Lex
ILLIEN
ill o.g.
[Very extensive Dj Shadow article/interview I found on the internet]
There's an ugly stigma about recording artists who make songs using mainly samples. It's provoked many traditional instrumentalists to lash out by saying, "These people aren't musicians!" But those who dis DJ Shadow (aka Josh Davis) for constructing tracks from other people's music don't know half the story. There's no comparison between Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" - entirely based on a sampled Police riff - and a composition by DJ Shadow. That's because Shadow isn't appropriating whole hooks in order to ride on the coattails of someone else's hit song. DJ Shadow is more like a junkyard artist, one who finds the most obscure, forgotten and sometimes undesirable sounds and manipulates and arranges them into something totally new and beautiful.
And he does it using only samples. That's in part because some music that mixes live instrumentation and sampling has left a bad taste in his mouth. "In the early '90s, there was a certain type of music where they'd have some guy come in and play saxophone on top of a sample," says Shadow. "The sampling was so generic. It was really just a loop from a record with sax over it. I thought that was really boring, so I don't ever want to do that. Producers like Organized Noise mix samples and live instruments really well, but for me, it almost feels like a cop-out, because I'm a collage artist. It's like, 'Damn, if only I could find this one part. Well, maybe if I just had somebody paint it, and then I'll put it out.' That almost feels like cheating."
So Shadow struggles to find prerecorded parts that, with some luck and skill, will fit perfectly together. "Lots of times, I have trouble finding bass lines, because it's not very often on a record that there are good open bass lines. Sometimes I wish I could just have somebody come in and do what I want him to do on a bass line. It would be so easy. But what I do just keeps things much more challenging, I guess."
Shadow worried that he would cave in and hire studio musicians for his second solo album, The Private Press. "I didn't know how much I really could say with samples this time," he says. "And I didn't know if I had a whole other album in me. It was just lack of confidence in the beginning. Within a few weeks, I knew that it actually would be more challenging for me to try and stick with my original ethos on this record."
THE VINYL HUNT
DJ Shadow has been collecting records for 15 years, but the search for new sampling fodder is a never-ending addiction. When at home, he checks out Village Music in Mill Valley, Calif., but his favorite store of all time is a place in Sacramento, Calif., simply called Records. "It's the front cover of Endtroducing," says Shadow of his first solo album. "My second favorite would probably be a store that doesn't exist anymore. It didn't have a name. It wasn't in the phone book or anything. It was in Merced, California, and that is where I developed my love for 45s. The guy who owned it was a weird dude who recently passed away. There's a picture of him at his store on the cover for the domestic version of 'Midnight in a Perfect World.'"
DJ Shadow has three different roles as a record-buyer: collector, DJ and producer. "A lot of the records that I look for as a collector I hardly ever sample, because they become renowned, and I know people will spot the sample because it's flagged in everybody's minds," says Shadow. "If I go out and find some really outstanding, rare late-'60s, early-'70s soul or funk thing that I'd never heard of or been searching for for a long time, that's my ultimate. A well-known holy-grail funk piece is an album by The Invaders called Spacing Out. It's incredibly good and incredibly rare."
As a DJ, Shadow has a broader scope. Even a flavor of the week can be a good DJ record. "Nowadays, with the [Pioneer] CDJ-1000 CD turntables, the latest Mystikal record could be an indispensable DJ record. If I get a new demo from Blackalicious that they're working on and I can find a way of working that into the set, then cool. There are lots of things that you pick up just to play that week that are instantly dispensable later. The very next week, it's often out the door to storage. But most hip-hop DJs have had certain records and well-worn tracks like Souls of Mischief's '93 'Til Infinity' or Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's 'They Reminisce Over You' in their crates almost 10 years now and still play them on occasion."
The vinyl gems used to make Shadow's tracks are often from pressings of 1,000 or fewer copies. "I always gravitate toward records that I feel are obscure, because I know if I sample it and can't clear it for whatever reason or don't want to clear it, then hopefully the odds are in my favor that it's not gonna be heard. Also, there's less chance that somebody is going to sample the same thing. A black and white, private-press heavy-metal record from '85 is as good to me as a poetry record from '65. If I can find a use for it and it works and it saves my neck in an arrangement context, that to me is gold."
