Labels: Editorials
Labels: Interviews, Videos
Labels: Videos
Labels: Interviews, Videos
Labels: Videos
The first step is to have the proper tools; that was the first mistake we made. We went to Home Depot probably 10 or 15 times the first couple of days. We were like, “Wait, we don't have a crowbar? Oh wait, we need a sledgehammer.”
Next, it's good to draw a diagram of where you want your audio and electrical plugs to pop out. Once you put the walls up, you're stuck with it, so it's really important that you're comfortable with where your plugs are. Visualize how your studio is going to be laid out based on the gear that you have. If you're going to have your computer or console in one corner but your rack or vocal booth in another corner, you have to envision how you want your wires running. For instance, we turned our closet into a vocal booth, so we made sure to put XLR female plugs and TRS stereo plugs in the wall for plugging the microphone and headphones into the wall. That wire should run behind the wall to the other end of the room where it pops out on a faceplate near my microphone preamp.
Then you have to find your electrical breakers for the studio room. Turn on everything in the studio room, including all the lights, and plug things into all the outlets. Then have a friend go to the breaker to figure out which switch turns everything off in that room, and turn it off. If you're not sure about it, you could turn off the whole panel and kill all of the electricity. At some point, you're going to need to turn on something for power tools, a vacuum, etc. We turned off just the room we were working in and ran an extension cord from another room to plug in a radio or whatever we needed, so we could keep the electricity off in the studio room.
Basically, you just go at the dry walls, man. You could cut it with a blade and pull it off, but there's no easy way around it. Just get in there and rip those walls out so you only have the studs of the framing. We ripped all the walls out, and there was mold behind it. The opposite wall was all cinder block, which had been letting water seep through and get into the insulation, becoming this festering pile of mold behind the wall. If you're creating a studio in a basement, mold is definitely a reality to deal with when ripping the walls out. It's very likely that if one of the walls is touching cinder block and there's earth behind it, you're going to have moisture and most likely mold, which typically happens in a basement, lower-level room or other humid place.
The quick solution to that problem is to weather-seal that wall with a solvent-based foundation coating (a company called Henry, among others, sells that), so it doesn't continue to let water through. The foundation coating is like a really thick paint. Slather about two coats on, and it basically moisture-proofs the wall.
We had to add extra electrical boxes around the studio, and you want to do that when the walls are down. It's very simple to move a plug once the wall is down; it's just a little box screwed to a stud. Unscrew it, move the wire and put the plug somewhere else. I was deathly afraid of electricity from getting shocked by ungrounded DJ mixers and that sort of thing. But it turns out that an electrical plug is the simplest apparatus of all time. You need to connect three wires, and the instructions are on the back. Just go buy one at Home Depot, and it'll tell you what to do.
If you don't feel comfortable with the wiring, once you have the walls down and everything is open, it's very simple for an electrician to come in. If you want the electrician to put in a subpanel of breakers just for your studio, it won't cost more than $100 or $200 dollars because everything is already exposed.
I ended up putting in a subpanel for my studio — extra breakers that are not on the main box. If you have a lot of big gear — tube gear, a console, etc. — that's something to think about. If you're using computers and digital gear, it's probably not necessary. But do not think that putting in a Furman power conditioner is going to solve any problems you have down the line. I've opened one of those up, and it looks like an extension cord inside. There's an RF filter, and that's about it. Those 1U Monster power conditioners have a lot more going on inside of them. That's something someone might want to throw at the top of their rack. But there's a lot of voodoo in electricity and cables. It wasn't until this project that I realized the truth behind power conditioners and audio cables.
Any person doing a project like this or just getting more into studio stuff needs to get comfortable with making cables. Cables are a huge racket. Companies are making enormous amounts of money selling premade cables, but you can buy very high-quality bulk cable for dirt cheap. In L.A., there are three or four places where you can buy bulk cable for 13 or 14 cents a foot. In a project like this, you need spools of bulk cable. It doesn't matter what plug you put on the end, whether it's XLR or TRS. As long as it's balanced, you can run that cable through the studs. We bought two bulk 8-channel cable snakes with color-coded wires that we labeled on both ends. To get through the studs, we drilled through them with a large drill bit and then fed the wire through. String the bulk cable behind the walls where you need it to be, and after the walls are up, pull out the cable and attach whatever kind of plug you want.
