“As I was jamming I found myself making about 25 tracks”: How Carl Cox produced an entire live album in 90 minutesThe material for Carl Cox‘s 2022 album Electronic Generations was written in 90 minutes, with the help of some trusty hardware and a Pioneer DJ V10 mixer.
During the Covid pandemic – a time in which he was unable to tour – Cox revisited the live electronic setups he experimented with in the early days of his career. He collated his arsenal – including a Moog Labyrinth and DFAM, and a Roland TR-8S drum machine – routed them through a V10, a mixer which can record individual channels as stems rather than outputting a stereo feed, and into Ableton.

READ MORE: Ableton Live 12.2 is now in public beta – here’s what’s new

Cox would simply turn on the gear, press record and start making music in the moment. Then, 90 minutes into one particularly inspiring jam session, he realised he’d made a full album. He explains the process in detail in a new interview with MusicTech.
“I found as I was doing all these different ideas while I was jamming that I was actually making a live album,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting to do an album. But everything that was coming about, I could tell – ‘That’s another track. That’s another track. That’s another track.’ I found myself doing about 25 tracks,” Cox recalls. This process birthed the new live setup he’s been touring with since events resumed post-pandemic.
“I’m just jamming the shit out of this stuff and all of these patterns, ideas, basslines, chord progressions and stories were just oozing out, and I recorded everything,” he said in another interview with Mixmag, further detaing his process for writing Electronic Generations.. “So, after about an hour-and-a-half, I sat there and I topped and tailed all the ideas of what I was doing. My last album took six months to do; [Electronic Generations] took an-hour-and-a-half.”

Cox will headline the Carl Cox Megastructure at Ultra Music Festival on March 29 using the same live setup, and he’s already announced more live shows for 2025 at notable venues like Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.
These shows are meant to capture the same process he used to make Electronic Generations and share it with an audience.
“When you go in the studio to record, you use these machines. You use a drum machine. You use synths. You use keyboards. So why don’t you do what we’re doing in the studio, and then create that live?” Cox tells MusicTech.
Read the full interview with Carl Cox via MusicTech.
The post “As I was jamming I found myself making about 25 tracks”: How Carl Cox produced an entire live album in 90 minutes appeared first on MusicTech.