The ever-present problem with using samples, of course, is clearing them. Although he's happy to set aside publishing money for artists, Shadow is plagued by the dollar signs reflected in many lawyers' eyes. "Lawyers make it totally impossible to clear more than one sample per song, because they all want 75 percent, no matter how big or how small the use is," he says. "If you come to them, they think, 'It's payday. We've got them under a barrel.' If you use a hundred samples in a song, you can still only clear one or two, tops. I've thought of mathematical equations that you could use so that each record constitutes a certain percentage. In other words, you may only use one sample, a little percussive element that plays twice, and then you may use another sample that loops through the whole song. So you could mathematically find out how much each sample would be worth, and if that were the case, you could clear more. But lawyers don't want to do it that way. They just want to say, 'We're outraged! And here's what it'll cost you.'"
IN THE BEGINNING
Like many kids, DJ Shadow couldn't afford expensive turntables. At 11 years old, in 1984, Shadow got a Sears combination tape machine, receiver and record player for $100. He taught himself to mix and scratch using that janky setup. "I was hearing records with scratching on them, like 'One for the Treble' by Davy DMX and 'Surgery' by Dr. Dre, the same Dr. Dre that is huge now," says Shadow. "Like anybody who picks up a guitar and wants to imitate his heroes, I was doing the same thing with scratching. I would record a record to tape, and I'd copy that tape [using the second deck] while holding the little selector knob in between phono and tape so you could hear both the record and the first tape playing together. Then I could scratch over the top [blending that with the first tape onto the second]. Now the problem with that is, on a crossfader, you can get sounds like tsch-tsch-tschhhhh. But when you don't have a crossfader, all you can do is dooba-dooba-doo-we. Then I figured out that I could fake the crossfader sound by adjusting the selector knob so that it would turn off the pullback, and then I'd put it back in the middle. Later, people were doing the same thing with the transformer switch on the mixer, which is just on and off as opposed to a fade - not saying that I invented it or anything. Believe me, I know I didn't, because nobody even heard my little tapes. But it just was nice when transforming became popular. I was like, 'Oh, I know exactly how to do this!'" A couple of years later, Shadow graduated to direct-drive JVC turntables, but it was many years later before he finally got his Technics 1200s.
THE PRIVATE PRESS PROCESS
Through working on Endtroducing - as well as collaborative projects such as U.N.K.L.E., the documentary Dark Days, Quannum and Brainfreeze - Shadow has finessed his production process. The opening (post-intro) track on The Private Press, "Fixed Income," is an instrumental composed of parts that drop in and out: pulsating bass synth, dueling guitar melodies, chiming harpsichord. It's almost a shock that the sounds weren't originally intended to be together. "Of all the songs on the album," says Shadow, "I feel like 'Fixed Income' best demonstrates what I was trying to achieve arrangementwise on this record, which was not to resort to my usual tricks. There's no fancy drum programming. I don't rely on a similar sample coming back throughout the whole thing to keep the song moving. It keeps going in all these different directions, yet it feels like a whole song. You need a lot of samples to be able to have a song do that."
One of Shadow's secret weapons that helped him get started on the album wasn't some expensive piece of gear, but rather Post-It notes. After buying and listening to thousands of records, Shadow wrote down comments about each. "I put the Post-It on the record and filed it on a set of shelves," he says. "Records that I listen to and don't find anything on, I chuck off into storage. Or occasionally I'll find something and go, 'Wow, I really want to put that song on tape.' So it will go on my 'to tape' shelf. Maybe one of three records has something that might be used. Two out of three will go off to storage. And maybe one of 50 ends up on the tape." Despite trying to keep things organized, Shadow has moments of chaos in his studio. "I'm constantly moving records from one end of the studio to the other," he says. "My studio is just barely under control at any given time."
