On saturday the 10th of july Defected is throwing a party at one of the most legendary clubs in the world, Pacha, Ibiza, and they invited us to play some tunes. We think that’s awesome.
Also spinning that night is this dude called Bob Sinclar.
An Ibiza night out is not complete without a proper pre-party, so you can check us dropping sunset tunes at Café Mambo from 10 till 11 pm.

Yes, we got another remix out. It’s a track by Martin Accorsi feat. Sarah Kühne and it’s called Soul Jack.
Released on Roger Sanchez’ Stealth Records, this track has been a firm favourite in our sets, and from what we’ve heard it also gets heavy support from all the usual suspects.

Grab Martin Accorsi feat. Sarah Kühne – Soul Jack (Chocolate Puma Remix) at Beatport.

We also went to Japan to shoot this video. Rumour is that an incognito Laidback Luke did all the ninja stunts.

;-)

Y’all know Robert Owens right? This legendary vocalist is known for one of the best house records of all time, ‘I’ll Be Your Friend‘.
So when we got the chance to remix his track ‘Deep Down’ we were quite chuffed indeed.

Now Underground Collective released it and you can grab your copy here.

Robert Owens – Deep Down (Chocolate Puma Remix) by Chocolate Puma

We had a little chat with the guys from Defected about our single ‘Back Home’.

You know a Chocolate Puma track from the first moment it knocks you around the head with its absurdly punchy beats. A ridiculously catchy vocal will follow soon after and that’s it; it’ll be in your head from when you first hear it, throughout the rest of the day or night and probably for a few days afterwards. You’ll either love it or hate it (although we’ve found most people sit firmly in the former camp) but regardless of which it is, it’ll bounce round inside your head for a considerable time.

Now, the Dutch duo have dropped a new track that’s set to follow in the addictive footsteps of its predecessors and attach itself to your brain like a house-loving limpet. We caught up with them to find out more…

Guys..this track is banging! What’s it all about?

For us this track was about taking our classic Chocolate Puma sound to the next level; making it tough and powerful but still trying to have as much soul and funk in it. And a bit of nanana, naturally.

Tell us about the vocalist Colonel Red…

We got introduced to Red by the guy who featured on our Dub Of Boom track. He is an amazing soul/jazz singer, originally from the UK, currently living in Rotterdam, Holland. You might know him from his Sweet Liberation album and his own Ruff Language label. The cool thing is that he is a genuine soul/jazz guy but at the same time knows everything about acid house, clubbing and Robert Owens.

You have a very distinctive, punchy sound…any production tips you’d like to share with us?

Choose the fattest sounds you can find. Use sounds with different characters and layer them. For example, using an analog synth sound, combined with samples from an old scratchy record, and live recordings from your kitchen ware gives you much more depth than just staying ‘in the box’. Also don’t think you need much equipment. ‘Cause you don’t. We just use Logic and use the standard plug-ins. That’s all. Oh, and good ideas don’t hurt either. Also, we just started giving production tips on our website chocolatepuma.com. We already got some features about eqing and compressing, so you definately should check that out.

The artwork for the single is also fantastic…who did the design?

The artwork is done by Dutch multitalented artist Marc Sokpolie aka Zwazi. We had a cool brainstorm session with him about all kinds of things we’re digging. After a few weeks he came up with this great illustration of us floating in space, with in the background the debris of the ring of Saturn replaced by wrecks of all the cars we like. The artwork for this single is actually a fragment of this bigger illustration. We even have made t-shirts!

When is the happiest you’ve ever been to be ‘Back Home’?

We love playing all over the world, and being at all these exotic is great. But at the same, being away from your loved ones is not always the easiest thing. Especially when we were stranded at Sao Paulo airport for a million hours due to a strike. Coming ‘Back Home’ from that trip made us quite happy indeed.

What can we expect from you for the rest of the year?

We made lots of bootlegs over the last year and we will share some of them with the rest of the world in the next few months. Also, we’re re-launching our label Pssst Music, which will be our little playground for tracks that won’t fit in the Chocolate Puma/Defected picture. Demolishing clubs and causing mayhem at the summer festivals is also on our to do list.

Anything else you’d like to tell us about..?

One of us is going on a holiday to Iceland. No kidding.

Back Home is out now on Defected Records.

We already gave it away on the blog of Zouk Singapore, but now we’ve also put a downloadable version of it on our soundcloud page.
Get it while you can, D.H.S. Vs. Brahms & Klement Bonelli – House Of Los Chicanos (KG Vs. Chocolate Puma Bootleg).