Before you put the walls up, you need to buy faceplates for the audio cables coming out of the walls. Certain pro-audio shops sell faceplates with plugs built into them. Those screw into standard electrical boxes, which come in sizes such as 1-gang, 2-gang, 3-gang, etc. (one gang per electric plug). Say, for example, you needed a box with four XLRs on it in the vocal booth — that's a 2-gang faceplate. So in the wall, you have to affix a 2-gang box. It's a little blue box that you nail to the stud. You have to have that so you can screw on the faceplate. Your audio cable comes out of the wall and sits in the box. When everything is said and done, you solder or attach the audio wires to the faceplate and screw it into the box.
When I say soundproofing, I'm not talking about treating the room acoustically. This is not a matter of putting foam up on the walls. Foam will stop the high frequencies from bouncing around within a room, but it won't soundproof your room. I'm talking about something that won't wake up your baby if you have to work at 4 a.m. The only effective way to soundproof your room is to add more mass to your walls.
With the walls open, you need to put something inside that's going to make it thicker. The best thing to use is mineral fiber. You could put freakin' sandbags back there, but mineral fiber is good because it's thicker and much denser than insulation. It's not expensive — about the same price as buying a batch of insulation. But it's more difficult to find because it's the nastiest substance ever created by mankind. Basically, it's a 2-by-3-foot slab, and you buy a package of five to 10 of those stacked. This stuff feels almost like fiberglass, but it's particles of mineral blown into a patty. If you get it on your skin, it itches like you would not believe, and it turns your skin red. You don't feel it right away. It can even get in your eyes, so you need gloves, goggles and a hat, and be sure to cover your whole body. And — I'm not just being funny — if you're putting in mineral fiber, and you go to the bathroom, be very, very careful when you touch your private regions. It is some nasty stuff, but it's absolutely the best thing to use. You can't get mineral fiber at Home Depot, but you can get it at a more high-end construction-supply place or high-end studio retailer. It shouldn't cost more than $100 a pack. We spent $200 — 300 on it for the whole room.
After all the wiring is set, put the mineral fiber in over or around the wires. It sits in between the studs and is malleable. You can bend it or rip a chunk off and put it in a small area. In the photos, you'll see the framing and the mineral fiber in between the framing. We put it behind the walls and the ceiling. If you were on the second floor, and there were beams going across beneath you, you could put it in the floor as well. It doesn't have to be too tight, it just has to be in there. When you have to rip it up and jam it in, that's when the stuff starts flying and getting all over you, and it becomes miserable. It is not toxic; it's just irritating. And once you get it in place, it's not like asbestos, which releases into the air. Mineral fiber can rub off on you only when it's disturbed.
Now it's time to start on the floating walls, which means that the wall itself is not touching the wooden studs framing the house. The wall is set off so that when it resonates and vibrates with the music, it doesn't transfer the vibration to the framing of the house or to the outside or other rooms. Without floating walls, the soundwaves of the lower frequencies will travel into the wall, into the stud and then throughout the whole house. By pulling the walls forward, you stop the transmission of that energy, and it stays within the room. It also gives you a better listening environment, because the whole house isn't resonating on certain notes. It really sounds different, and it takes a little getting used to because you're accustomed to listening to sound in an untreated environment.
We had no experience with floating walls. I bought all the parts in a kit from a distributor, and the kit is nothing more than some metal rails and rubber, neoprene padding stickers. You have to buy the dry wall separately.
The first thing you do is put up the long metal rails along the vertical studs. They run horizontally across the studs. We had to cut some of them (see Fig. 1) because they come in 3- or 6-foot lengths. At some point, you'll get to the end of the wall, and it won't even out.
In Fig. 2, you can see the mineral fiber in the wall. Through the ladder, there's a blue 3-gang box with an 8-channel snake of bulk cable coming out. And up on the ceiling, you can see that we've put up some floating wall rails. So first you put the rails down spaced apart like that along all the walls and the ceiling. Then you put the black neoprene strips from the kit across the railings. Now there's a rubber cushion on top of that rail. Then you take green board, which is like 5-inch dry wall, and lay that against those rails. Screw the green board into only the rails and not the wood so that it's literally hanging off of the ceiling. That's the essence of the floating-walls system. If you put your hand against the wall in this room, it won't move, but it's not touching the frame of the house; it's kind of floating off of those rails that are isolated with neoprene.
