks imo, when listening to the original and then going back to the Daft Punk version it feels like a downgrade because of missing instruments and structure

relaxing 4 days ago||

I count it at 116 bpm. Nice and funky, just like mama liked it.

Loughla 4 days ago|

On a different but related note, the best version of this song is by Scary Pockets;

https://youtu.be/RHu0ALxqUIo?si=39AqMuSrLL2zu3At

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