Korg Monotribe Version 2 (4 of 5): Drum Rolls + LFO

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Eric Valentine

Recording Slash

Technique : Recording / Mixing



What's the best way to make a classic rock album? For producer Eric Valentine and guitarist Slash, there was only one answer: use classic recording techniques and vintage gear.


Paul Tingen



Eric Valentine in the control room at his Barefoot Studios, at the custom‑built mixing desk that was under construction during the recording of the Slash album.Eric Valentine in the control room at his Barefoot Studios, at the custom‑built mixing desk that was under construction during the recording of the Slash album.Photo: Eric Valentine



"When I first met Slash to talk about his solo album,” recalls Eric Valentine, "I immediately told him that the only way I wanted to do it was to approach it like a classic rock record: get great musicians, rehearse the songs properly, and record them on tape machines. There's one particular vintage tape machine that I wanted to use for drums and bass, to get that classic '60s rock sound, and I then wanted to use a more modern tape machine that can punch in and out for overdubs. My idea was to make it really simple, with a great drum sound and one guitar in one speaker and another guitar in the other speaker, so you can really hear performances. I didn't want to hear just a wall of guitar sounds, I wanted to be able to hear Slash playing guitar. He seemed really excited about that.”



Saul 'Slash' Hudson was excited enough to entrust Valentine with the engineering, mixing and production of his first genuine solo album. Simply named Slash, it hit number three in the US charts and made the top spot in many other nations. It's easy to understand why. Not only does Slash feature a number of high‑profile singers, amongst them Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Iggy Pop and, er, Fergie and Maroon 5's Adam Levine, but it also boasts four of the five members of the most successful incarnation of Guns N' Roses. The music itself seriously rocks out, with much full‑on guitar work decorating an impressive number of good songs — including the lead single, 'By The Sword'.



The most immediately striking aspect of Slash is its in‑your‑face sound, which indeed sounds like it's harking back to the golden days of classic rock & roll, while at the same time being thoroughly modern. With Scully and Studer tape machines, an EMI and a custom desk, an enormous array of valve, ribbon, and other microphones, and all manner of vintage and funky and obscure outboard, Eric Valentine's Barefoot Studios is clearly the domain of someone in love with analogue recording.



The track sheet for 'By The Sword'. The track sheet for 'By The Sword'. "Modern, digitally recorded records are an abusive sonic experience,” says Valentine cheerfully. "The whole advent of digital recording has affected many aspects of the music industry and of contemporary recording, mostly in an unfavourable way. It has contributed to the overall decline of the recording industry, in part because listening to digital is less satisfying than listening to analogue. To my ears, digital stuff has an uncomfortable, buzzy high end that I find very difficult to listen to or work with. Digital has the remarkable ability to sound dull and harsh at the same time, and I have to admit that HD doesn't sound dramatically different to me. Of course, my formative years of getting into music and recording were during the analogue days, so I'm aware that I'm romantically attached to that sound and way of doing things. But there's also real truth in the fact that modern, digital records just don't have the same sonic effect as analogue records. When I was growing up and my favourite bands had a new record out, I'd get it, put it on my turntable, and I'd listen to it probably 10 times in a row. They were great‑sounding classic rock records, and I'd listen to them over and over. I simply can't do that with modern records. They're just way too fatiguing to listen to for a long time.”

Extreme Views



Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Eric Valentine



Despite his attachment to the old ways, Valentine is only 41. He grew up in the Bay Area and got into recording as a young teenager in the early '80s, initially doing sound‑on‑sound recording with "two compact cassette recorders and a little Radio Shack mixer”, then using a four‑track Tascam Portastudio. As a drummer, he was part of the hard rock band T‑Ride, and as an engineer and producer he has worked in a variety of genres, including urban (Paris), ska‑punk (Smash Mouth), post‑grunge (Third Eye Blind, Lostprophets), heavy guitar (Joe Satriani), pop (Maroon 5) and punk‑pop (Good Charlotte).



"I suppose I have some pretty extreme views on analogue versus digital recording,” states Valentine, and it turns out that his enthusiasm for analogue isn't only to do with sound quality. He also sings the praises of the analogue way of working. "I do make records using a computer — I started using Logic and then switched to Pro Tools in 1997, with the advent of Beat Detective — but it's a completely different process that leads to completely different results. I have been trying to figure out ways of finishing records just with a computer, without using a tape recorder, but it doesn't really work for me. It's just too disorientating. I can't do it. I just went through another project that I started doing on a computer, and halfway through I had to get the tape machines going. I now record in different ways. Sometimes I will start a project in Pro Tools and use the benefit of digital editing to comp performances, and after organising everything in the computer I'll transfer the project to a tape machine and mix from there. I did that with the Lostprophets record. It seems an appropriate way of working for rock‑band projects. For more pop‑style projects, where potentially a lot of arrangement edits are made close to finishing, I capture the sound on analogue first and then transfer it to a computer. I ended up using that approach for the All‑American Rejects single, 'Gives You Hell'.



"Making records with tape machines has always felt more like an actual craft to me. I'm self‑taught, and learned my craft in the studio that I set up during my T‑Ride days: it was called HOS [an acronym for Hunk Of Shit], and by the '90s I had been in six locations around the Bay Area. I had a Fostex B16 at one stage, and a Neve 8038 desk with 1081 EQs. The latter took up too much space and was not practical for mixing, so I switched to a Neve 8128 in 1997. In 2000, I bought Crystal Studios here in Los Angeles, which I turned into Barefoot Recording, the main reason being that I wanted a large tracking room. I've had several desks here, among them a Neve 88R, and since 2006 I've been designing and building my own custom console, which is finally done.”



Crystal Industries Recording Studio was a legendary place where artists such as Barbra Streisand, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton were recorded during the late '60s and '70s. It had fallen into disrepair when Valentine bought it, and required major renovation.

Slash & Burn



"Slash and I met through some mutual acquaintances. I'd never met him, but I'd heard all the infamous stories about him from the past, so for our first meeting I wasn't sure whether there would be this train wreck in a top hat careening into the restaurant. I just didn't know what to expect. Instead he was incredibly composed, very focused and very easy to talk to. He knew this record was going to be eclectic, with different singers on each song, and I think he was looking for someone who could approach each song in a more individualised way and could accommodate different stylistic approaches. He also said that he'd always made records with tape machines, and that the computer thing of playing in the studio and later finding that his parts had been moved or changed, or otherwise edited, was not comfortable for him. So the approach I suggested was really a lot more what he is used to.



"We started recording in April of 2009, and worked on and off for almost a year on the record. Scheduling was incredibly complicated, because of variations in his schedule and in that of the various singers, so me having my own facility was a huge asset. I got involved in the project when most of the demos were already done. Everyone involved really knew what they were doing, so there wasn't much pre‑production necessary. Slash is an amazing songwriter and arranger, and he had recorded instrumental demo versions of all his songs at Chris Flores' studio. He sent them to the singers, and they then wrote their vocal lines and lyrics and recorded these to the MP3 of the song in question. In a handful of cases, the singer went to Chris's studio and they worked on the demo vocals there. Slash intentionally wanted to record the demos really quickly and roughly, using drum machines and so on, to avoid getting too attached to the demo versions.



"Of course, Slash's guitars sounded good on these demos nonetheless, and we used some of the original keyboard stuff Chris Flores had done for a 'radio' version of Fergie's 'Beautiful Dangerous'. Also, Slash's vision and demo arrangements were so clear that most of the times the original demo arrangements of the songs didn't change much, which was incredible. The changes he wrote worked really well for the singers to write to, and I think he pulled some really cool stuff out of them, some of it the best I've heard them do in a long time. So a lot of the times the vocals and arrangements were already pretty worked out by the time Slash came to Barefoot. He and I would listen to the vocals and arrangements and make decisions about what worked and what didn't, or what could be better. We then got [bassist] Chris Chaney and [drummer] John Freese in, and we finalised the arrangement with three of them in the studio. Everybody would be throwing around ideas and we'd make sure that the demo parts translated into a group of human beings playing.”

Extraordinarily Loud



Slash, Dave Grohl and Duff McKagan lay down a take in the large live room at Barefoot, under the watchful eye of Eric Valentine (right). Slash, Dave Grohl and Duff McKagan lay down a take in the large live room at Barefoot, under the watchful eye of Eric Valentine (right).