PUZZLE PIECES
In the demo stage, Shadow works on three songs at a time. Then he decides which ones he'll take further into the process. "I kind of throw them against the wall repeatedly to see which one wants to stick every time, and then I'll start working on that a little bit," he says. Then Shadow will work on three more demos. For The Private Press, he ended up with 18 in all: 12 full songs, as well as three B-sides and three demos he didn't have time to finish. Each song took from three weeks to a month to produce - 15 months total for 85 minutes of music. But Shadow was careful not to overwork his tracks. "Once a song is done in my mind, it's done, and it's either good or it's not," he says. "I've always tried to be really cognizant of not doing a whole record and then scrapping it. If I'm working on it past the demo stage, that's only because I feel there's a 99 percent chance of it being good."
Gearwise, Shadow has a few mainstays. He uses Digidesign Pro Tools software to track and edit, but not to sequence: "I don't like to quantize things and put beats on a grid. If there's gonna be a mistake, so be it, but I want to be able to choose it." Shadow does all his sequencing by ear using two Akai MPC3000s MIDI'd together. "The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy's producers in the '80s, used two or three [E-mu] SP-1200s MIDI'd together," says Shadow. "They inspired me to do that, and it was a big development for me. Before I had two, I usually wouldn't run out of memory - I'd run out of pad space. And I like to have all my sounds accessible to me all the time. I like to chop things, and with one MPC, you only have 16 times four banks, so that's 64 sounds available at one time. I had just totally outgrown that."
The other important piece of gear in Shadow's setup is a Roland VP-9000, which he uses for its time-stretching and internal effects to morph a mediocre sound into a great one. "What the drums on 'Walkie Talkie' are now and what they were on the record are totally different," he says. "On the original record, it's just sort of average-sounding, and it actually isn't even a drum break. It just goes, pssssshhh, kuh-boom-boom, and then the vocalists start singing again. So I took that, put it into the MPC, made a fake pattern, put that into the VP, gave it all this huge weight and distortion with the internal effects, plugged it back into the MPC, rechopped it and made it sound completely different."
While working on demos, Shadow continues to audition new records. "If I find something intriguing, I'll pull up some of the demos and try to make it fit temporarily," he says. "And if it fits, then I'll say, for example, 'This works perfect with "Fixed Income" at +5[fraction one-half] pitch on the turntable.'"
But sometimes, Shadow has to go to greater distances to find a part that he needs for a song. Although certain parts for "Fixed Income" came together quickly, the song soon presented a problem in the low end of the mix. After laying down the beat, he created the low-mid bass-synth note that steadily hits throughout much of the song. He found the sound from a generic soul 45 from the '70s. "It starts off with studio chatter, and then you hear the keyboard go buuom," he says. "A few more seconds pass, it does it one more time, and then the song kicks in with no rhyme or reason."
With that bass part in play, Shadow still felt that something was missing. "I knew that the synth sound couldn't just be the only thing occupying the low end," he says. "I needed a proper something with a lot more bottom to it, but I couldn't find a good bass line. So I took a time stretch of something on the lower frequency, like a perpetual low tone, and I fed it into my Roland VP-9000, put it in tune and then in real time; just turning the Pitch knob made it go, rrrr-rrr-rr, rreeerrr-rrr, making up my own bass line. As a result, I think it really moves the song along."
TRACKS UNDER A MICROSCOPE
Once Shadow was 80 percent finished with his tracks, he took them to a bigger studio to work with mixing engineer Jim Abbiss and some additional outboard gear. "I don't feel like I've ever been that strong mixwise," says Shadow. "I mean, Endtroducing, for everything that it was, was not mixed great by any stretch. When I play that next to other things, it's really hard to mix with other things, because it has this really closed sound, ultrawarm but ultraclosed. I remember, it never worked in clubs." Abbiss worked with Shadow mixing the U.N.K.L.E. project, which featured vocals by Radiohead's Thom Yorke and The Verve's Richard Ashcroft, among others. "I didn't think I was up for the challenge and the responsibility of having to mix those songs with those vocalists," he says. "So from the beginning, I said to Jim, 'Look, having just mixed Endtroducing, I know that there are some gaps in my knowledge.' And we just got along really well. I'd have these really intangible words to describe what I was feeling and hearing, and he would actually know how to make it happen."