The black squares shown in Fig. 3 are the neoprene rubber — just stickers, basically. You put those stickers all over the first layer of wall. Then you put another layer of wall — the final outer layer — up against those stickers on the green wall. So there are actually two walls: The wall you see in the room is sitting on top of rubber cushions, which are on top of the green wall, which is on top of the rails, which are on top of the studs. In creating floating walls, you lose about six or seven inches off the width and length of your original room's size.
In Fig. 3, you can clearly see that every time we put up a new layer of wall, we had to cut out the hole for the faceplates where the electrical and the audio were going to reside (to the right of the ladder). The console was going to be placed right where that ladder is, so we wanted all the audio from the room — the vocal booth mics and the stuff from the rack on the other side of the room — to pop out right there as a faceplate of plugs.
No matter how well you make the wall, the windows are always the Achilles' heel of studios. I didn't want to build this beautiful studio and then have complaints from the neighbors late at night. After consulting a lot of people, the best solution was to take a hammer to the original window, and then put up two layers of glass block, which is like a wall. We did one layer from the outside and one from the inside. Glass block has very similar acoustic properties to a wall, and it's excellent for letting in natural light and stopping sound from traveling out of the studio. Glass block was also cheaper than building a solid wall because it would have cost too much money to finish the wall on the outside of the house. There are two layers of glass block because by soundproofing the room, we created a thicker wall.
In Fig. 4, you can see half of the first layer of glass block sitting in a plastic track. Wherever you buy glass block, you can get the track and the spacers as well. All you have to do is screw in the track around your window opening, and the glass block sits in the track. Make sure the blocks fit evenly — your measurements have to be precise. You can't cut a glass block when you get to the end and there's room for only half a block. Put the plastic spacer down, then pour the cement mix in and put the blocks on top — that helps you keep things evenly spaced. I thought that process was going to be difficult, but it's not. It's definitely something that a home-improvement person could do. You just have to use a little foresight.
The room is now soundproofed, but that doesn't mean the inside will sound good. Acoustic treatment is a whole separate issue, and the last thing I wanted to do was buy a big purple foam kit to put up on the wall. That's not going to look so hot. Instead, I bought 18-by-18-inch squares of superthin, light wood at Home Depot, and I cut foam to the size of the wood. I sprayed the back of the foam with spray adhesive and stuck the foam to the pieces of wood. Then I went to a fabric store and got a light green burlap fabric that I thought would look nice in the studio. I wrapped the fabric over the foam and stapled it to the back of the wood with a staple gun. Then I bought industrial Velcro at Home Depot and affixed these nice, 2-inch-thick burlap squares to the wall.
That's my poor man's acoustic treatment. It's enough to stop the high frequencies from bouncing all over the place in the room, and it still looks okay. It works well for the high frequencies, but it doesn't do jack for the low frequencies — they are a bigger problem. There are products available to fix that, but this is still a small bedroom studio, and I don't have space to put in a big carpet tube or something like that. But the great thing is I can overcome any acoustic problems with volume. I can just crank it crazy loud and not bother anyone.
I'm definitely happy with the studio, although we got way behind schedule on the album because of it. But there was a point when I was mixing, and I had been up for literally 30 hours. I was sitting there, and Double K was next to me dozing off. I had the air conditioner pumping, it was 5 a.m., the sun was coming up through the glass blocks, I had the music loud and my wife was asleep. I thought, “You know what? This was all worth it, just to be here at this moment in time.” For someone who tried to put a little bit of every piece of money I got into gear so I never had to depend on a record label, it meant a lot for me to be sitting there like that, enjoying my own studio.
The saga continues. Click here for more photos and Thes One's advice on lighting (stay away from dimmers)... air conditioners and other power concerns. Also, Remix talks to Thes about the People Under the Stairs' Stepfather album and how the new studio helped advance the group's sound.
Labels: Studios
People growing up in this cursed generation ought to consider themselves awfully lucky. Yes, you look at the news, you see the papers, you hear the polar bears cryin', the Middle East bleeding and the religious zealots choking on their own excrement, and it's hard to immediately agree. But consider this: How many generations can rightfully claim being witness to the unlikely birth, rapid rise and glorious apex of one of the world's most influential musical genres?
While hip-hop was gaining credible steam in attempting to prove itself as more than just a passing fad through the '80s, there was a clan of cats from the streets of Staten Island, N.Y. who were honing their craft, paying each others' bail, fine-tuning a style, dodging bullets, stealing electronic equipment, street hustlin' and spiritually evolving all at the same time. They embraced the culture that they lived in, immersed themselves in the movement and locked themselves in a chamber. What they emerged with grabbed the music world by its horns, turned it upside down and shook the hell out of it until any semblance of doubt fell from its pockets.
