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<blockquote>"We were trying to make the hardest record we could make. It was very strange because we made it, we thought it sounded brilliant, we had it on the big speakers just blowing us away. Then someone from the record company came in — and because the demos were more synthy and not as industrial as the album, he listened to it and his mouth dropped open and he said 'You've ruined this record.' But of course it's gone on to be a classic. It was done in 20 days. I think it was a good thing that we made records so quickly back then because there's a lot of energy in there and mistakes are left in, so it sounds human and it's not blanded out over time."[http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan06/articles/johnfryer.htm]</blockquote>
===Instrumentation and samples===
In a 1990 interview with ''Keyboard'' magazine[http://www.nin-pages.de/1990_Keyboard_April_english.htm], Reznor gave some details on what went into the album:
<blockquote>Where did you get the samples that you used on the album?
A couple of people helped me. I'd say, "if you hear anything cool in a movie or any place else, just throw it onto cassette, and I'll dump it into the sampler." Of course, they were all hot to do it for a couple of days, then their interest waned and their output stopped. But every drum sound on ''Pretty Hate Machine'' is off of somebody else‘s record. I'd just gotten the Emax but I hated the factory sounds, and I didn't have anything transferred over from the Emulator. So I got a couple of albums out - Front 242, Scritti Politti, a bunch of things - and nicked sounds from here and there. Then I sequenced the songs, and took them into the studio, thinking, "Okay, if I'm gonna do it for real with a producer, let's get some real drum sounds." But the ones I had were pretty cool. We just EQ-ed them, and that's it.
Did you take any original industrial noise samples?
Most of those sounds I got from other sources. Part of it was laziness. But another part was, "That's a cool sound". I'd Turbosynth it, or put it in Alchemy and EQ it until it came out as a weird new sound. I was tempted to lay in more of other people's stuff, but I thought that would lend a real dated quality to the record, seeing where that has gone the way it has in hip-hop. I didn't go out with a DAT machine and record any thing. That's something I want to do for the next album - maybe dedicate a month to accumulating good sounds. But I had so much work heaped on me that I didn't have time to do that sort of thing. When you're in the world of independent labels, you don't have four weeks to mix two tracks.
What are some of the more memorable samples on your album?
On the last chorus of "Sanctified," you'll hear a weird little beat; that's kind of an obvious one. At the end of the last song on the album, "Ringfinger," the idea was to get as many loops playing at the same time as possible. We got about 12 before we ran out of channels. For a lot of weird percussion things, I would cheat: I'd get a track up, and if I couldn't find something that would make a groove, I'd take, say, a Public Enemy two-bar loop, turn it backwards, modulate it through Turbosynth with an oscillator tuned to the pitch of the song, and get this weird flanging-type thing that's in key. No one would guess that‘s actually another song playing. Every drum fill on "Terrible Lie" is lifted intact from some where. There are six other songs playing through that cut, recorded on tape, in and out, depending on where they worked.
"Terrible Lie" also features a very provocative dissonant theme right after the false ending.
That sound has quite an interesting history. It started out as a woodblock. I ran it through a distortion pedal, sampled it, then did my Emax trick by dropping it down a couple of octaves. Then I chopped off the beginning of it. I might also have put an envelope on it with Turbosynth. That's probably my favorite sound on the record.
What was the source of the piano sound on "Something I Can Never Have"?
That‘s the one song I kind of backed away from. I did that in London, with John Fryer. He's done a lot of things on the 4 A.D. label, like Cocteau Twins, System Event, Xymox. There's a dreamy quality to a lot of the stuff that he produces, so that track lent itself to him. It ended up being some sample off an [Akai] S900 with the filter way, way down. He's the reverb master, so it was buried in the AMS reverb. All the weird stuff in the background is from a project he does called This Mortal Coil, which is a collaboration of 4 A.D. artists. He had a bunch of half-inch tapes that they had done for backing tracks, with bass guitars slowed down. I was listening to them while he was mixing other things on the tape, checking out what was there, and accidentally brought this up in the mix. We recorded it on a couple of tracks of 24- track. Somehow it worked perfectly.
"That's What I Get" followed an unusual arrangement pattern, with a really big intro, after which the tune gradually diminished to nothing.
Initially, I didn't intend that track to be on the album. It was supposed to be a b-side or something like that. Lyrically, it didn't fit the flow of the record. So I figured I'd approach it in a different way, rather than in the Nine Inch Nails formula of small, big, small, big, big, small-verse, chorus, etc. We had kind of run out of arrangement ideas, so we just threw up some loops and things. The percussion on it wasn't ten different parts; it was one loop that John had from something else, and it worked. He's got 600 disks of weird things I've never heard of.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of synth on the album.
Actually, there was. I used a Prophet-VS, an Oberheim Xpander, and a little bit of Minimoog, which was down more than up in the studio. I've had the Xpander since it came out. I've always considered it a great analog machine. It's the only thing I've ever owned that‘s never let me down. But I'd gotten to the point where it was cumbersome to program. I had the same ten sounds I always thought were great in lt. Then, when I worked with Flood, he breathed new life into it for me. He's absolutely a master of programming the Xpander. We really got into the FM section, doing some weird modulation things I'd never attempted and coming up with very strange, non-analog sounds. That ended up being a big part of what we did for a lot of weird modulating sounds. "Terrible Lie" was all Oberheim.</blockquote>
==Touring==