Before hooking up with Abbiss, Shadow did some pre-EQ'ing of drum breaks, guitars and other sounds before dumping them into the MPC. But Abbiss helped Shadow tackle some more difficult EQ'ing problems, such as when two parts occupied the same space in the frequency spectrum. "There were songs like 'Mongrel ...' that I remember we had a hard time mixing because we weren't getting enough out of the bass line and a lot of the piano parts were occupying the same space. When you have everything trying to fit into the same space, that becomes a problem. So we'd asked ourselves, 'What if we treat it in this way that takes all the crispness out of it? Will it still be compelling as a sound?' There are thousands of decisions that have to be made in the studio."
Sometimes it's easy to get too close to a project, especially during 16-hour days magnifying the tiniest increments of sound. That's when Shadow breaks out of the studio to allow Abbiss to solve problems alone for a while. "When he's working on drums, I'll tell him if I'm unhappy, but usually he'll say, 'Give me an hour,' because he doesn't want to have me in the background hearing him. A lot of times, you have to take mixing to the furthest extreme to know where to come back. He doesn't want me in the background going, 'It's not gonna be like that, is it? You're gonna change it, aren't you?' And I'm happy to take an hour out. I get stressed in the studio."
It's no surprise that after spending many months pouring all of his energy into The Private Press, Shadow would feel some anxiety. As an album comes to fruition, the pressure mounts and artists often find themselves second-guessing whether they (and the audience) will be happy with the result. That's why, in the later stages of recording, Shadow lets go of his creative will and allows the technical and objective side to take over.
"I have to really get methodical and try to maximize the arrangement at that point," he says. But to succeed in making a great album, Shadow believes that in the beginning stage of making tracks, analytical thinking is out the door. "You gotta make music that doesn't sound like anything else," he says. "That's why, when I'm in the demo stage, I try to turn my heart on and my brain off and just come up with a groove."
ULTRARARE PRIVATE PRESSINGS
For the past 15 years, DJ Shadow has gone out of his way to find obscure sound sources. Here's one you may not know about that was used for the intro and outro, both titled "Letter From Home," on The Private Press: "Those samples come from a 'Recordio' disc," says Shadow. "In the '40s, '50s and '60s, you could go into a drug store, an arcade or a hotel and, in the same way you could have your photo taken in a photo booth, you could pay 50 cents and make a letter on a record. When I first started finding them, it was really eerie and kind of charming. You hear how people actually used to talk and the words they really used, because it's totally not intended for any kind of mass consumption, like a film would be. Actors talk like actors, and their dialog is usually kind of forced. But on these discs, you actually get to hear what people sounded like. If you can find them at all, they're usually just in Goodwill and Salvation Army. The biggest record store in America only has, like, 50 because usually they're so disposable. It's like, 'Okay, I'll be home in a week.' People usually just heard them and threw them away."
STUDIO IN THE SHADOWS
Few get to see DJ Shadow's recording studio, as it's also where he lives and tries to maintain some privacy in Marin, Calif. But Shadow did reveal what lurks behind his studio doors. It's a modest setup (with no live instruments) that he uses to record and edit up until the mixing stage. Once tracks are 80 percent finished, he takes them to a bigger studio for "access to all the outboard gear" and to collaborate with mixing engineer Jim Abbiss.
COMPUTER/SOFTWARE
Apple Mac G3 Digidesign Pro Tools
SAMPLER/DRUM MACHINES
(2) Akai MPC3000s (MIDI'd together)
PROCESSORS
Roland VP-9000 VariPhrase Processor (for time-stretching and effects - used on the drums on "Walkie Talkie") MXR Pitch Transposer (used on "Monosylabik")
TURNTABLES
(2) Technics SL-1200s
DJ MIXER
("It's got a lot of cool bells and whistles," says Shadow.)
