RAMON ZENKER: Recording Fragma's 'Toca's Miracle'

Most record producers would greet the discovery that their work has been bootlegged with dismay. For German dance producer Ramon Zenker, however, it proved to be the key to a smash hit. Sam Inglis finds out more...

Even by the capricious standards of pop music in general, dance music tends to be ephemeral. The tides of fashion turn so fast that songs, artists, and entire styles can top the charts one month, only to be forgotten the next. So when German dance producer Ramon Zenker, aka Fragma, saw his semi-instrumental trance track 'Toca Me' peak at number 11 in the UK last autumn, he could have been forgiven for thinking that its chart career was over. He could not have dreamed that, six months later, it would be all over the radio, and go all the way to the top of the charts as the basis of one of the summer's biggest smashes. "I produced it as a club track. I thought it was a good idea, with the guitar sample, but I thought it was only a thing for clubs, and wouldn't really be that successful," insists Zenker modestly.

'Toca Me' was written by Ramon Zenker and his regular collaborators Dirk and Marco Duderstadt. "They started the composition," explains Zenker. "They offered me some chord lines, sequences and bass lines, and started looking for interesting sounds. I collected these, put my own ideas to it and mixed it together into a track."

What they came up with was almost a pure instrumental, based around a typical trance-style arpeggiated Clavia Nord Lead synth sound treated to a panning delay. "There's not a lot of sound sources used," admits Zenker. "I used a Roland TR909 for the drums, and there's the arpeggiated sequence from the Nord Lead, chord sounds from the Korg O5R/W, and I think the bass was from the Waldorf Pulse, but I can't really remember. There's also a string pad, but I can't remember what I used for that -- I think maybe the Emu Audity 2000. And a little bit later there's some synth chords, those are from the Access Virus."

The other major instrumental feature of both 'Toca Me' and 'Toca's Miracle' is a distinctive guitar sample, again treated with delay: "The guitar sample is from a soundcard from a PC. I produced a song for two boys, and when they'd done the first version, the original demo version, they did it on a PC with a soundcard. It was a cheap soundcard, I don't know which one, but the sound was so unique I sampled it. I tried other sounds from the Roland JV2080 and other modules, but they were not so distinctive."

To these basic elements, Zenker added reverb from a Lexicon 480L, and 'ear candy' in the form of a variety of one-shot backwards sound effects leading into each chorus. "One of them is something like reverse thunder -- I don't know exactly what, but I like the sound. There's also a reverse cymbal, and there's another reversed noise, something like an explosion. I don't know what it is, I've never tried to listen to it forwards! It builds up to the chorus; there's also a snare roll to help link the verse with the chorus."

The final touch on the original 'Toca Me' was the minimal original vocal element: "There was only one vocal sample in it, the sample 'Toca Me', and it only came in three times or something -- the rest was pure instrumental. I always thought that it needed a vocal, but I didn't have the right idea for it to put any original vocals on it, and I thought if I put the wrong vocals on it wouldn't be any good, so it would be better to leave it instrumental. But I was always thinking that it needed vocals. And then somebody put this vocal on it, and it was the vocal that the song needed."

The vocal that the song needed turned out to come from a much older dance record, Coco's 'I Need A Miracle', which reached number 31 in late 1997. Her melody and performance fitted over the top of 'Toca Me' extraordinarily closely -- yet this winning combination was not discovered either by Coco or Ramon Zenker. "Someone else did it," explains Zenker. "It was a DJ from the UK; I think his name was Vimto or something. He mixed the two songs to

"The whole story around this record is very funny -- someone takes your record and takes another record, mixes them together, does a bootleg, sells it illegally, and then everybody plays it on the radio and the record company calls me and says 'We need this version!'"

Although the story sounds unusual, it's not the first time that a crude bootlegged DJ mix of two completely different records has spawned a dance smash: "It happens a lot in the UK," insists Zenker. "There was an example with Lisa Stansfield on this Tori Amos track. There was a track from Tori Amos where Armand van Helden did a remix, and it was a lot of instrumental with just a few words from Tori Amos, and then somebody put vocals from Lisa Stansfield on it, and it was a big hit in the UK. There are a lot of bootlegs -- but there's a lot of crap. They put everything together and sometimes it's so awful, but sometimes it works."

The popularity of the bootleg 'Toca's Miracle' was enough to stimulate demand for an 'official' version, and so Ramon Zenker set out to create one. Coco's vocals, sent to Zenker on DAT, suited his instrumental track so closely that it took a minimum of production effort to weld the two together: "The original vocals were at 126bpm, so I had to timestretch them to 135, I think, and I had to change the tuning a bit, it was a little bit out of tune, and then it fitted. I work with Logic Audio, and I used the time-stretch in the Logic Time Machine. For the pitch I used the DPP1 plug-in from Digidesign. It was only about 50 or 30 cents out, just a bit." Such was the fit between the 'I Need A Miracle' vocals and the instrumental 'Toca Me' that no changes to the latter's sequenced backing or sounds were necessary: all that was required was the reorganisation of a few sections to get the structures of the two songs to match up.

Finishing touches involved the addition of plenty of reverb to the vocals, and another piece of ear candy in the form of the distinctive delay treatment applied to the single words 'need' and 'you' in several places. The reverb came courtesy of Lexicon's Lexiverb TDM plug-in, while the unusual single-word effect was achieved by cutting the individual words out and moving them to a different track within Logic, before applying a delay plug-in.

The mix was equally straightforward: "I did the mix of 'Toca's Miracle' completely in Logic. I put the instrumental from 'Toca Me' and took the samples from Coco, and did it digitally in Logic and Pro Tools. I did two mixes, the club mix and the radio version. The club version is only a little bit different; it's a little bit longer at the beginning so you can mix it in, and the ending is different. The rest is the same."

The bringing together of 'Toca Me' with the vocal track that suited it so perfectly was a minor musical miracle ("It's unbelievable how it fits," exclaims Zenker); and by another mighty coincidence, the potential legal nightmares involved in releasing a track assembled from two previously released records were also bypassed. "Fortunately, this Coco single was on Positiva, which is the same label we are on," says Zenker. "That was very good, so Kevin from Positiva A&R sorted things out with Coco and her management, and it was very quick to find a deal to use the vocals. 'I Need A Miracle' was three years old -- a long time ago -- and 'Toca's Miracle' was more successful than both knocked together, so there was benefit for both sides."

'Toca's Miracle' has indeed been successful. One of only five singles in the charts at the time of writing to have gone gold -- meaning that it has sold over 400,000 copies in the UK alone -- it notched up 12 weeks in the top 40, and has been a fixture in radio playlists for months. It's enough to make you wonder what will happen if it ever gets released again...

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