D.H.S. Vs. Brahms & Klement Bonelli – House Of Los Chicanos (KG Vs. Chocolate Puma Bootleg) by Chocolate Puma

We made a little selection of the tracks we’re digging at the moment. We were cheeky enough to put our new single ‘Back Home’ featuring Colonel Red at the top spot! ;-)

Check it here

This is big. Friday April 30th we’ll be dropping tunes at one of best clubs in the world, Zouk Singapore. To celebrate this, we’re giving away a new DJ Mix and finally…*drumroll*… our ‘House Of Los Chicanos‘ Bootleg.
You also get the chance to win Chocolate Puma t-shirts and signed Defected In The House Amsterdam compilations! Woohoo!

To win this you have to answer to following question: “What is the title of the new Chocolate Puma single, released April 28th on Defected?”
Email your answer, full name + contact before Fri 30 Apr, 6pm to alyssa@zoukclub.com

Grab our new DJ Mix and ‘House Of Los Chicanos’ bootleg here

Finally it’s here, and we’re very excited about this one! Our new single featuring Colonel Red ‘Back Home’ is released. So grab your copy at your favourite download store.

Beatport
Traxsource
Defected Store
etc.

Preview:
Chocolate Puma – Back Home Lo Fi Preview by Chocolate Puma

We all love our daily dose of compression, and we know some amongst you can’t resist smacking the hell out of a signal. That’s cool, but the downside might be that you lose a lot of the dynamics and transients, and that your drumloops, synths, or even your whole track ends up sounding squashed and lifeless.

So, imagine you’ve got this really cool drumloop with hard hitting snare drums and really punchy attacks on the kick drum, but there’s also al kinds of cool noises and ghost notes in the background that you want to bring forward in the mix. But you don’t want to lose the punch!
Or you want to glue sounds together without messing with the peaks.
Or add that nice character that comes with this emulation of a vintage tube compressor without flattening the loud parts.
Sometimes we record some live percussion, which might have both great attacks from hands hitting a piece of drum skin, and nice soft undertones and noise at the same time that you really want to make more audible.

This is where parallel compression comes in. It’s a technique we use A LOT. Even back in the days, when we were still mixing on our analog mixing desk and Drawmer and Focusrite hardware compressors, we used parallel compression in practically every song.

Now what is it then?
Wiki says: Parallel compression, also known as New York compression, is a dynamic range compression technique used in sound recording and mixing. Parallel compression, a form of upward compression, is achieved by mixing an unprocessed ‘dry’, or lightly compressed, signal with a heavily compressed version of the same signal. Rather than bringing down the highest peaks for the purpose of dynamic range reduction, it accomplishes the same end by bringing up the softest sounds, adding audible detail.

So by combining a dry uncompressed signal together with a compressed version you get that nice squashy/characteristic/pumping sound of compression AND the impact, attacks and dynamics of an uncompressed signal.

Now, how do you use it?
If you’re a Logic user and using the standard Logic compressor it’s fairly straightforward.

- Just put a compressor on a channel, fool around with threshold, ratio and other knobs and squash it!

- Then go to the bottom lefthand corner and click the triangle to unfold this menu with extra parameters.

- At the bottom you will see a slider called ‘Mix’. If you pull the slider to the left you’re mixing the dry signal in.
Also, a lot of third party plug-in compressors have some kind of dry/wet slider, like one of our favourites, Fabfilter’s Pro-C.

Now, if your favourite compressor plug-in doesn’t have a dry/wet slider, don’t worry, as there are different ways of getting parallel compression.

- Put a compressor on a bus channel.

- Besides routing your signal to your main output, also send it to the bus channel using the send knob.

- Make sure you switch on any kind of latency/delay compensation, or you might get some nasty phasing problems.

or

- Make a duplicate of your uncompressed audio track

- Put a compressor on it.

Yay, you’re compressing parallel!
Now, you can use it on whatever you like. For example we always use it on our stereo bus, and very often on percussion and our drum tracks.

Audio examples:

Uncompressed signal: this sounds really static. Notice that the soft percussion hits are difficult to hear.

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Heavy compressed signal: this might sound cool, but it lacks power and dynamics

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70% uncompressed signal mixed with 30% heavy compressed signal: now we get the best of both worlds. Cool squashy sound of the compressor, soft notes are more audible, but we still retain the power and punch.

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