There's an ugly stigma about recording artists who make songs using mainly samples. It's provoked many traditional instrumentalists to lash out by saying, "These people aren't musicians!" But those who dis DJ Shadow (aka Josh Davis) for constructing tracks from other people's music don't know half the story. There's no comparison between Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" - entirely based on a sampled Police riff - and a composition by DJ Shadow. That's because Shadow isn't appropriating whole hooks in order to ride on the coattails of someone else's hit song. DJ Shadow is more like a junkyard artist, one who finds the most obscure, forgotten and sometimes undesirable sounds and manipulates and arranges them into something totally new and beautiful.
And he does it using only samples. That's in part because some music that mixes live instrumentation and sampling has left a bad taste in his mouth. "In the early '90s, there was a certain type of music where they'd have some guy come in and play saxophone on top of a sample," says Shadow. "The sampling was so generic. It was really just a loop from a record with sax over it. I thought that was really boring, so I don't ever want to do that. Producers like Organized Noise mix samples and live instruments really well, but for me, it almost feels like a cop-out, because I'm a collage artist. It's like, 'Damn, if only I could find this one part. Well, maybe if I just had somebody paint it, and then I'll put it out.' That almost feels like cheating."
So Shadow struggles to find prerecorded parts that, with some luck and skill, will fit perfectly together. "Lots of times, I have trouble finding bass lines, because it's not very often on a record that there are good open bass lines. Sometimes I wish I could just have somebody come in and do what I want him to do on a bass line. It would be so easy. But what I do just keeps things much more challenging, I guess."
Shadow worried that he would cave in and hire studio musicians for his second solo album, The Private Press. "I didn't know how much I really could say with samples this time," he says. "And I didn't know if I had a whole other album in me. It was just lack of confidence in the beginning. Within a few weeks, I knew that it actually would be more challenging for me to try and stick with my original ethos on this record."
THE VINYL HUNT
DJ Shadow has been collecting records for 15 years, but the search for new sampling fodder is a never-ending addiction. When at home, he checks out Village Music in Mill Valley, Calif., but his favorite store of all time is a place in Sacramento, Calif., simply called Records. "It's the front cover of Endtroducing," says Shadow of his first solo album. "My second favorite would probably be a store that doesn't exist anymore. It didn't have a name. It wasn't in the phone book or anything. It was in Merced, California, and that is where I developed my love for 45s. The guy who owned it was a weird dude who recently passed away. There's a picture of him at his store on the cover for the domestic version of 'Midnight in a Perfect World.'"
DJ Shadow has three different roles as a record-buyer: collector, DJ and producer. "A lot of the records that I look for as a collector I hardly ever sample, because they become renowned, and I know people will spot the sample because it's flagged in everybody's minds," says Shadow. "If I go out and find some really outstanding, rare late-'60s, early-'70s soul or funk thing that I'd never heard of or been searching for for a long time, that's my ultimate. A well-known holy-grail funk piece is an album by The Invaders called Spacing Out. It's incredibly good and incredibly rare."
As a DJ, Shadow has a broader scope. Even a flavor of the week can be a good DJ record. "Nowadays, with the [Pioneer] CDJ-1000 CD turntables, the latest Mystikal record could be an indispensable DJ record. If I get a new demo from Blackalicious that they're working on and I can find a way of working that into the set, then cool. There are lots of things that you pick up just to play that week that are instantly dispensable later. The very next week, it's often out the door to storage. But most hip-hop DJs have had certain records and well-worn tracks like Souls of Mischief's '93 'Til Infinity' or Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's 'They Reminisce Over You' in their crates almost 10 years now and still play them on occasion."
The vinyl gems used to make Shadow's tracks are often from pressings of 1,000 or fewer copies. "I always gravitate toward records that I feel are obscure, because I know if I sample it and can't clear it for whatever reason or don't want to clear it, then hopefully the odds are in my favor that it's not gonna be heard. Also, there's less chance that somebody is going to sample the same thing. A black and white, private-press heavy-metal record from '85 is as good to me as a poetry record from '65. If I can find a use for it and it works and it saves my neck in an arrangement context, that to me is gold."
