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Please click confirm to resume now. I am from the school of being able to tell what studio somebody recorded at because of the way the room sounds. So I put that reverb on to make it sound as if it all came from the same room. Sometimes when the kick is coming from a record you get that sample hiss, and you have to take that out, and you have to make sure that it sits right. I didn't do anything to the snare, 'MstrS'. The additional kick and snare, as well as the two tracks, don't go to the overall reverb, I felt that they sounded better dry.
There are two s, and they don't play at the same time, they complement each other. The first had an RE6 on it, to get it to sit right. I'm boosting at 2. A lot of people miss the higher register of the , which actually gives it its character. By the way, I never really look at the numbers when I am EQ'ing, I just move the dots around and listen. The only number that I will pay attention to is the Q. The low rings out longer, and adds strength to the drums. On the outboard, the two s and kick and snare would have gone through the Distressor and the API.
I did not feel the need to add anything else, other than the overall reverb to which many of the drums tracks are sent. I am not the kind of person who just grabs for outboard gear because it is there. What makes me decide to go for one or the other? As I said, most of my mixes from the last 10 years will have the Distressor and API on the drums, because I can get really detailed with the harmonics in the Distressor.
I can tune the kick very precisely and make it fit perfectly. I wanted to bring out the mids of the guitar figure in the sample. There also wasn't enough bottom end in it, so there is a little boost around 34Hz as well. I did not want too much of the sample bass line, but I still wanted some of the rumble. Somebody took the EQs out of a Focusrite board and put them in a rack and we have that in Baseline and I love them.
Why three EQs? After that, I use outboard EQs to adjust the tone to my liking. I also compressed the sample on the board, using the SSL compressor. The Massey TapeHead made the guitars sound as if they were coming off tape, and this was also done to make sure that they blended in with the sample, which had been taken from a vinyl record.
The guitars are low in the mix, as they only add support to the guitars in the sample. Like the guitar, it is mixed in low, as it's more there to add texture. It occurs during Jay's last part of the verse and throughout the hook. So it was really an additional sound. Many of the stereo tracks I get are uneven in volume between left and right, and I'll use the REQ to level the two channels.
You can see that the right channel is up by 1. That was just a quick fix. I just did a little bit of desk EQ, because, as always, you have to be mindful of mids building up.
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I finished my schooling at that time so the reason that was so special is because I met Chucky Thompson, who became one of my best mentors. So he was executive producing her second album, so the nervousness you have of figuring out the equipment and knowing how everything works in a session was with my own group.
It was just so much more relaxing to figure everything out because it was my music, or the group that I was with. But through working with Chucky, he got comfortable with me, I got comfortable with him, and then he started bringing me into all the stuff he was doing with Bad Boy. He had started Chuck Life, which was a record label he was dealing with in DC, but he would still do a lot of stuff in New York.
I would normally track stuff and then go with him to New York. And he was the bridge that introduced me to another great engineer, Tony. So the next day when he walked in I opened the box on the desk.
Then we kind of struck a relationship. To this day I turn my NS10s up. Most people have their NS10s flat, and I turn mine up.
All of that comes from Tony Maserati. So one thing leads to another leads to another. Relationships are just as important as the information that you get. The information makes you ready; the relationship is gonna actually get you in the door to use what you know.
And it got me accustomed to working in New York City. But all of that led to me getting to New York City. But once the Madd Rapper album was done, again, I looked at Duro and was trying to work out who managed him. I went on this two-week search for his manager. It just never stopped from there. I did a session for Memphis Bleek. Interesting things started to happen. There was also a guy named Brian Stanley, good, good friend. So there was a little crew of us. We were all doing major sessions, but we were all young black guys.
We used to be pissed because we tried to get sessions but Allied Pool was controlling New York City at this time. Tony was in Allied Pool, but it was just a group of older rock engineers that had everything on lock. That was our way of helping each other out. Bleek and I gravitated toward each other and struck up a friendship.