"The process of recording was Slash, Josh and Chris playing together in my main recording area, facing each other, playing the songs live. A big part of Slash's sound is having his amplifier playing extraordinarily loud, so we had to have that in a separate room. This meant that he and the band were recording with headphones, even though Slash hates them. It took them maybe three to four hours for each song to work out the arrangement and play a couple of takes, from which I'd edit the best bits to get the master. We'd typically take about three days to record the music for an entire song. The first day we'd get the arrangements and we'd record bass, drums, and the basic guitar part. Once they were done and I had edited the master, I'd copy it to a slave reel, and the next day Slash would do his overdubs to that. Because the headphones make it hard for him to feel what he's playing, for his overdubs I'd set up a live kind of thing in the control room.Slash's guitar overdubs were recorded in the control room at Barefoot, with the backing tracks playing over the huge Urei 813 monitors.Slash's guitar overdubs were recorded in the control room at Barefoot, with the backing tracks playing over the huge Urei 813 monitors. I have these big Urei 813 monitors which are almost like live monitors and I'd just crank them way up. Sometimes I'd be wearing ear protection while Slash was doing overdubs in the room with me. In that situation he was incredibly accurate and consistent. On the third day we'd usually record the singer.



"I recorded the drums really simply, usually with a classic rock four‑mic setup, with a mic on the snare, in front of the kick drum, a mic that hovers above the hi‑hat and one that hovers on the other side, above the floor tom and crash cymbal there. Sometimes I'd supplement that with a chamber mic and/or I'd put a 57 in front of the drum kit and send that to some guitar amps that had spring reverbs. I'd mic the amps and get a great distorted, reverby sound that blended in really well. The specific drum mics I used were mostly an SM57 on or an old Altec 633A 'salt shaker' on the snare, a Neumann U67 on the kick, and the two overheads would be AKG C12As.



"As for the bass, the bass cabinet was mostly an Ampeg SVT 8x10, which was in a separate room, with a Neumann 47FET and a Sennheiser 421 on it. The 47FET generally had a warmer and more natural sound than the 421. The guitar is very straightforward with Slash. He plays one electric guitar for everything, the replica of a 1959 Les Paul Standard made by Chris Derrig that he obtained when recording Appetite For Destruction, and I used a few different mics on his very loud cabinets, mostly an SM57, but sometimes a Sennheiser 421, sometimes a Beyer 160 ribbon if we wanted it to sound a little warmer and smoother. He has a particular Marshall 412 cabinet he really likes that has great low end. We would almost always have that rig going, because it's very comfortable for him while he's playing, and occasionally I'd mult the signal from his guitar to other amps, such as an AC30 and an old Silvertone, to blend in and get different textures that can help identify different parts.”

There's That Sound



Valentine's post‑mic signal paths were remarkably simple: ancient desk into ancient tape machine. "Everything went through the 1972 or 73 EMI TG1 desk that I'd borrowed because my custom‑made console wasn't finished yet.While awaiting the completion of his own mixer, Eric Valentine was forced to make do with an early '70s EMI TG‑series...While awaiting the completion of his own mixer, Eric Valentine was forced to make do with an early '70s EMI TG‑series... The EQ is not hugely flexible, but I could do some basic moves with it. I recorded the band to a two-inch, 16‑track Scully tape machine, and also edited on that. So it was all about razor blades and slicing tape. The Scully was crucial to these recordings. It's a really odd beast that has a very specific and very cool sound. They were used on some of the early recordings of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and it's the first piece of equipment that I have come across where the second I used it I immediately went: 'There's that sound! This really sounds like the classic records that I love!' I heard this more with the Scully than with anything else I've used, whether mic pres, microphones, EQs, whatever. With the Scully it was just instantaneous: 'Wow! That sounds like Jimi Hendrix's 'Are you Experienced?'' My Scully is American‑made, from around '69‑'70, and I stumbled across it in 2004 and had it refurbished. It's a cumbersome machine to use, because it doesn't punch in very well and the remote was designed by a crazy person.”The basic tracks were recorded to Valentine's vintage Scully 16‑track.The basic tracks were recorded to Valentine's vintage Scully 16‑track.



Because Valentine often used several amplifiers for one guitar part, the number of tracks quickly exceeded 16. Various other instruments, such as keyboards, strings and percussion, added to the track count, so while Valentine used the Scully mainly for the basic rhythm tracks, he employed a Studer A800 24‑track for overdubs. Surprisingly, however, most vocals were recorded to Pro Tools. Valentine: "Only Rocco Deluca, Beth Hart and Adam Levine sang directly to tape. For the rest, I did a reference mix of the master, transferred that to Pro Tools and they sang to that. Most singers prefer to sing into a computer, because it's a lot easier for them. Tape machines suck for singers. Getting everything in tune and in time, with all the emotion, is really hard to do in one take or one punch, and singers are faced with very real endurance issues. They just simply can't scream into a microphone for hours on end.



"Recording in a computer is a lot freer for vocalists. I can record a bunch of passes of the whole song and I don't have to force them to re‑sing specific lines. It allows them to get immersed in the song and they don't have to think so much about pitch or getting this or that word right, or whatever. I actually get more honest performances from singers when I capture them in a computer. I can then edit their performance, for instance tune a really cool performance, where the emotion is exactly what we want, if it's a tiny bit out of tune in some places. I'll only nudge things a bit to make sure it's not distracting, meanwhile definitely making sure that everything keeps sounding like real human beings singing. So I never use Auto‑Tune aggressively. It just allows me to use really great, unreproducible but slightly flawed performances. Interestingly, it was the old‑school guys that really embraced the computer, with Lemmy saying, 'Aren't these computers great?' They've lived through the challenges of capturing performances on tape machines. There's times where you lose stuff that you love because you were trying to punch one small part of it, or try to beat a take you had and it doesn't get better. It can be frustrating and tedious. With the computer, any time someone does something incredible, it can be kept.”

'By The Sword'



Written by Slash and Andrew Stockdale

Produced by Eric Valentine



Eric Valentine: "'By The Sword' was mostly recorded like I described, with the added benefit that we had the singer available while we were tracking. Andrew came up with a lot of arrangement ideas and contributed to the overall approach of the song. Slash plays an acoustic in the intro, a Martin reissue of the classic D28, which I recorded with a pair of Schoeps 221 mics. If I have just one, I like to place that between the soundhole and the 12th fret, so it doesn't get too boomy. In this case I had two mics in that position, one looking down at the strings from the top and one looking up from below, and if you pan them in stereo, the strings actually pan across the speakers a little bit, which is a cool effect. I had the prototype EQ for my custom desk around, and any time I needed detailed EQing I used those, and I used them when recording the acoustic guitar for this song. Pretty much all EQ on this album was done by this custom EQ or on the EMI TG1.



"Mixing 'By The Sword' was pretty straightforward because the songs were tracked with the sounds that we wanted, and so mixing was mostly a matter of balancing and letting the sounds come out unencumbered. Keeping the mix simple was also the only way in which I could get away with my mix setup, which was really ridiculous. I'd hoped that my custom console would be ready for these recordings, but it wasn't, so in the interim while the console was being built, I had set up a 48‑channel Flying Faders system using just the faders of my as‑yet‑unfinished custom desk, and two stereo summing busses. It didn't have auxiliary sends or inserts, so I had to patch outboard effects in between the tape machine and the faders. In addition I'd use Pro Tools as a sort of universal effect box. I had duplicates of all tracks in Pro Tools, so if I needed delay splashes or reverb or whatever in particular places, I could send that to a plug‑in, and take a stereo output from Pro Tools to the fader pack. In some cases I also ran some outboard, like the Ursa Major Space Station and the Eventide H3000, through Pro Tools, to be able to use the automation and have more control.”



Drums: Custom desk EQ, Dbx 165A, Empirical Labs Distressor, NTI EQ, Universal Audio 1176.Although Eric Valentine's custom desk was not finished by the time Slash was mixed, its EQ was available and employed on several tracks. Although Eric Valentine's custom desk was not finished by the time Slash was mixed, its EQ was available and employed on several tracks.



"On this song I had the four drum mics, plus one room and two chamber mics. The drums were as I described earlier — 67 on the kick, 57 on the snare, C12A for overheads — and there's a mono room mic, the Coles 4038, and the two chamber mics are a pair of KM84s. The drum sound is a balance of those, with a little bit of EQ. The snare drum and mono room had a little bit of my prototype EQ, while the room mic was gated to open when the snare hit, and the snare had some Dbx 165A compression. I submixed the drums to a stereo pair, on which I had a pair of Distressors and some NTI EQ, and I also did some parallel compression with a pair of 1176 compressors that I mixed underneath to add more density to the ambience.”



Bass & guitars: EMI TG compressor, custom desk EQ, Universal Audio 1176, EMT plate reverb, Orban EQ, BSS dynamic EQ, Urei LA2A.



"There are two bass tracks: one DI and one recorded with a 47FET, using compression from the EMI desk. I'm pretty sure I used the 47 on this track, and I didn't compress any more during the mix, just added some of my prototype EQ.



