Cash Cash: Blood, Sweat & 3 Years

Spending 20 hours straight in a studio with Nelly changed the way electronic music trio, Cash Cash record music, and not just because the rapper wouldn’t let them write anything down...

Cash Cash’s inception as an electronic music trio can be traced back to Jean Paul (JP) and Alex Makhlouf’s parents’ basement. Completing the trio is life-long friend Samuel Frisch, who together with the Makhlouf brothers grew up in northern New Jersey where they whiled away the hours recording in their basement studio.

Together, the three DJ/producers record, mix and master all of their music under the moniker Cash Cash, and have released four full-length albums and an array of EPs and singles, as well as churning out a steady stream of official remixes for artists such as Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, David Guetta and Hardwell.

“It’s been the three of us since day one,” opens JP. “Sam and I were in high school together and we recorded random demos on our old PC computer in our – I don't even know what you would call it – it was barely a studio! It was the most makeshift thing you could possibly find, and we all learnt from trial and error.”

After a few years at college, JP knew he wasn’t happy, and decided to quit to pursue music full time:

“It felt like the most liberating thing ever,” he remembers. “I didn't have a clue what I was going to do. I just knew that if I left college, I’d be able to focus on music more. I knew it would skyrocket because I'd have all this time to work on it – and that's literally what happened. Two months later, we got signed with a major record deal. It was like pure…I wouldn't say luck; It was almost like a formula: focus on music, get 100% results.”

Their latest full length album Blood, Sweat & 3 Years, was Cash Cash’s way of bringing music listeners from all genres together under one roof. An ambitious and intense project that took 36 months to complete, the LP blends tear-jerking lyrics, expressive synths, thunderous basslines, and the group’s signature infectious melodies – not to mention a star-studded lineup of A-list guests including Nelly, Christina Perri, Bebe Rexha and Busta Rhymes.

There’s a good reason the album took 36 six months to finish: logistics.

“The biggest thing that makes it hard for us to put out albums left and right is that we're not all home in one place for enough time. We play a lot of shows together, but most of the touring is done with me and Sam, and there's only so much that Alex or one of us can do back home in the studio. Sam can finish ideas that we started or he can keep things moving in a direction, but ultimately, we all need to be home in the studio to make a final product.

“Another reason is when you're working with so many different artists, there are a lot of moving parts as far as the artists themselves, their management, their publishers, or if you have other writers in the room – it takes a long time to get all the paperwork done to get everyone on board with everyone's release cycles. So there's always random holdups, on top of the fact that we are perfectionists and are always overthinking things. It's something we're getting used to, and we're getting a little bit faster with the whole process.”

Must Be The Money

Helping them shake up the way they record came from an unlikely source when they partnered with Nelly on dancehall-infused summer anthem, Millionaire.

“Working with Nelly was probably one of my favourite studio sessions ever,” JP confesses. “It was insane. I think we worked for about 20 hours straight until 5am. It was a combination of partying, eating, and just going crazy. I didn't even think we're going to get anything done. The next day I was sorting all the vocal tracks like, ‘Oh my God, did we even get anything?’”

Partying aside, JP says the real pinch-me moment came when the rap legend decided to add his signature “must-be-the-money” vocal stamp into the song:

“I had the idea, and I was like, ‘dude, we should just do it. Let’s pay homage to it!’ He looked at me and didn't say a word. I was like, ‘I think I just pissed him off; I think he's gonna leave the room!’ Then he started shaking his head, but for yes, and he said, ‘maybe champ, maybe…’ He was down, and he was great!”

Nelly did more than recite one of his most famous lines: he shifted the way Cash Cash recorded music from then on. The usually heads-down trio are used to doing everything by the book in a methodological way, and took the whole process extremely seriously.

“Sometimes we are a little too serious for our own good,” JP admits. “There wasn’t much laughing. But when we were with him, it changed things. I remember I was trying to write down some lyrics and he grabbed my phone and said, ‘no writing lyrics down; if you ain't gonna remember it, it ain't good enough and it ain’t gonna stay in the song!’ I said, ‘I'm gonna forget what I wrote though’, and he said, ‘then you should forget it!’ He was pushing us in this other direction of loosening us the hell up, and that kind of stuck with us. Now we have more fun in the studio and we get more creative because of it.”

So no more writing down lyrics at all?

“Well...my memory’s not as good as his,” he says a little guiltily. “I do write things down still here and there, but we just make it less about looking at your phone and not second guessing things as much. At some point, you’ve got to have confidence in your own decision making. If you can't have faith in yourself, then how can anyone else?”

The trio are pretty self contained, and there is no need for them to outsource anything for any part of the production process.

“Everybody does a little bit of everything,” JP explains. “My brother does a lot of the keyboard writing and he's great with chords, and I'm great with melody, vocals, editing and mixing and stuff like that. And Sam is a great producer who can do pretty much everything. We try to be as respectful as possible to one another when we're conveying our ideas, but obviously that can get a little hard when two of us are brothers and we're used to being very, very blunt with one another! We're still friends, so I guess it hasn't got that bad yet!”

Cash Cash are long-time Steinberg Cubase users, which JP says is the crucial piece of gear that links them all together:

“We’ve been on Cubase since day one, literally. We tried a bunch of other things, and they just felt like work! I remember opening up Pro Tools for the first time and being like, ‘Oh my God, this just reminds me of school and Microsoft Word – bad vibes, bad vibes,” he laughs.

“I was just like, ‘there's got to be something else’. We found Cubase and we said, ‘this is the one’. We found Cubase and it was a match made in heaven. It's opened up the doors for everything.”

In terms of plugins, Waves immediately springs to mind for JP – his particular favourites being the SSL plugins, the V-Comp Compressor and Renaissance, but the X-Hum and X-Click – designed to kill clicks and other like transients – have been the real lifesavers for Cash Cash:

“Our song Call You with MAGIC! was recorded together in an LA studio, but just as a demo. We planned to re-record the vocals but he ended up having vocal surgery so he couldn't re-do them because he had one of those nodules on his vocal chords. We wanted to put the song out but there was this nasty hum in the vocal. I think it could have been a fan in the room – the AC had this high pitch sound and it was driving us crazy, but we got it out with those restoration Waves plugins. They literally saved the day.”

JP describes Cash Cash as “diehard Adam Audio” users, and they have been using their various studio monitors for 15 years.

“In our studio, it’s Adam Audio always,” JP confirms. “There’s something you can't put your finger on, it's a really smooth sound and you can work on them for a long time without getting tired. They were initially known for being rock speakers, but we're doing everything on them: rock, pop, hip hop – so we always found that perception to be a little bit of BS.”

Cash Cash started out with Adam Audios’ S3A monitor, but between them have since upped their respective collections to include everything from the A7, A8X to the A5Xs.

“Back in the day we had their S3A, and I felt like it was the first time I heard music properly,” he remembers. “This was what music was supposed to sound like. For producers, your studio starts with speakers; there is only so much you can do if you're not hearing it right. We’ve got a pair of the new S3H speakers, which is kind of like a remake of the speaker we originally fell in love with. It's been awesome having them in our studio. It's opened up our third eye.”