The ever-present problem with using samples, of course, is clearing them. Although he's happy to set aside publishing money for artists, Shadow is plagued by the dollar signs reflected in many lawyers' eyes. "Lawyers make it totally impossible to clear more than one sample per song, because they all want 75 percent, no matter how big or how small the use is," he says. "If you come to them, they think, 'It's payday. We've got them under a barrel.' If you use a hundred samples in a song, you can still only clear one or two, tops. I've thought of mathematical equations that you could use so that each record constitutes a certain percentage. In other words, you may only use one sample, a little percussive element that plays twice, and then you may use another sample that loops through the whole song. So you could mathematically find out how much each sample would be worth, and if that were the case, you could clear more. But lawyers don't want to do it that way. They just want to say, 'We're outraged! And here's what it'll cost you.'"
IN THE BEGINNING
Like many kids, DJ Shadow couldn't afford expensive turntables. At 11 years old, in 1984, Shadow got a Sears combination tape machine, receiver and record player for $100. He taught himself to mix and scratch using that janky setup. "I was hearing records with scratching on them, like 'One for the Treble' by Davy DMX and 'Surgery' by Dr. Dre, the same Dr. Dre that is huge now," says Shadow. "Like anybody who picks up a guitar and wants to imitate his heroes, I was doing the same thing with scratching. I would record a record to tape, and I'd copy that tape [using the second deck] while holding the little selector knob in between phono and tape so you could hear both the record and the first tape playing together. Then I could scratch over the top [blending that with the first tape onto the second]. Now the problem with that is, on a crossfader, you can get sounds like tsch-tsch-tschhhhh. But when you don't have a crossfader, all you can do is dooba-dooba-doo-we. Then I figured out that I could fake the crossfader sound by adjusting the selector knob so that it would turn off the pullback, and then I'd put it back in the middle. Later, people were doing the same thing with the transformer switch on the mixer, which is just on and off as opposed to a fade - not saying that I invented it or anything. Believe me, I know I didn't, because nobody even heard my little tapes. But it just was nice when transforming became popular. I was like, 'Oh, I know exactly how to do this!'" A couple of years later, Shadow graduated to direct-drive JVC turntables, but it was many years later before he finally got his Technics 1200s.
THE PRIVATE PRESS PROCESS
Through working on Endtroducing - as well as collaborative projects such as U.N.K.L.E., the documentary Dark Days, Quannum and Brainfreeze - Shadow has finessed his production process. The opening (post-intro) track on The Private Press, "Fixed Income," is an instrumental composed of parts that drop in and out: pulsating bass synth, dueling guitar melodies, chiming harpsichord. It's almost a shock that the sounds weren't originally intended to be together. "Of all the songs on the album," says Shadow, "I feel like 'Fixed Income' best demonstrates what I was trying to achieve arrangementwise on this record, which was not to resort to my usual tricks. There's no fancy drum programming. I don't rely on a similar sample coming back throughout the whole thing to keep the song moving. It keeps going in all these different directions, yet it feels like a whole song. You need a lot of samples to be able to have a song do that."
One of Shadow's secret weapons that helped him get started on the album wasn't some expensive piece of gear, but rather Post-It notes. After buying and listening to thousands of records, Shadow wrote down comments about each. "I put the Post-It on the record and filed it on a set of shelves," he says. "Records that I listen to and don't find anything on, I chuck off into storage. Or occasionally I'll find something and go, 'Wow, I really want to put that song on tape.' So it will go on my 'to tape' shelf. Maybe one of three records has something that might be used. Two out of three will go off to storage. And maybe one of 50 ends up on the tape." Despite trying to keep things organized, Shadow has moments of chaos in his studio. "I'm constantly moving records from one end of the studio to the other," he says. "My studio is just barely under control at any given time."