Following the 2004 death of one of its most unique and celebrated, albeit trouble-prone members, Russell Jones (aka Ol' Dirty Bastard, Unique Ason, Joe Bananas, Dirt McGirt, Dirt Dog, Osirus and, who could forget, Big Baby Jesus), a bit of the air was understandably taken out of the group's sails. But with an insatiable appetite to evolve, RZA corralled the rest of the crew: GZA, U-God, Method Man, Masta Killa, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck and even Ghostface Killah. He also enlisted master wordsmith and former honorary member Cappadonna as an official member. The Wu refocused, realigned and, thankfully, soldiered on.
“It really just took a phone call and an explanation that, ‘Yo, it's time for us to do our thing,’ and everyone felt the same,” RZA says over a heaping plate of Thai spaghetti at Lanna Thai in Sherman Oaks, Calif. “So I went up to New York myself, booked the studio and started the process. We promised this to the people, so now it's time to deliver The 8 Diagrams. It's gonna be in their veins.”
In between records, RZA added to his arsenal both materialistically and spiritually. Inspectah Deck divulges that there are “well over 1,000 Wu or Wu-affiliated songs,” the majority of which RZA has had a leading role in producing. It's this tireless résumé, along with numerous movie scores (among them Kill Bill Vol.1, Afro Samurai and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) and an ever-increasing thirst for knowledge that prepared RZA for The 8 Diagrams.
“What I did over these last 10 years, I picked up my first music book,” RZA says. “I started studying music theory, and now I've got 10 years in. I know how to play piano on an intermediate level. I know how to play guitar on an intermediate level. Now I know that he went from C to F; he went to B minor and then to A minor. Harmonic progression, that's what I mostly studied. In hip-hop, you don't need melody because the voice and the rhymes are the melody, so you need harmony. That's a secret right there.”
An important aspect of RZA's unique production prowess comes not from something he's learned but from something he was born with — an innate ability to trust his own instincts. “If you go listen, I may have a slight off-beatness to my music, and I realize it's me,” he says. “Forever may have been more quality than 36 Chambers, but it still never met the quality of what Dr. Dre's doing…I still never had that wide-EQ produced quality. I got the same SSL they got, the same big speakers, the same system. I just don't hear it how they hear it. I hear it how I hear it.
“Method Man will vouch for this and Tru Masta will vouch; if you come to my studio session, if you touch one fader after I mix everything, you'll be like, ‘That's not on beat.’ The only thing keeping it on beat are the levels of where everything is at. You got like 15 things making one sound. I take all these different elements and make it one tone, but if you move anything, it falls apart like a card-house.”
Although some producers will tell you that the rhythm section has to lock together, RZA sees it differently. “Most producers want their bass to hit with their kick,” RZA demonstrates with an impromptu beatbox, “but I don't think you need to. The bass can be wherever the fuck it wants to be, as long as it has a space of operation. Sometimes my bass note isn't even the same key as my kick note. A long time ago I realized music isn't only a note and a melody and a harmony, it's also a pulse.”
“A lot of people are straight 1, 2, 3, 4,” Inspectah Deck chimes in. “They're so formatted, they think the snare has to come here. With this dude, the snare may come in on an off-beat, but when it come in, it come in with a smack. It come in and announce itself. That's the difference between him and a lot of other producers. That's why we sound the best when we rhyme with him.”
RZA's certainly come a long way in the 14 years of recording and adjusting to the nuances of 9 — and often more — MCs, each with their own subtle quirks requiring different approaches and levels of attention. “In the old days, it was more like I knew whose voice would go on which beat, but over time, everyone's talent has grown and expanded and voices have changed somewhat,” RZA says. “In my opinion, no producer ever mixes Ghostface's voice the way I mix his voice. I always had his voice warmer. A vocal only sleeps between 70 Hz and 10 kHz. Between that range, you got to find that perfect balance for your artist that takes away some of the nasal high, while still keeping the warmth of the mid and a little bottom.”
For 8 Diagrams, RZA used Avalon and Urei preamps, as well as the dbx 160 compressors with Pultec EQs. There's enough to go around. “Each Clan member had his own compressor, so when he came to my house or studio, his compressor was always set to his voice,” RZA says. “I had a preset channel that I would never touch.”