A normal engineer is just supposed to sit there and be quiet and facilitate the record. I owe a majority of whatever else came after that to him, just from our relationship being cool. Then Jay-Z being the COO of the label inevitably is gonna come by to check on whatever one of his artists is doing. In the middle of a Memphis Bleek session, Jay was working on an album at the time. It used to be this thing where we would call Quad. Call Sony. When you have the ability to have your own studio and have this room you can get comfortable with, and know the sound of that room, it makes work flow so much faster.
I always say to people the best music comes from small groups of people coming out of the same room. Hitsville is not this big place — this place might be bigger than Hitsville [ looking around the room ]. Every single time you think about it. Stax is not this super conglomerate of people. Can you talk a bit about the sonic characteristics were of Baseline?
What was defining about it, what was acoustically unique about it? We had it designed by a Pro Audio designer, his last name Malekpour. Dave Malekpour at Pro Audio Design designed that room. When it first started I gave him two days to put the room together and it was sounding like a real opera room. This room needs to sound like this. I kind of learned every nook and cranny of that room. We had Genelec near-fields.
I had NS10s, which I absolutely live by. Sometimes the Genelecs are a little bit too forgiving. Dre headphones — you can put anything through the Dr. Then we had Augspurgers as our mains and then we had the extra sub-Augspurgers and the amps were perfectly tuned to the Augspurgers.
You have to buy the amps with the speakers, because he has to tune it exactly like that. When you turn those Augspurgers on, they kick. Well, do you have another example of something? And sometimes you need to step back and listen to the purity of the music.
One of the best things I ever did was start to do some jazz sessions. Coming from hip-hop and going to jazz is just a completely different approach. I have to span all these genres of music. When you do a jazz session, you mix as the session is going on. Jazz artists expect to be able to knock out the whole album, maybe two albums, in a day. So you take all this time to get ready but then you just flow.
Most of it is just fader levels. I may be pressing a couple of things, EQing a couple of things. But it speaks to you not getting in the way of the music. And you have to make those determinations and decisions. That too was a super fun record.
Kanye used to send monthly DATs. Jay might lke two of them and pass the rest around to whoever was in the studio. But he did that to claim the record. Cam was already hot, but it shot him to real serious superstar status. Do you have an example of something you did extensive work on, beyond normal? Then we can open things up a little bit for them to ask questions. OK, this is one of my favorite records I have ever done. Has everyone heard of De La Soul?
But I actually got to work with them on this album called Grind Date. He wears a mask. He used to be in this group called KMD back in the day with his brother, but his brother passed away, so he just flipped it and made this new persona called MF Doom, where he takes from the Spiderman comics, that character.
Personally, I like the song tracked out, every sound. Every producer is not gonna do that. This is one of those tracks, but it ended up being an incredible record that is a staple on underground music. Kane Flow. So there was vocal stuff going on there. Obviously, Jake One produced this and he killed it with the speeding up and slowing down of the beat. You have to give credit to Jake for doing that with the beat and to De La for doing that.
MF Doom is on there. Dilla is one of my great favorites. If you just listen to anything hip-hop, J Dilla is the person you should listen to. His catalog will show you the complete range of what can be done with hip-hop music. He was just into making music. His album Mm.. Food to me is another hip-hop classic, very underrated.
But Grind Date is definitely one of my favorite albums. I wanna give everybody a chance to ask Guru a few questions as well. Does anybody have a question at this point? Please wait for the mic. Me too. I noticed you mentioned API. Do you ever use the Waves API or things like that? Yeah, I think they sound extremely close to what it is. No two s or Bs are gonna sound exactly alike. We would have to first of all re-cap everything.
The plug-in thing is incredible to me, so I never try to argue, is it exactly like the real thing? It does a job and it does a job well. The Waves ones are extremely close to the real thing, just because those are my EQs of choice on certain drums. I think they did a great job. Waves and Universal Audio are killing the game with actually doing remakes of old pieces of gear. Also, in your mind you associate a sound with the visual picture of that piece of gear.
So I love that the interface looks like the real thing. You understand? But Universal Audio and Waves are really killing it. But these are just my things that I go to on a regular basis because now I can replicate all my mixes in the computer. So people actually made convolution verbs out of those rooms before they destroyed them. I was pissed when Sound on Sound went.
It was one of the greatest rooms to mix in. I hope that answers your question. It just depends on what you like and what works for you.
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