"Getting a good guitar sound in a track starts with having a great sound at source and parts that are easy to feature. Slash comes up with both: he comes up with really cool guitar riffs that you want to hear clearly, and he's capable of playing them in a very cool, aggressive, punchy way. He has a particular attack that's part of his signature sound, and it makes mixing his guitar tracks really straightforward. I mean, a 57 sounds great on a Marshall rig, so we used that a lot, and when you have a player like him, it sounds huge. Some of the guitars in the mix had multiple sources and hence tracks, so I had submixed these on the EMI desk, on which I added a 'blue stripe' 1176 for some additional compression, and from the EMI I sent a stereo pair to my Flying Faders. I also used some EQ, and if there is reverb, it comes from the room mic. I never sent the electric guitars to a reverb, though I did use some EMT plate reverb, as well as the prototype EQ on the acoustic guitar. There's another intro guitar, an electric, before the drums come in, which is capo'ed, and it had an Orban EQ, a BSS dynamic EQ and an LA2A.”



Vocals & mix bus: Universal Audio 1176, Altec 436B, Empirical Labs Distressor, Alan Smart C2.



"There are two vocal tracks: one main vocal and a double. I had recorded Andrew's vocals with an RCA 77DX mic and some 1176 compression, and during the mix the vocals went through a pair of modified Altec 436B compressors and a pair of Dbx 902 de-essers.



"The whole mix was compressed with an Alan Smart C2, and recorded to half‑inch at 30ips. With the mastering, we had an initial round that came back too loud with too much limiting. I told the mastering engineer 'We gotta turn this thing down about 2dB.' I think it's the first time in five years that the mastering engineer had heard that! I can understand that artists get bummed out if their songs sound softer in someone's playlist where it's together with other people's stuff, but limiting for radio makes the least sense, because radio stations limit the shit out of everything in any case! But I always tell mastering engineers: 'I don't care if we have the loudest record, I want it to be the best‑sounding record.”



On the evidence of Slash, Valentine may, in fact, have achieved both. .

Sync'ing Two Tape Recordings & Pro Tools



During the mixing of the Slash album, Eric Valentine ran two multitrack tape recorders and a Pro Tools rig simultaneously. Asking if this resulted in any sync issues seemed to hit a sore spot. "Yes, sync was a huge problem,” exclaimed Valentine, "largely because our friends over at Digidesign have destroyed the SMPTE sync function in Pro Tools 8. So I was constantly wrestling with that. I had to check the sync of the tape machines with Pro Tools constantly, using my ears and the isolated snare mic track as a reference to make sure that the snare on the tape and in Pro Tools were really tight. The thing they screwed up in Pro Tools 8 is that the SMPTE sync now doesn't accommodate delay compensation. So every time there's a change in the amount of delay compensation [applied automatically within Pro Tools to compensate for plug‑in processing delays], it changes the SMPTE sync. This was definitely not a problem in version 7, but I could not go back to that, because when I got 8 I upgraded my soundcards and my computer to an Intel, and I could not get an install of 7 to work on my new hardware. So I was stuck with 8. The moment I had 8 installed, I was immediately aware that they had screwed that up. It was really distracting and tiring to always be wondering in the back of my mind whether the tape machines and Pro Tools were still in sync and to then be adjusting the sync offset. But we managed to fight our way through it.”

Tape Types & EQ Curves



"I used RMG's 911-formula tape during the recordings of Slash's album, but I wrestled with that the whole time, so the next time I may try ATR tape,” says Eric Valentine. "My favourite tape used to be 3M 996, and after they stopped making that, I switched to [Quantegy] GP9 and occasionally to [Quantegy] 456. All the multitrack recording for the project was done at 15ips with an IEC/CCIR EQ curve, no Dolby. This meant calibrating the machines to what many people call the European standard. Early analogue tape machines had more problems with hum, so the circuits had the low end pre‑emphasised, which then could be turned down on playback to help minimise the hum. Eventually, tape machines got better, with less hum issues, and in Europe they came up with a new EQ standard which is essentially the opposite, in that the high end is pre‑emphasised so it can be turned down later to minimise hiss, and it also greatly improves the amount of headroom. This standard works much better for 15ips, but most of the American recording scene had remained locked into the original NAB recording curve, because so much material was recorded with it that it was difficult to change that standard. The mix for 'By The Sword' was done on half‑inch, 30ips, and that uses a totally different EQ standard called the AES curve, on which everyone has settled.”

Custom Console



Eric Valentine was frustrated not to be able to use his own custom‑built console for the recordings of Slash, because it was not yet finished during 2009. Instead, he just used the desk's fader pack fitted with Flying Faders. However, come 2010, pride of place in Barefoot Studios (called so because the American prefers walking barefooted), goes to Valentine's console, which has been under construction since 2006.



"The company is called Undertone Audio, or UTA. The company right now is just four people: myself, Larry Jasper, Mike Westbrooke and Angel Corcuera. For the first two or three years it was just Larry and I developing the circuitry and general approach. I have brought vision, ears and funding to the project; Larry does the actual circuit design work, and Mike and Angel are now in charge of manufacturing.



"The design of the console picks up where the Class‑A designs of the late '60s and early '70s left off. It has pure class‑A signal paths input to output, with special vacuum-tube amplifiers for the mix‑bus path. I wanted to make sure that the equaliser would be the best choice at least 95 percent of the time, and I believe what we ended up with is the most flexible and musical Class‑A EQ ever designed. I was also determined to solve the acoustic issue that consoles have, which is that they adversely affect the sound of the nearfield monitors. So we made the work surface acoustically transparent. We're in the process of getting a patent for this, and until we have that I can't tell you more about it. One thing we did do is streamline the desk's configuration with features specifically for record‑making, so it keeps the console physically smaller and less obtrusive.”  

Published in SOS July 2010

Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Jaycen Joshua

Inside Track: Justin Bieber (feat. Ludacris) 'Baby'

Technique : Recording / Mixing




In his second career in the music business, Jaycen Joshua has become one of the USA's top mix engineers. With child star Justin Bieber, the brief was to bring urban grit to pop production.



Paul Tingen



Jaycen Joshua at his SSL desk in Larrabee Studios. Photo: Tiffany Lo



"Once you get to the upper echelons of mix engineers,” asserts Jaycen Joshua, "you are being paid for your taste. You're not hired just to make the rough mix sound better. You are the last line of defence, creatively, and you're expected to improve the record. It is your job to change things. And my idea of mixing is to make listening to a record like a movie experience. Every song is like a story, and so I may try to give something pleasing to the ear just for a split second, or open things up a little bit by taking things out, always with the question in mind: how am I going to tell the story from the verse to the chorus? How can I best tell the story of the 'B' section? How am I going to improve the story in the outro?”



Jaycen Joshua is talking from Studio 1 of Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles, a place that has been his home for the last seven and a half years. Larrabee houses three of the word's top mixers, the other two being David Pensado (see SOS January 2007: /sos/jan07/articles/insidetrack_0107.htm) and Manny Marroquin (see SOS December 2007: /sos/dec07/articles/insidetrack_1207.htm), and Joshua estimates that between them, the trio cover about 50 percent of charting American pop mixes.



Unlike the others, however, Joshua's list of published credits is relatively short, and it turns out that this reflects his close connection with Pensado. Joshua worked as the legendary mixer's assistant between 2006 and 2008, and during the latter part of his tenure, the two worked together on equal footing. In this capacity the duo shared a Grammy for Mary J Blige's Growing Pains (2008), but in many places only Pensado's name is mentioned, the assumption presumably being that Joshua was just his assistant.



This is despite a music industry pedigree that goes back, astonishingly, to his early teens, with his main introduction having been provided by Jheryl Busby, the Motown mogul who died in 2008.



Joshua: "My mom and my stepdad were pretty heavy players in the music business. My mom was Busby's assistant and later his general manager, and he thought that youth was very important, so he made me junior A&R when I was 13 years old, and he used me to bounce ideas off of. At age 15, I obtained a more prominent role that included signing bands. I worked as an A&R for Motown, MCA, Sony, Clockwork, and finally Dreamworks, until I was 24, when I decided that I had had enough, and went into advertising. That was great, but it was a nine‑to‑five job, and I had remembered that I had always been very interested in engineering, the little nuances that come with making people's music better, so I decided to take an engineering course at the Los Angeles Recording Workshop. As part of that I managed to arrange an internship at Larrabee. This was in 2003, and I started at the bottom, as a runner, getting food for people that I had dealt with in the past as a record exec! It was humbling, to say the least, but to become great at something, you have to pay your dues. I ended up being a staff engineer for Larrabee Studio 1, until Dave Pensado moved to Larrabee and I became his assistant. Pensado identified my abilities early on, saying I had a special gift in the genres of hip‑hop and rhythmic pop that he had never seen before, and asked me whether I could start mixing certain records with him. This quickly evolved into us having two rooms here at Larrabee and mixing many records together. He later noticed how my talents outgrew the team and encouraged me to spread my wings and use our respective talents for what we're best at under the same umbrella, 'The Penua Project', which is a combination of our last names. So for the past three years I've been mixing alone, on average a record a day.”