“Basically, he's the conductor,” Inspectah Deck says of RZA, “so all I got to do is give him what I feel was decent to me — my vocals, my ad libs — then I let him seal the deal. I know by the time he's done with it, it's going to sound how it's supposed to sound. It's gonna have that Wu-Tang edge. There's only one RZA.”
Being the conductor has its downside, though. It means having to be honest for the sake of the music. And because egos get involved and RZA didn't treat every situation with kid gloves, there's been plenty of tension in the studio. “He'd be like, ‘Get the fuck out the booth!’” U-God reflects. “Next day I'm back in again: ‘Get the fuck out the booth!’ Next day I'm back in again…it got to a point where it was like ‘Motherfuckerrrrrr!’ I mean, the last time he kicked me out the booth, I done killed the whole booth, slammed the door, boom boom boom! Went home. But he brought it out of me. He made me go back and correct it and made me perfect my shit. Now, it ain't nothing. He made me a beast.”
At one point during lunch at Lanna Thai, RZA shot Remix a judgmentally discerning glare before offering, “I don't know if I want to tell anybody…but I'll tell you. I'll tell your magazine only. I recorded the vocals in two to three mics at one time. I put a mic right at the chest, one up close to the throat and one right in front of them,” he says. “It's a mess for the engineer. You have like 20 tracks of vocals for Raekwon alone, but I wanted to have a new vocal sound. I wanted to be able to catch a nigga's chest ambience, his throat ambience and maybe his nose ambience.”
For this process, he used Neumann U 87s as the main sensor, with AKG C 12s and a Shure 55 Unidyne (“the mic that Elvis used to record his shit,” he says), and the positions were slightly altered depending on the MC up to bat.
In addition to using different vocal-recording techniques, the RZA draws a few new pieces of gear, among them the Roland MV-8800 drum machine. “I had a lot of beats already on the 8000 because I had the 8000 for almost three years now,” he says, “but the 8800 I had for a couple of months, and it had some hot new kicks and some hot new sounds in it that I wanted to use. With the MVs, you can record the vocals right into there and do a whole song…mix it, master it and put it out.”
RZA also uses the Roland V-Synth quite a bit. “You can actually plug anything through it so you can make your whole beat and put it into the V-Synth and elastically stretch it out,” he says. “Just plug into a MIDI keyboard or plug a mic directly into it and do your hooks and alter the sound or add an extra voice on top of the chorus. It's also like a vocoder. It has great vocal cards in it, so you can have the flute sound like a vocal.”
If you've seen RZA's mug in the Roland ads lately, you'll know that he's got a little sponsorship love from them, but he wasn't always a believer. “I've been using more Roland, but I actually hated Roland growing up. To me, their equipment wasn't user friendly…their interface wasn't proper, but now, I think they got it. Also, now I'm smarter, so I can figure it out.”
The most expensive keyboard kit used on 8 Diagrams was a Korg Oasys, on a track called “Tar Pits.” “I made a beat that I liked and recorded my guitar directly into the Oasys,” RZA says. “I could be programming beats and have a live sound all coming out of one thing. Also, the preamps inside the Oasys are much better than the preamps in the Digi 002. Sometimes I even dump the MV tracks into the Oasys because it has a better preamp.”
Meanwhile, RZA also found himself pulling out older gems such as the Yamaha VL7. “If you plug it into an MPC, for some reason, MPC modulation causes all the notes to stutter, so it sounds like an Isaac Hayes type of delay, which I actually discovered accidentally, but once I found it, I ran with it. I did recently bring out the VL7 for this album for a song called ‘Wolves.’ I used it for the horns, and it has one of these kinds of flute synths.”
A guy like RZA can afford any piece of equipment he desires, but it's not always what he thinks he needs, it's what is readily at his fingertips. While the majority of the production process employs Pro Tools, RZA uses it all because, “I'm just a scientist of sound like that. I even used a GarageBand sound for one of the characters in Afro Samurai.”
RZA has also dabbled in Apple's more pro DAW, Logic. “George Clinton came in and bugged out, and I was like, “You know what? There're a few good bass loops in Logic that we can drag-and-drop, and I'll just take out some of the notes, but the sonics are going to sound good.” So I started the session in Logic. We started smoking some weed, started getting into the groove, and to switch back over to Pro Tools was going to take a minute. I already had a spirit going on, so I wound up recording the song ‘Land of My Dreams’ in Logic, which I didn't know I was going to do for this album.”