PUZZLE PIECES
In the demo stage, Shadow works on three songs at a time. Then he decides which ones he'll take further into the process. "I kind of throw them against the wall repeatedly to see which one wants to stick every time, and then I'll start working on that a little bit," he says. Then Shadow will work on three more demos. For The Private Press, he ended up with 18 in all: 12 full songs, as well as three B-sides and three demos he didn't have time to finish. Each song took from three weeks to a month to produce - 15 months total for 85 minutes of music. But Shadow was careful not to overwork his tracks. "Once a song is done in my mind, it's done, and it's either good or it's not," he says. "I've always tried to be really cognizant of not doing a whole record and then scrapping it. If I'm working on it past the demo stage, that's only because I feel there's a 99 percent chance of it being good."
Gearwise, Shadow has a few mainstays. He uses Digidesign Pro Tools software to track and edit, but not to sequence: "I don't like to quantize things and put beats on a grid. If there's gonna be a mistake, so be it, but I want to be able to choose it." Shadow does all his sequencing by ear using two Akai MPC3000s MIDI'd together. "The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy's producers in the '80s, used two or three [E-mu] SP-1200s MIDI'd together," says Shadow. "They inspired me to do that, and it was a big development for me. Before I had two, I usually wouldn't run out of memory - I'd run out of pad space. And I like to have all my sounds accessible to me all the time. I like to chop things, and with one MPC, you only have 16 times four banks, so that's 64 sounds available at one time. I had just totally outgrown that."
The other important piece of gear in Shadow's setup is a Roland VP-9000, which he uses for its time-stretching and internal effects to morph a mediocre sound into a great one. "What the drums on 'Walkie Talkie' are now and what they were on the record are totally different," he says. "On the original record, it's just sort of average-sounding, and it actually isn't even a drum break. It just goes, pssssshhh, kuh-boom-boom, and then the vocalists start singing again. So I took that, put it into the MPC, made a fake pattern, put that into the VP, gave it all this huge weight and distortion with the internal effects, plugged it back into the MPC, rechopped it and made it sound completely different."
While working on demos, Shadow continues to audition new records. "If I find something intriguing, I'll pull up some of the demos and try to make it fit temporarily," he says. "And if it fits, then I'll say, for example, 'This works perfect with "Fixed Income" at +5[fraction one-half] pitch on the turntable.'"
But sometimes, Shadow has to go to greater distances to find a part that he needs for a song. Although certain parts for "Fixed Income" came together quickly, the song soon presented a problem in the low end of the mix. After laying down the beat, he created the low-mid bass-synth note that steadily hits throughout much of the song. He found the sound from a generic soul 45 from the '70s. "It starts off with studio chatter, and then you hear the keyboard go buuom," he says. "A few more seconds pass, it does it one more time, and then the song kicks in with no rhyme or reason."
With that bass part in play, Shadow still felt that something was missing. "I knew that the synth sound couldn't just be the only thing occupying the low end," he says. "I needed a proper something with a lot more bottom to it, but I couldn't find a good bass line. So I took a time stretch of something on the lower frequency, like a perpetual low tone, and I fed it into my Roland VP-9000, put it in tune and then in real time; just turning the Pitch knob made it go, rrrr-rrr-rr, rreeerrr-rrr, making up my own bass line. As a result, I think it really moves the song along."
TRACKS UNDER A MICROSCOPE
Once Shadow was 80 percent finished with his tracks, he took them to a bigger studio to work with mixing engineer Jim Abbiss and some additional outboard gear. "I don't feel like I've ever been that strong mixwise," says Shadow. "I mean, Endtroducing, for everything that it was, was not mixed great by any stretch. When I play that next to other things, it's really hard to mix with other things, because it has this really closed sound, ultrawarm but ultraclosed. I remember, it never worked in clubs." Abbiss worked with Shadow mixing the U.N.K.L.E. project, which featured vocals by Radiohead's Thom Yorke and The Verve's Richard Ashcroft, among others. "I didn't think I was up for the challenge and the responsibility of having to mix those songs with those vocalists," he says. "So from the beginning, I said to Jim, 'Look, having just mixed Endtroducing, I know that there are some gaps in my knowledge.' And we just got along really well. I'd have these really intangible words to describe what I was feeling and hearing, and he would actually know how to make it happen."