Blow Them Away



Early this year, Jaycen Joshua also earned Grammy nominations as part of the production team of Jamie Foxx's Intuition and Beyoncé's I Am... Sasha Fierce, mixing the most ear‑catching single from the album, the three‑time Grammy-winning megahit 'Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)'. Another high‑profile hit mixed by Joshua is Justin Bieber's 'Baby'. Joshua and Pensado mixed the majority of the Canadian teenager's debut EP My World (2009), and Joshua shared mixing credits on this year's follow‑up My World 2.0 with Manny Marroquin and Serban Ghenea. My World 2.0 is Bieber's first full‑length album, and even more than his debut EP, represents a deliberate attempt to get the white teenage sensation to bridge the gap between clean bubblegum and gritty urban music. To this end, urban producers like The‑Dream, Tricky Stewart, The Messengers and Bryan‑Michael Cox were contracted, with everything coming together in the lead single 'Baby', written and produced by The‑Dream and Stewart, and also featuring rapper Ludacris. Both single and album ended up being massive international hits.



Joshua: "Yeah, the vision of Tricky, and Dream and LA Reid [of Island Records] and Usher [of the RBMG label] was that they wanted Bieber to straddle the line between American hip‑hop and pop. They did not want him to be a pop artist, they wanted him to be the cool white kid. I think the reason they came to me was that I'm very aggressive in my approach to mixing these kinds of tracks. I like to hit them really hard, so that you can really feel the drums, while everything else sounds expensive, so that it turns into a great hybrid. I really attacked the drums on this track and put my Class‑A Neve 1073 or 1084 preamps on every percussive instrument, to get roundness and punch. I ran the outputs from Pro Tools directly into the Neves, and they then went to the insert returns of my SSL, bypassing the SSL pres. It changes with each mix but I'm big‑time into my Neves at the moment, and I have 18 of them — 14 1073s and four 1084s.”

Organisation



Unlike many other successful mix engineers, Jaycen Joshua puts great emphasis on hearing the rough mix. "You really have to engulf yourself into these rough mixes nowadays, because these kids spend so much time and so much creative energy on these roughs that if you don't really understand the track and their ideas, you are going to get killed. Many older engineers will knock these kids, saying that they're only using plug‑ins, and that the older stuff sounds so much better, and everything is getting worse and worse and worse. And I am saying: your idea of worse is not everybody's idea of worse. Pro Tools, or other DAWs, and plug‑ins might not sound like outboard gear, but they are giving kids who may have better creative ideas than you and me the opportunity to do the same thing as we are doing. What they may be losing in sonic quality they gain in creative possibilities. In terms of the war that is going on between engineers nowadays and all these young engineers coming up on Pro Tools, nobody can tell me that engineers know more about hip‑hop than an 18‑year‑old African‑American kid who grew up listening to it. That is impossible. We are stuck in our studios every day, so how are we going to know?



"Sixty to 70 percent of the mixes I get in are done by the producer and engineers in their own studio setups. They most likely will have spent two to three weeks getting their rough mix to sound incredible for the label, and they will have lived with these mixes and the delays and the drops and the other effects and gotten used to them. Once your ear gets accustomed to things, it's what you tend to like. So I need to hear their rough mix before I do anything, otherwise I'll be chasing that rough mix for the rest of the process. Nonetheless, in 50 percent of cases, people won't send me the rough mix. So in the standard email that we send out to our clients I say that I don't work on records for which I don't have all the files, including the rough mix, at least three days in advance. I also ask them to send me everything on time, and leave every plug‑in, every effect, every automation move. If they used outboard, I ask them to print the track with and without the effect. Ninety percent of the time I may not use what's there, but it works much better for me to hear their ideas, and be inspired by them and respond to them, so I can either expand on them or suggest trying something different.



"Receiving the files three days in advance gives my assistants the chance to prepare the Session, organising everything in the way I like, colour‑coding and labelling all tracks and plug‑ins and so on, so all I have to do is come in and push up the faders. As you can see from the 'Baby' screenshots, I'll have drums and percussion in yellow, the high end in orange, the bass in red, lead vocals in red, my whole slew of effect tracks in dark green and the original effects of the client in light green, and so on. I also ask my assistants to put the contents of the tracks in the Comments window: we don't change the original track names in case we need to re‑import the Session and match it up. For someone who is mixing every single day of their lives, and particularly because people with home studios organise their tracks in any number of ways, organisation is a number one priority. In general I only have a day to do a mix, which is why my assistants do all the tedious organising, which can take two hours or more. For me those are two hours of potential creativity that I can never get back!Jaycen Joshua attaches a lot of importance to organisation in his Pro Tools Sessions, and has them meticulously prepared by his assistants: note the colour‑coding and the comment field listing the contents of each track. This screen shows a small section of the 'Baby' Session, with the prominent 'Synth Keys 1' track at top.



"I don't listen to the rough until the day of the mix. The first thing I do is get a cup of coffee, and I'll go on the Internet to check my email. That takes about half an hour, and while I'm doing that I'm listening to the record over and over again. When I hear something special, I'll solo it or have a look in Pro Tools to see what's going on. Of course, if the rough doesn't sound good, I'll try something very different, but if I'm hearing something that's incredible, I'll start from there. Advanced producers like the Max Martins, Tricky Stewarts, or Polow Da Dons, they also basically mix their own records. These guys understand sound, they understand how to represent the whole frequency spectrum. My job is to take these rough mixes to another level. I'm paid for my taste, and at the moment my taste is pretty respected, so I do what I feel is great. So when I arrive in the morning and listen to a mix I did the day before, I usually am pretty happy with it. However, in the cases that the client will ask for minor tweaks, like the vocals or the kick a bit louder, I usually will hear something else I'd like to change, and so I will stem things out and make these changes. If a client comes with requests for changes much further down the road, they are usually made by my assistants.”

'Baby'



Written by Justin Bieber, The‑Dream, Tricky Stewart, Christina Milian, Ludacris.

Produced by The‑Dream, Stewart, Milian.



Jaycen Joshua: "When I begin a mix, I'll basically start with attacking what I think is the most important part of the record. If I think the rhythm section is driving it, then I will start with that. If I think it is the vocal, or a main melody played on strings or piano, I'll begin with that. In the case of 'Baby', it was all about the beat and the vocals, and I began with the drums, which I wanted to sound very aggressive, with lots of punch. I also tried to open the track up a little by taking things out, mostly in the lead‑up to the hooks. All the greyed‑out bits were done by me. Another aspect of the way I organise my mix is that I split the whole track up in three groups: rhythm section, music (mostly keyboards and synths), and the vocals. So after having gone through the SSL, the rhythm section, the melody tracks, and the vocals, each are sent to sub busses on the SSL, which are then each returned to two faders. So I have a six‑channel submix before finally summing to stereo.



"One thing that's unusual about this Session is that all tracks are in stereo. Basically they are all rough mix stems that Tricky [Stewart] gave to me. He knows what he wants, so once he gets there, he prints it. For me that's great. The old guys will talk about how they used to push up faders and the drums would sound incredible, because the engineer would have spent hours getting the right mics and mic positions, and so on. Nowadays, in the music that we're talking about, that's rarely the case. People don't really spend much time dialling in the best sounds. But Tricky does, and for me that's great. The fact that everything is stereo is no problem for me. You don't see any panning in the screen shots because I pan on the board. I never pan in the box. I also ascribe to what I believe is one of Spike Stent's rules of mixing, which is that I'll null all the faders on the board when I start. I'll leave my Pro Tools trims as they are, and I'll do my overall trims on the board. I can then see when I've raised or lowered things. If a client comes in and says that the buzz synth is a bit too low, I can immediately see on the board how much I took off.”



Drums & bass: Neve preamps & EQ, Studer A827, Dbx 160, Pultec EQP1A, API 550A, McDSP Filterbank, Digidesign Trim Adjuster, Medium Delay, Empirical Labs Fatso, Moog EQ.



"There are eight percussion tracks. The 808 is really a hi‑hat, then there are two kicks, clap (with clap reverb), clap 2, hi‑hat, crash and drum roll. Everything was programmed on this track. Apart from the hi‑hat and the crash, which went through the SSL, I put everything through the Neve 1073 mic pres because I wanted punch on these tracks, but not SSL punch. Also, this specific record was a bit weird, because I asked my assistants to dump all drums tracks to two‑inch tape, on a Studer A827, using Quantegy 499 tape (I have a certain amount of rolls left; it's very difficult to get good tape these days). Dumping stuff to two‑inch doesn't always work, but when it does it rounds out the sound beautifully. The analogue tape gives it a colour that I can't get any other way. Colour is very important. Sometimes I run a track through a piece of gear, like a Fairchild, without touching the compressor, just to get it to add some colour to the sound.



