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Found this article, about the engineering process behind Lil Wayne's single, how to love.
Very technical on the engineering part, and also contains some interesting insights on the recording process.
Didn't see this posted, when searching. There is more information in the original interview:
Link: Fabian Marasciullo: Recording Lil Wayne's 'How To Love'
Some interesting snippets:
Very technical on the engineering part, and also contains some interesting insights on the recording process.
Didn't see this posted, when searching. There is more information in the original interview:
Link: Fabian Marasciullo: Recording Lil Wayne's 'How To Love'
Some interesting snippets:
'How To Love' marks quite a dramatic change of direction for Lil Wayne, being predominantly an acoustic guitar/vocal track with the rapper singing, accompanied by some very deep, spacy drums, and some synths mixed very low. With Wayne currently being hip-hop's leading artist, Marasciullo is certain that it marks a new trend in urban music in general. "Wayne called me and was really enthusiastic, saying, 'I got the record, we are going to win Grammys!' When I went over, he played the song to me, and was performing it in the room, his arms up in the air, singing at the top of his lungs. It was an inspiring moment. When listening, I immediately thought: 'This is a really different record for him.' It's very organic, earthy, musical, and the way I mixed it, it has a lot of top end in it. Until now it wasn't really OK for a hip-hop record to have that much high end. But not everything has to be centred around an 808! This song allowed me to use a lot of the techniques I learned in my early career, like when I worked with Bruce Swedien on Michael Jackson's Invincible and with Britney Spears, all these pop things. Wayne is the biggest rapper in the US and he's a trendsetter, and him releasing a song like this will allow other artists and labels to put songs like these out. The face of hip-hop is changing; it does not have to be a set thing any more. I promise you that you'll see a lot of 'How To Loves' pop up next year!”
The making of The Carter IV was complicated by a number of extra-musical factors, including Lil Wayne's prison experience. "After he came out of jail,” recalls Fabian Marasciullo, "he immediately went on tour. It was like: 'Rockstar time!' He was ready to go out and live a little bit. He had been sitting down for more than half a year and didn't want to be inside any more, and certainly not in a windowless room, like a studio. This made life very difficult for Banger [Michael Cadahia], his tracking engineer, because he had to record a lot of the material in the tour bus or in his hotel or in whatever studio they could find in the town they happened to be in. The tour bus didn't have a real studio in it, so it was all makeshift and very improvised, which made it very challenging to have continuity while recording the album. It was a worst-case scenario to get some hi-fi stuff going!"As I mentioned before, Wayne likes to work by himself, with his engineer, and do his own thing. The producers are rarely there while he is recording. Timbaland was an exception, he's very particular about his stuff, so Wayne and he spent a few days at The Hit Factory. Wayne tends to do his stuff over two-track MP3 mixes that the producers send him, and the funny thing is that he tends to edit these so much that when the producers later hear it, they're asking why he's rapping over the bridge part and the verse music has become the outro, or why two bars from the hook have become part of the verse, and so on. He's very hands-on and asks Banger to do the actual edits for him. With regards to the guest performers, T-Pain and John Legend came to the studio to record stuff there while Wayne was there too, but it's not the kind of collaboration where you picture everybody sitting in the studio together, with the producer there and, say, John Legend playing piano and Wayne doing his thing.
"Wayne's unwillingness to spend much time inside also created an interesting scenario for my work, because I could not get him to come to the studio to listen to my mixes! Normally I would have sent him my mixes via email, but Tha Carter III had been leaked four times, which led to a situation where I had to put the drives in a safe, with me being the only one with the key. They ended up really annoyed, because at the end of the project I went to Italy on honeymoon, with the key in my pocket, and so they had no access the drives! With the new album, there were no digital transfers — most of the producers didn't hear the tracks until after everything was mixed and ready to be released. Wayne would either take a break from touring to come into the studio, or we used iChat. In the studio my assistants were laughing, because I had a dummy drive there with nothing on it, marked 'Carter IV', as well as some drives marked 'Jazz Now', which made people think that they contained jazz compilations. In reality, I had the mix drives with me all the time, they never left my side. If something would have happened to me, Wayne would have lost all his mixes. But like everyone in Florida, I'm an avid gun carrier! It really is like the Wild West.”
"Wayne's unwillingness to spend much time inside also created an interesting scenario for my work, because I could not get him to come to the studio to listen to my mixes! Normally I would have sent him my mixes via email, but Tha Carter III had been leaked four times, which led to a situation where I had to put the drives in a safe, with me being the only one with the key. They ended up really annoyed, because at the end of the project I went to Italy on honeymoon, with the key in my pocket, and so they had no access the drives! With the new album, there were no digital transfers — most of the producers didn't hear the tracks until after everything was mixed and ready to be released. Wayne would either take a break from touring to come into the studio, or we used iChat. In the studio my assistants were laughing, because I had a dummy drive there with nothing on it, marked 'Carter IV', as well as some drives marked 'Jazz Now', which made people think that they contained jazz compilations. In reality, I had the mix drives with me all the time, they never left my side. If something would have happened to me, Wayne would have lost all his mixes. But like everyone in Florida, I'm an avid gun carrier! It really is like the Wild West.”
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