While the grimy, gritty and we-like-it-raw style still provides the foundation of everything Wu, the most surprising and unexpected element of 8 Diagrams was RZA's decision to use live instruments for the first time. “He's redeveloped his skin,” U-God offers matter-of-factly. “That's what basically everything is. You got to shed skin and redevelop. RZA surprises me every time because right when you think he ain't got nothing, you swear he ain't got nothing, he got something.”
“It was something I wasn't used to back in the early Wu-Tang days, but since I have become a Hollywood composer, I had a chance to work with 80-piece orchestras,” RZA says. “So now I know. It's actually something I've always wanted to do…to put those two worlds together.”
Inspectah concurs that the timing was right: “I think that's a brilliant idea in 2007. With a live band, mixed with certain samples, it gives it a classic sound, but more up-to-date, more crisp, more clean. It's crazy, man: I'm from the school where he's on the [Ensoniq] ASR, the Korg Triton, the Kurzweil, and now you got the dude in there hittin' the violin strings at 100 mph, you got the dude on the drums — it's different.”
This is evidenced best in what is possibly the biggest “WTF?!” on The 8 Diagrams: the group's cover of The Beatles' “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” RZA, the last person you'd expect to ride the Yellow Submarine, can't hold back: “I love it! I love the progression; I love the five chords they're using up and down. I always wanted to record that song.”
The story goes a little something like this: A music executive friend of his told RZA that not only was it one of the few songs George Harrison wrote, but that he personally knew Dhani Harrison, George's son. So “I get on the phone with Dhani, and not only does he know all the Wu-Tang songs, he knows the samples of the kung fu movies that I use,” RZA marvels. “So we had a chance to eat, meet, hang and I just said, ‘Yo, I want to do this song, and I want you to play acoustic on it. I already got John Frusciante to play lead guitar. And when I finished doing American Gangster last year, as a wrap gift, Russell Crowe gave me a 1961 Gretsch guitar — mint condition. So I told Dhani, ‘I want you to come in and play acoustic guitar on the song, but I want you to play on the Gretsch.’ Eight months later, we did it.” Employing an army of Fender and Line 6 amps, producer George Drakoulias (The Cult, The Black Crowes, Tom Petty) stepped in to support, and RZA got Ghostface, Method Man and Raekwon to do verses.
“I think I did good job of incorporating electronic hardware, software and live instruments on this album, and that's a war,” RZA insists. “The software people act like you don't need hardware, and the hardware people act like you don't need instruments, and musicians don't like all that electronic shit because it takes away their jobs.”
Once the toils of production come to a close, the cathartic experience of the live show enters the picture. When you walk in and see 60,000 W's up in the air, you know it's going down. And surprisingly enough, there's not much more on the stage than a posse of killa bees, their mics and a modest DJ setup. In addition to two Pioneer CDJ and two Technics turntables, DJ Mathematics uses a Rane TTM 56 mixer and 360 Systems Instant Replay, a device with hot keys that enables on-the-fly, instant playback of sound effects.
“Basically, when we do a show, it's the instrumentals from the albums,” Mathematics says, referring to the 100-plus instrumentals he juggles throughout a show. “Some of them I do certain things to; I may add an intro or a little breakdown or make beats to try to beef some of them up with an 808 or some hats, but basically it's the instrumentals.”
Fortunately, with RZA constantly changing things up in the studio, Mathematics can easily distinguish track from track as he supports the MCs onstage. “One thing that may not be a good thing about the RZA,” RZA says modestly, “is that I strive not to repeat myself.” But his Wu-Tang brethren have his back.
“Sometimes it takes a minute to hear what he got,” U-God emphasizes. “Sometimes you got to have an ear for the future. Like, right now it's 2007. He got shit in stash for 2012.” You heard it, Wu fans — stay tuned for the next five-year plan.
Apple Mac G5, Logic
Digidesign Digi 002, Pro Tools|HD
Akai MPC4000
Roland MV-8000, MV-8800
Propellerhead Reason, ReCycle
Sony Oxford EQ, Dynamics
McDSP Filterbank
Waves Platinum bundle
Gretsch 1961 guitar
Korg Oasys
Roland V-Synth
Yamaha VL7
SSL G Series
AKG C 12
Neumann U 67, U 87
Shure 55 Unidyne
dbx 160 compressor
Eventide Harmonizer 3000
Lexicon D-Verb
Neve outboard EQs, 1081 preamp, 9080 compressor
Labels: Interviews