"With regard to the specific tracks, the 808 already sounded incredible and had a roundness that I loved, so I didn't do much to it, just some EQ on the board, and it needed a little contouring, for which I used the 1084. The one drawback of the 1073 is that the EQ does not give me enough parameters, so I will put the 1084 on anything that I want to do some detailed Neve EQ'ing on, and use the 1073 for tracks for which I'm only going to use a pre. The two kick tracks went through a signal chain that was made famous by Bob Powers and that was passed on to me by Dave [Pensado], which is a Dbx 160x compressor going into a Pultec EQP1A EQ. This runs on a parallel channel and I add it in with the original signal. It gives you absolutely amazing low end. It's unstoppable. If you listen to Powers' work with Common or A Tribe Called Quest, he's a pioneer and the father of hip‑hop low end. The snare has the 160x going into an API 550A, again parallel. If you don't use parallel compression you risk things sounding thin. You begin with the original track that the producer loves, and if you manipulate that you may deviate too much from it, whereas if you blend a treatment in, it will be more pleasing to the ear.



"I also used a number of plug‑ins on the drums, mostly the McDSP Filterbank EQ and the Digidesign Trim Adjuster. If there's one plug‑in I couldn't live without, it's the Filterbank, and here I used the P2 two‑band parametric EQ. With regard to the Trim Adjuster, if one side of a stereo track doesn't have the same level as the other, instead of pulling the pan to one side I'll use the Trim Adjuster to increase the gain on one side and to make sure I'm dealing with a perfectly balanced stereo track. There's also a Medium Delay on the Crash, because it was originally a mono track, and I wanted it in stereo. So I set the delay to 21ms and mixed the original 100 percent to the left and the delay to the right. Why 21ms? It's a Digi preset on the Medium Delay, 21.19ms to be exact, and when I heard it, it sounded right. With 21ms you get enough separation between left and right and it's a bit dramatic and not so phasey. I didn't try to set the delay in rhythm. You usually already receive a perfectly timed Session, and to get a little feel it's good to have some things that are not exactly in time. The sound becomes like a drummer hitting two cymbals, left and right, at the same time.



"'Bass 2' is a synth bass, which also was treated with the A827 with the rest of the drums, and I then sent it through the Empirical Labs Fatso and the Moog EQ on an insert on the board. There's a plug‑in version of the Fatso, but I find that the original is untouchable. Putting the Fatso on the bass is like night and day, especially if you're looking for that lower mid‑range roundness that will give you a fuller sound. The Moog EQ three‑band parametric is an absolute go‑to box for me on the bass, even though I'll occasionally use the Focusrite 110. But the Moog is incredible. The mid‑range goes down to 62Hz and to me is better than the low‑end parameter. I don't know why, it just sounds richer.”



Keyboards & guitars: Cranesong Phoenix, Aphex Aural Exciter, McDSP Filterbank, Digidesign Extra Long Delay & Tel‑Ray, 'Motown' EQ, BASE Spatializer, Waves GTR.



"The main instrumental track is the piano track that we retitled 'Synth Keys'. It sounded a little thin to my ears, so I used quite a few plug‑ins on that.The main instrumental element of the song was a track originally named 'Piano', but labelled 'Synth Keys 1' in Joshua's comments field. This was quite heavily processed using Cranesong's Phoenix Dark Essence, the Aphex Aural Exciter plug‑in, McDSP's Filterbank EQ and Digidesign's stock delay plug‑in. The Cranesong Phoenix Dark Essence is a great plug‑in, it emulates tape saturation and it makes the sound a bit darker. The Aural Exciter adds a little top end. A lot of people don't like the fact that it adds distortion to your sound, but that high distortion gave exactly what I was looking for. The Filterbank beefed up the low end, and there's also a Digi Extra Long Delay. 'Js Keys Delay' is an effects track with the Digi Tel‑Ray delay that was blended in with the piano below. The Tel‑Ray is a great‑sounding delay that I love on piano. In general I don't like using reverb too much because it can cloud up your tracks and make them less clean. So it's fun to use delays instead and the Tel‑Ray is very distinct, it kind of mimics the sound of the hammers hitting the piano strings.



"A lot of people are down on the Digidesign plug‑ins because they don't look special, but I reckon that Digi are the ones who invented the game we're playing right now, so why would their plug‑ins not be good? I also like the DVerb, for instance, which was used by the client to make things more roomy and bigger, and I left it. With regards to outboard, I had the Motown EQ on the main 'Synth Keys' part, but no compression, because I wanted to retain an open feel and for the track to have dynamics, and I had enough compression in the rhythm section. I also had the old BASE Spatializer on the main pad in the hooks. I'm big on space, but we only have two speakers to work with, and it's a challenge to fit everything. I love the way someone like Dr Dre, for example, doesn't fill up his records with too many instruments. On this record, the Buzz Synth had a lot of low‑mid and sounded very full, so to separate that from the pad synth I put the pad synth outside of the speakers with the Spatializer.



"The guitar sounds were pretty good, so not much needed to be done. I used the Waves GTR Stomp 2 on the electric. It's one of Waves' better plug‑ins. I love the phaser on it, which is really lush, similar to the MXR phaser. The only thing with the Waves SSL bundle plug‑ins is that they overdid the emulation of vintage analogue gear, and made the hiss too loud. So I will always gate these plug‑ins, like the VEQ or the API. I could just switch the Analogue button off but I'm superstitious! I'm big on my tracks being as clean as possible. If there's hiss, it's there because I want it to be there.”



Vocals: Celemony Melodyne, Digidesign TL Space & Extra Long Delay, Massenburg EQ, Cranesong Phoenix, Waves Center, Renaissance Compressor & Metaflanger, Sound Toys Pitchblender. This part of the Session includes most of Justin Bieber's (red) and Ludacris's vocal tracks. The lead vocal was split to several tracks with different EQ settings for different parts of the song.



"Justin is in red, Ludacris in light blue. The main vocal is at the top, 'Lead All'. In fact, all the tracks in red are Justin's lead, but I vary the effects compression and EQ on his vocals during the song, so I split the main vocal track up and every one of the tracks below is dedicated to a different EQ for a different section of the song. When he changes his tone, the EQ has to change.



"The vocals were tuned by us. Tuning is one aspect of the game that you have to have. Consumers' and clients' ears have become accustomed to hearing vocals perfectly in tune, to the degree that if you now hear a record on which a person sings natural and is not tuned, you feel that something isn't right. I prefer to use Melodyne. I am not a huge fan of Auto‑Tune, unless it is the sound that you are looking for. For me it's an effect, not really a tuner. If you want to tune your vocals and for them to sound natural, you can do stuff with Melodyne that seems almost impossible. I also retain the original vocal in the Playlist, so if I want to retune or go back to its natural note, I can dial that up.



"I did the vocal effects 100 percent in the box on this record, and they're all sends to effects tracks that are marked in the darker green. (I didn't use the original vocal effects in the lighter green.) There are so many effects because, like with the EQ, I'll treat his vocals differently for different sections of the song. I'm using two convolution reverbs, one being the Digidesign TL Space, especially the 'Silky Gold Plate', 'QRS', and 'Big Pan Hall' reverb settings. The last is a phasey panning reverb.The TL Space convolution reverb was widely used, in this case to emulate a Quantec Room Simulator patch as one of the vocal reverbs. Other plug‑ins are the Massenburg EQ, which is very precise, with very tight Q, so you can notch out very small bandwidth frequencies. It has something that every EQ should have, which is that you can solo and sweep the frequency you are affecting, so you can find the frequency that you hate and notch it out.



"I also used the Cranesong Phoenix again, which is so important in rock music. I know a huge producer who uses the Phoenix Dark Essence with the 'Gold' preset on every track before he even starts. On this track, because Justin is so young and is a little harsh in his mid‑range, I went for the Luster to add fullness and some warmth.Cranesong's Phoenix was used again to thicken Justin Bieber's lead vocal, which was also compressed using Waves' Renaissance Compressor. Finally, on Justin's backing vocals, 'JBVrsBg1', which are the 'yeah‑yeahs' at the end, I put the Waves Center plug‑in, which is great because it lets you place exactly where you want your low or your high or your punch in the stereo spectrum. There's a great preset called 'Less Vocal' that takes the vocal away from the centre and expands it, so it's not so in your face. This gives your lead more space in the middle. Often it's good to play with the spatial aspects of your backing vocals.