Before hooking up with Abbiss, Shadow did some pre-EQ'ing of drum breaks, guitars and other sounds before dumping them into the MPC. But Abbiss helped Shadow tackle some more difficult EQ'ing problems, such as when two parts occupied the same space in the frequency spectrum. "There were songs like 'Mongrel ...' that I remember we had a hard time mixing because we weren't getting enough out of the bass line and a lot of the piano parts were occupying the same space. When you have everything trying to fit into the same space, that becomes a problem. So we'd asked ourselves, 'What if we treat it in this way that takes all the crispness out of it? Will it still be compelling as a sound?' There are thousands of decisions that have to be made in the studio."
Sometimes it's easy to get too close to a project, especially during 16-hour days magnifying the tiniest increments of sound. That's when Shadow breaks out of the studio to allow Abbiss to solve problems alone for a while. "When he's working on drums, I'll tell him if I'm unhappy, but usually he'll say, 'Give me an hour,' because he doesn't want to have me in the background hearing him. A lot of times, you have to take mixing to the furthest extreme to know where to come back. He doesn't want me in the background going, 'It's not gonna be like that, is it? You're gonna change it, aren't you?' And I'm happy to take an hour out. I get stressed in the studio."
It's no surprise that after spending many months pouring all of his energy into The Private Press, Shadow would feel some anxiety. As an album comes to fruition, the pressure mounts and artists often find themselves second-guessing whether they (and the audience) will be happy with the result. That's why, in the later stages of recording, Shadow lets go of his creative will and allows the technical and objective side to take over.
"I have to really get methodical and try to maximize the arrangement at that point," he says. But to succeed in making a great album, Shadow believes that in the beginning stage of making tracks, analytical thinking is out the door. "You gotta make music that doesn't sound like anything else," he says. "That's why, when I'm in the demo stage, I try to turn my heart on and my brain off and just come up with a groove."
ULTRARARE PRIVATE PRESSINGS
For the past 15 years, DJ Shadow has gone out of his way to find obscure sound sources. Here's one you may not know about that was used for the intro and outro, both titled "Letter From Home," on The Private Press: "Those samples come from a 'Recordio' disc," says Shadow. "In the '40s, '50s and '60s, you could go into a drug store, an arcade or a hotel and, in the same way you could have your photo taken in a photo booth, you could pay 50 cents and make a letter on a record. When I first started finding them, it was really eerie and kind of charming. You hear how people actually used to talk and the words they really used, because it's totally not intended for any kind of mass consumption, like a film would be. Actors talk like actors, and their dialog is usually kind of forced. But on these discs, you actually get to hear what people sounded like. If you can find them at all, they're usually just in Goodwill and Salvation Army. The biggest record store in America only has, like, 50 because usually they're so disposable. It's like, 'Okay, I'll be home in a week.' People usually just heard them and threw them away."
STUDIO IN THE SHADOWS
Few get to see DJ Shadow's recording studio, as it's also where he lives and tries to maintain some privacy in Marin, Calif. But Shadow did reveal what lurks behind his studio doors. It's a modest setup (with no live instruments) that he uses to record and edit up until the mixing stage. Once tracks are 80 percent finished, he takes them to a bigger studio for "access to all the outboard gear" and to collaborate with mixing engineer Jim Abbiss.
COMPUTER/SOFTWARE
Apple Mac G3 Digidesign Pro Tools
SAMPLER/DRUM MACHINES
(2) Akai MPC3000s (MIDI'd together)
PROCESSORS
Roland VP-9000 VariPhrase Processor (for time-stretching and effects - used on the drums on "Walkie Talkie") MXR Pitch Transposer (used on "Monosylabik")
TURNTABLES
(2) Technics SL-1200s
DJ MIXER
("It's got a lot of cool bells and whistles," says Shadow.)