"I also have a lot of plug‑ins on Ludacris's vocal track. It seems more than it is, because in fact his engineer always gives me great vocal recordings, so it was a matter of notching things up or down a little bit here and there. The 'PingPong' effect is the Extra Long Delay that is ping‑ponging his lead left and right. It's a panning delay that's EQ'ed, put through a reverb, then phased out a little through the Waves Enigma. The 'RapH3K' is my emulation of an Yamaha SPX90, and the 'RapVerb' isn't really reverb, because everyone knows that reverb is the kiss of death on rap vocals. Reverb and rap don't mix. Right at the bottom are The‑Dream's ad libs. On his BGs [background vocals], I used the RCompressor, the Choruser, the PitchBlender and Metaflanger.Sound Toys' PitchBlender was used to treat The‑Dream's vocal ad libs at the end of the song. Plus I added the Center plug‑in to place him outside of the speakers. Dream sets the pace creatively in terms of effects and trying to entertain people sonically and he's always trying new stuff.”



Submixes: SSL G384, GML 8200, Avalon 2055.



"As I mentioned above, after having gone through the SSL, the tracks will come up on the desk in three stereo pairs: drums, music and vocals. Using the inserts on the drums submix I had the SSL G384 compressor and the GML 8200 EQ. I left the music untouched, and on the vocals I had the Avalon 2055 EQ for some air, to add some sparkle. I'm huge on dynamics, and in the subgroup mix I may lift an entire section a dB for the chorus or an outro. Dynamics are key in pop music, and subgroup mixing gives me some flexibility and control over the dynamics. Finally, the Session was in 48kHz/24‑bit and I mixed back into Pro Tools, using my modified Lavry Gold A‑D converter. A lot of people don't realise how important your converters are. I monitor my mix after the converter which is important, and this converter has a specific sound that I love.” .

In & Out Of The Box



An 80‑channel SSL XL 9000K desk with a custom suede trim dominates Jaycen Joshua's room at Larrabee. When queried, Joshua proudly declares himself to be beyond the analogue versus digital and in‑the‑box versus out‑of‑the‑box debates. "I am new school: whatever works, works. I owe 99 percent of my know‑how to Dave [Pensado] and he's a big fan of the SSL, and during my A&R career every mix that I witnessed was done on an SSL. So I'm conditioned to like the SSL sound and to working with it. At the same time, people like Serban [Ghenea] and Phil Tan [see SOS February 2007 issue] are doing incredible mixes in the box. A lot of people have opinions about in the box versus out of the box, but both have their advantages. There are things that you can do in the box that you can't do outside. So with regards to the out of the box and in the box arguments, I am a proponent of both. When I go into battle, I want all my guns ready to go. I want the best of outboard and the best of in the box.



"For example, I really love the 9000 K, because it gives me some of the characteristics of the G, and the SSL computer is amazingly fast. However, I'm now doing all my automation moves inside of the box, and my SSL is in essence just a big summing box with multiple faders. To my ears, summing in analogue still sounds better than summing in the box, though I don't think there are any consumers out there saying: 'Man, this record sounds so great because it's been summed in an SSL.' I don't think the consumer cares. The issue is nonetheless important, because while we're not trying to please the consumer, who may be listening to MP3 and very compressed files anyway, as a mixer you are trying to please the clients, who are the artists and the A&R managers and record companies. Mariah Carey, for instance, is very hands‑on with her records and she hears the differences. She'll hear whether her vocal is pristine and clear and whether all the dynamics are there and whether the reverb tails right to the very end. You can lose clients if you don't consistently blow them away. You want your client to go: 'Wow, I've never heard anything like this!'



"The advantage of mixing in the box is, of course, that you have instant recall, and A&R people and artists are now so used to being able to request unlimited changes that the guys working outside of the box are getting killed by it. The way I handle that is that, first of all, I try to get pretty close with my first mix. I tell people that I work with that if they are totally not happy with my mix, we have a different vision on the record, and I may recommend them another mixer to use. Who am I to tell them that their vision is wrong? This is rare, but it happens to all of us. However, for cases where they want minor tweaks I now pretty much have to stem everything out. I'll do multiple stems of every instrument, because you also have your stereo bus compression, and if you change the stem of, say, the kick, it will affect the stereo bus compression. So I'll give myself stems from every angle possible, every instrument, the whole rhythm section, the vocals, so that it's easy to accommodate minor requests for changes later on. It's a lot of work for my two assistant engineers, but I had to do it.”    

Published in SOS August 2010

Korg Monotribe Version 2 (3 of 5): Sequence Volume and Active Steps

Mike Strange Jr: Eminem Recovery

Inside Track | Secrets Of The Mix Engineers

Eminem's Recovery has been one of the biggest hit albums of the year, spawning two number one singles — all recorded and mixed by Eminem's long‑term engineer, Mike Strange.



Paul Tingen



Mike Strange Jr.Photo: Grant Morhman



Eminem's 80 million album sales, including nine number one albums and 13 chart‑topping singles, don't only make him the world's best‑selling rap artist, but are also indicative of the degree to which he has crossed over into the mainstream pop market. The accolades he's gained during his 14‑year‑long solo career include Artist Of The Decade (Billboard magazine, 2009) and Best Rapper Ever (Vibe magazine, also in 2009), plus a staggering 11 Grammy Awards (from 26 nominations) and seven American Music Awards. Eminem's achievements are even more impressive when placed in the context of the detour his career took in 2005, when he retreated from the limelight just as he was at the top of his game. At that point he had released four best‑selling solo albums — The Slim Shady LP (1999), The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), The Eminem Show (2002) and Encore (2004) — and had a hand in two US number one albums with D12, the Detroit hip‑hop group that he co‑founded in 1996.



Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers, aka Slim Shady, aka Em, didn't return to the fray until 2009 with Relapse, which didn't quite scale the commercial heights of the aforementioned solo albums. His latest solo album, Recovery, is an obvious attempt to re‑establish himself at the forefront of the hip‑hop and pop worlds. The man states in 'Talkin' 2 Myself', one of Recovery's core songs: "Them last two albums didn't count / Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushin' them out / I've come to make it up to you now no more fuckin' around.” The album has been one of the greatest hits of the year, spawning, for the first time in Eminem's career, two US number one hit singles from the same album: 'Not Afraid' and 'Love The Way You Lie' (featuring Rihanna).

Changing The Team

This composite screen capture shows the Pro Tools Session for 'Not Afraid'. Eminem's vocals are near the top, colour‑coded blue and red (at the extreme left), above Luis Resto's instrumental parts (purple and green), with the components of Boi‑1da's original beat (orange) below those.



Eminem has always been particularly adept at blending rapping of dazzling virtuosity with ultra‑catchy pop hooks. Recovery takes this approach one step further, and 'Not Afraid' is notable for its extended chorus and bridge, both sung by Eminem. The foundations for Eminem's writing and production approach have usually come from a small group of collaborators led by Dr Dre; Encore and Relapse also featured Mike Elizondo along with keyboardists Mark Batson and Luis Resto.



On Recovery, however, Eminem worked with a much wider variety of producers, several of them unknown or up‑and‑coming. Dre appears as executive producer and co‑produced just one song, while the rest of the tracks were (co‑)produced by the likes of Just Blaze, DJ Khalil, Jim Jonsin, Denaun Porter, Supa Dups, Emile Haynie, Script Shepherd, Havoc, Boi‑1da ('Not Afraid') and British new kid on the block, Alex da Kid ('Love The Way You Lie').



Given Eminem's lengthy relationships with Dre and other musicians, the rapper appears to like working with a stable and close‑knit coterie of insiders, so it doesn't come as a surprise to hear that his engineer, Mike Strange Jr, has been working with him since 2001. On the phone from Detroit, Strange explains that he cut his pre‑Em engineering teeth with producer Michael Powell, famous for his work with Anita Baker and for founding Vanguard Studios — during the '90s one of Detroit's most in‑demand recording venues. "Em came into Vanguard to mix the first D12 album,” recalls Strange, "and they needed an assistant, so I stepped in. I later received a phone call from the owner of 54 Sound, the studio where Em was working at the time, asking me if I wanted a job. I've worked with Em ever since. I began as an assistant, and eventually moved onto being his main engineer and mixer. Apart from when he's touring, Em is always working in the studio, even when he wasn't releasing albums, so it's a full‑time job.”



Strange was originally a musician, and when recording his first, never‑released solo album in the mid‑'90s, he ended up manning the Pro Tools rig, his first step towards becoming a self‑taught engineer and Pro Tools expert. It made finding work easy, says Strange, "because there weren't many Pro Tools rigs in Detroit at that time”. He still occasionally plays guitar, bass and keyboards on Em's records, but his 'musician' career has taken a backseat to his engineering and mixing. He engineers all Em's sessions and, with the rapper, mixed almost all of Recovery.

Out Of The Box



When recording Eminem's hook vocal, Strange used Digidesign's stock reverb and delay (right) plug‑ins — though the latter was replaced at mixdown by a TC 2290 hardware unit.



The Eminem recording and mixing sessions all took place at Effigy Studios in Detroit, formerly a commercial studio that Eminem acquired in 2007. Strange: "We left the large live room more or less as it was, but completely gutted the control room, including the digging of a trench in the floor for the cabling. The room wasn't quite big enough, particularly for Dre and his people, so we knocked down walls to be able to accommodate everybody. We only kept a few pieces of the studio's original gear, and for the most part installed our own. For instance, we changed Effigy's API for an 80‑channel SSL G‑series, which came from Ocean Way studios in Los Angeles.”



Eminem's core team at Effigy is completed by Mike's brother and assistant engineer Joe Strange, studio manager John Fisher, and keyboardist/composer Luis Resto, who has also been working with Em since 2001, and who has co‑produced and co‑written many Eminem songs. As for the studio itself, the SSL is not just for show: Em and Strange continue to be fans of analogue equipment and are averse to mixing 'in the box'.



Strange: "We are only in the box when cutting Eminem's vocals for a song, which I record over a two‑track mix of the producer's beat. During that stage, I remain in Pro Tools so it's easy for Em to switch between songs while writing and recording. After that, I ask the producer for the individual tracks and I'll spread them out across the SSL. We basically use Pro Tools like a tape machine. We use the occasional plug‑in, but it's mainly to clean up stuff. For the rest we use outboard and the SSL board, and after we've mixed the track, we add musical overdubs, usually with Luis. We've long worked in this way, and acquiring Effigy Studios hasn't really changed our working methods. Our main focus in getting the new studio was in creating a recording facility that was similar to other rooms Em had worked in and in which he is comfortable. We've developed a certain workflow over the years that means that we can move through the material very quickly, and in which the recording process has become almost invisible. All our focus is on creating the song, and not so much on getting sounds and things like that. The studio is set up in such a way that we can just walk in and start.”



Adding instrumental overdubs after having mixed the song is hardly conventional practice, but it's clearly become such a normal procedure that Strange mentions it in passing without further comment. It emerges that this unorthodox working method has a very logical raison d'être. According to Strange, their most common way of working is that a producer will send them 'beats': a combination of a rhythm track and a musical arrangement, which may be rudimentary or complete, and with or without a hook melody line. This arrives as a stereo mix, and the next step is for Em to write and record his rap to the non‑hook sections of the beat. He will usually double‑track the entire rap.



Strange: "We have a large live room at Effigy, and we have Em in there with some gobos, and a Sony C800 microphone, going into an Avalon 737 mic pre. It's the microphone that Dre uses, and Em likes it, so he's always used it. In all the years I've worked with him, I don't think we've ever tried another mic. It's a little bit like a guitar player who digs his old Les Paul: you don't take that away from him. We have a few C800 mics, because we tend to burn them up quite quickly. Em has two, I have one, and Luis has two or three. Because it's a fairly modern mic we've never had problems changing from one to another. We go straight into Pro Tools from the Avalon, at 44.1kHz/24-bit. Dre used 88.2 for a while, so we switched to that as well, but we prefer working in 44.1 because of the amount of tracks that we sometimes use in one song. Once Luis starts doing overdubs, we need all the tracks we can get! We don't need them for Em, though, who will cut his vocals exactly the way he wants them. We don't do vocal comps and things like that. I have never done vocal comps for him. Em doubles his rap vocals for sonic reasons, to make it sound a little thicker, and he's really good at reproducing his performance and getting his doubled vocals to sit really tight. It's not a lot of work for me. Cutting the vocals is easy, because he knows what he wants and is able to achieve it.”

Get The Vocals Out Of The Way



Few plug‑ins were used in the mix, but the Massenburg EQ appeared in several places, such as on Boi‑1da's timpani sample.



Strange continues by giving more details of their back‑to‑front mixing method, asserting that Eminem prefers to "get all the vocals out of the way before we mess with the track too much. Once we have cut all the vocals to the point where Em is comfortable with them, and we're sure we're going to use the song, I'll request the multitrack from the producer, spread things out over the board, and only at that point will I start dissecting the beat, tweaking it sonically. That's the beginning of me mixing the song. I'll get the mix to the point where it sounds close to the orginal two‑mix, but better, with the vocals mixed in, and then Em will come in and he will mess with it for two or three hours, especially paying attention to the vocals. At this point I simply man Pro Tools. In general, the producer isn't there when we work on the track — the beauty of the Internet is that you use it to send files to and forth, which means that people don't have to come all the way to Detroit. Though Dre is always there when we work with him, and Alex da Kid did come over, as did Just Blaze and Jim Jonsin.



"After the mix, we get Luis in to do overdubs. Luis has a huge collection of keyboards and soft synths, and we have tons of stuff at the studio, like the Oberheim OB8, the [Yamaha] Motif, the new [Roland] Fantom G, and so on. He'll be throwing ideas down pretty quickly. Joe [Strange] is usually at Luis' side during overdubbing, because there can be a million things happening at the same time, and Joe helps to keep everything moving. I'm not trying to condense or comp anything at this stage, because it takes up too much time. As I said, I like the recording process to be invisible, so the artist can just get on with creating music. There might be only one idea on each track, but it keeps the workflow going fast. In some cases I end up with hundreds of tracks! Later, once it's clear something is not going to be used, I'll make it inactive and will hide it. I don't delete anything, because it's always possible that someone will ask for it later on. Also, Luis actually plays everything. He doesn't program or sequence his parts and we don't sit there quantising his stuff. Luis is an actual player, a real music guy. He has a really good feel.”



Strange explains that Eminem is very involved at all stages of the process, including the mix and the overdubbing processes: "He has a real vision of how he wants things to sound. Everything with him is very deliberate. Our main focus is in understanding what he is looking for and giving it to him.”



It is here that the reason for Strange and Eminem's back‑to‑front working method becomes clear: once the rap artist has laid down his vocals to the producer's beat, he comes into the control room, where he can focus without distractions on the arrangement and production side of the song. Given that in hip‑hop the vocals are the most important element, even more so than in pop music, it also makes sense that he first sets them in stone, so to speak, and then fits "the music” in with them. Moreover, according to Strange, the parts that are added by Resto are in most cases an embellishment of the producer's original beats, rather than a rewriting or re‑arranging of everything. Often this involves Eminem introducing his own musical ideas, which Resto develops into complete parts. In this sense Resto's contributions are on a par with a mixer working on improving sounds or replacing a kick drum or another part. So would it be correct to understand the overdubbing process as a continuation of the mix process?



Strange: "Yeah, in this way of working the overdubbing process and the mix process are one and the same, and Luis' contributions generally enhance the producer's arrangement that's already there. Sometimes we end up with something very different, but that's not very often. You have to remember, though, that Luis also writes stuff, like he co‑wrote 'Lose Yourself' [Eminem's 2002 number one hit]. So there are different ways in which songs come into being. On 'Not Afraid', Luis' contributions improved and fleshed out Boi‑1da's original arrangement to the degree that he did get a co‑writing credit. All Luis' stuff is recorded DI, so we're in the control room at this stage. The live room at Effigy gets mainly used for cutting Em's vocals. We don't do a lot of acoustic recording in the studio. I played acoustic guitar, bass and keyboards on the track 'Going Through Changes', and used the C800 and Avalon 737 for the acoustic guitar, and DI'ed the rest. We've recorded guitar amps in the past, like when working with Mike Elizondo, but it's not very common. Usually people will be going through [Native Instruments'] Guitar Rig, rather than us miking the guitar amp. For the bass, we also go DI through the Avalon or, again, Guitar Rig. We have a Prism Orpheus Firewire and the RME Fireface 800 audio interfaces to plug electric and bass guitars into.”

'Not Afraid'



An unusual use for Antares' Auto‑Tune: to keep the pitch of the TR808 kick stable.



Written by Marshall Mathers, Matthew Samuel (Boi‑1da), Luis Resto, Jordan Evans, Matthew Burnett

Produced by Boi‑1da

Additional production: Mathers, Resto, Evans, Burnett



The original beats for 'Not Afraid' were supplied by Boi‑1da, the 23‑year‑old Canadian production wonder, who shot to fame last year with the US number two hit single 'Best I Ever Had', performed by fellow Canadian singer/rapper Drake. A few months later, a second Boi‑1da‑produced hit song, 'Forever', shot to the top of the US charts, featuring Drake, Lil Wayne, Kanye West and Eminem. Strange: "We first heard of Boi‑1da when working on that song. We were like, 'That beat is great, let's get more from this guy.' So he sent us more stuff, and Em picked out some of the beats and wrote to them, and I then stuck Boi‑1da's CD in Pro Tools to record Em's vocals. I think two of Boi‑1da's songs made it to the album, 'Seduction' was the other one. He was never there for the sessions.



"The original beats that Boi‑1da sent us contained most of the drums and a number of keyboard pads, so we had the chord changes. If you look at the screen shots, you can see that I've put all Boi‑1da's stuff at the bottom of the Session, under an inactive track, 'Orig beatz'. It consisted, from top to bottom, of an 808 kick, a regular live kick, a hi‑hat, a ride, a snare and a cymbal track. Underneath that, there's a horn track, a track with orchestral hits, and several pads, including a Mellotron‑like sound, that play the chord progression. There was no hook melody; that was added by Em. I like to have the vocal tracks at the top of the Session, because in hip‑hop they are the most important element. There are three stereo 'explode' tracks at the top purely because they were a last‑minute addition. But below that you can see Em's main rap track, '3EmMn05', and below that the rap double, and below that his talking in the intro. You can see that he sang the hook five times. These are actual overdubs, we didn't copy and paste, other than for the hook vocals in the intro, for which I bounced some of the later hook vocals and them moved that submix to the front. The bridge vocals were overdubbed six times. We didn't use Auto‑Tune or anything like that: Em also gets his singing parts down quickly and accurately.



"Below the bridge vocals you see the inactive 'Luis2' track, and below that is all Luis' stuff, 25 stereo tracks in all, going all the way down until Boi‑1da's beats. Seventeen of Luis' tracks are keyboards: piano sounds, guitar sounds, and so on. There's a lot of orchestration that he added, particularly in the choruses and bridge. On the far left of the screen shots you can see that I colour‑coded all tracks. All the more traditional keyboard tracks are in blue, the two bass parts played by Luis are in green, and the percussion/drum tracks, whether from Boi‑1da's original beats or played by Luis, are in brown. Boi‑1da's original keys are in orange, and the gunshot explosion in dark green. Em's rap is in dark blue, the hook vocals red, and bridge dark purple. The three lines, colour‑coded in purple, are master faders that trim the outputs to get things to the console at the right levels.



"After I've arranged the Session in Pro Tools like that, I lay things out more traditionally on the desk, with drums on the left, then any bass instruments, then any guitars, keyboards, main vocals, and overdubs to the right. When I start mixing I begin with the drums, first the kick, then the snare, et cetera. I bring each part of the drums in, and then I add the vocals, which usually means I have to go back to the drums and change things there. If anything interferes with the vocals, it gets changed. When I add in the vocals I'll start with the rap, because you have to prioritise that in hip‑hop: you want to be able to understand each word, especially when he raps fast. It can be a challenge to fit in the rap from a sonic perspective. The hook is usually a lot easier to fit in. I'll then add in the other instruments, one by one. Em has a particular way in he wants things to sound, and we do our best to get the track to fit around the vocals. Once I've got the mix to a point where I think it's close, Em will come in and he'll be at the desk for a few hours, and he'll tweak things and will get them to how he wants to hear them, and at that point we start adding Luis' stuff. In doing so we make sure it fits in with what we already have. We don't have another separate mix session after Luis has done his overdubs, we're always working towards the end result.”



Drums: SSL EQ and compression, Antares Auto‑Tune, Digidesign Trim and EQ III, various reverbs.



"Boi‑1da's stuff sounded pretty good, so I only used SSL EQ and a little bit of compression on that, to make it fit with the other tracks. I used a Trim and Auto‑Tune on the 808 kick that was added by Luis, because there was some pitch fluctuation in the 808 and we wanted to keep it in tune. There's a 7‑band EQ on the timpani sample, and apart from SSL EQ and compression that's it as far as the drum and percussion tracks are concerned.



"The vast majority of effects I use are outboard, and we're pretty well stocked at Effigy. I always set up a number of reverbs while mixing, mostly the Bricasti, Eventide 2016, the Lexicon 480, Lexicon PMC70, and the Yamaha SPX90s. The SPX90 is an old box, but it has such a cool sound. It has a clanginess that's difficult to get from other boxes or plug‑ins. These effects are mainly set up for the vocals. One track may get a couple of reverbs, and but I'll sometimes use them on the drums or other instruments as well.”



Vocals: Massenburg EQ, Digidesign Extra Long Delay and D‑Verb, Alta Moda Unicomp, Requisite L2M, TC 2290, various other reverbs and compressors.



"The two rap tracks have a Massenburg EQ plug‑in, and the '9' send goes to the eighth‑note delay track immediately above the two rap tracks. The 'E' plug‑in on the intro speech track is Digidesign's Extra Long Delay. That's all the plug‑ins I used on the rap. The outboard included a lot of compressors, including the Alta Moda Unicomp, one of the coolest compressors around, which works great on vocals, but also on the kick or the snare. There's some vocal distortion in the rap, which was caused by running the vocals hard from the Alta Moda back into the SSL returns. You have to push the SSL really hard to get some distortion, because it's usually pretty forgiving. I also used a Requisite L2M on the vocals, which is a tube mastering compressor. It's kind of like a couple of LA2As, but with more control. I've used that on every song I've recorded for Em. It's expensive, but really cool.



"With regards to the hook, the delay on Em's vocals that repeats every vocal line he sings is a real feature. During tracking I used a plug‑in delay for that, and you can still see the Hook Delay track in the Session, but you can also see that all the sends are gone. I replaced it with the TC 2290 delay, for sonic reasons. I also used the D‑Verb when cutting, and it looks like I left that in there. In terms of the outboard reverbs, I'll usually have a short plate and something longer, and that will kind of stay there for the duration of the track.”



Music: SSL EQ and compression, API 550a, Digidesign Dynamics III, Massenburg EQ, various other compressors and reverbs.



"For the most part, the music tracks only had SSL EQ and compression. Certainly the Boi‑1da tracks had nothing else. The bass had an API 550a EQ, which we like a lot. I may use outboard compressors or reverbs on more important instrumental parts. You can see that I used a Digidesign compressor limiter on one of the horn sounds, and the Massenburg EQ on an OB8 sound. At the end of the session we added the three gunshot tracks, which had Massenburg EQ plug-ins to roll off some low end. There are also string overdubs [arranged and recorded by Jordan Evans and Matthew Burnett] and a live choir overdub [recorded by Robert Reyes] in the track. Em wanted these and they were recorded after we finished the track. They were done in LA, the files were sent to me and I flew them into the mix.”

Mixdown



"We print the mix back into Pro Tools, and we'll do a few different mix passes, like a main pass, an instrumental pass, an a cappella pass, a drum pass, and a bass pass. We do this for several different reasons. One is that if Em wants to change something later on, like he wants a little more bass in one section, we can do that very quickly and easily. The other is that when he's touring with his live band, they can add elements of the mix to what the band is doing. There's also a vocal delay right at the end of the track, just as it segues into 'Seduction', and that was created by using the a cappella mix and putting a delay on it, and copying and pasting that at the end of the track. I didn't do anything to the final mix, I simply sent it off to [mastering engineer] Brian Gardner and let him do his thing.” .

'Love The Way You Lie'



Eminem's most recent hit, 'Love The Way You Lie' featuring Rihanna, came into existence in a slightly different manner from 'Not Afraid', for a number of reasons. The backing track and hook melody were created by British producer Alex da Kid, and apparently the arrangement was so complete that Luis Resto didn't add anything. In addition, Rihanna's vocals were recorded elsewhere. Mike Strange explains: "Everything we needed was already in the track, apart from the vocals. As with 'Not Afraid', we cut Em's vocals to the two‑mix, using a D‑Verb and Extra Long Delay plug‑ins, which I kept in the mix. Then Alex came over to help us with the mix.



"Rihanna recorded her vocals while on the road. They consist of seven stereo vocal tracks, and basically we left these exactly as they were given to us. We added a bit of SSL EQ and compression, and some reverb, but not much. In fact, I kept the vocal balance made by Rihanna's people, and simply had Rihanna's vocals come up on the desk in stereo. Often when we work with another vocalist, we figure that they have done what they want, and so we prefer to leave it. On Em's vocals, in addition to the D‑Verb and the Extra Long Delay, I had board compression and EQ, and the Bricasti and 2016. The rap almost always gets those two. Sometimes I use the 480, which is cool for longer reverbs, while the Bricasti and 2016 are better for brighter reverbs.



"Regarding the music, I didn't do very much to Alex's tracks. They were very well recorded. The [Waves] R‑Verb and REQ on the kick and the Maxx Bass on two other kick tracks came from his Session. I left everything he sent me. We didn't use much outboard on this song at all, almost everything was done with the console EQ and compression. It was simply a matter of trying to match and then to improve on the demo he'd sent us.”


Published in SOS October 2010