Fade
The Beat Strangler
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Introduction
Born in Delaware as Gimel Keaton, Young Guru acquired his nickname in his teens, when he was teaching African history classes at a community centre. In the early '90s there were no clubs in Delaware, so Young Guru brought his own amplifiers, lights, microphones, and so on, which sparked his interest in music technology. He began DJ'ing in Washington DC in 1996, where he met singer/rapper Nonchalant, who had a top 20 single at the time, and became her tour DJ. Young Guru, who had taken piano lessons as a child, used the money he received from the tour to fund a six-month music recording course at Omega Recording Studios in Rockville, Maryland, which had a great impact on him. After Omega, Young Guru engineered Nonchalant's second album, which was never released, but the producer, Chucky Thompson (Mary J Blige, Faith Evans) recognised the young engineer's potential and invited him to come and work with him in Washington DC. In 1999, Young Guru went independent and moved to New York, where he worked with Deric Angeletti on his Madd Rapper project and with Memphis Bleek. The latter was signed to Roc-A-Fella Records, which led to Young Guru meeting Jay-Z.
Mixing Engineer: Young Guru Shares Some Of His Secrets
Behind the scenes of Jay-Z's "The Blueprint 3" is Gimel Keaton, better known as Young Guru. Young Guru met Jay-Z back in 1999 while doing sessions for Memphis Bleek. Being top dog at Roc-A-Fella, Jay-Z would visit those sessions and eventually invited Young Guru to do some sessions with him. Young Guru explains, "Soon after, he asked me if I would be an engineer at Baseline (one of Jay-Z's recording studios). I continued to be an independent engineer, but I ended up literally living in Baseline. I did and still do a lot of sessions for Roc-A-Fella and Def Jam and other labels, and do pretty much all Jay's sessions. Even when Jay's working with another producer who has his own go-to engineer, Jay takes me along to engineer his vocals. This is to do with my knowledge of his way of working and the comfort and trust factor between us. We do more than just recording: he also bounces off ideas with me, so there's a kind of synergy about the records we create together. Plus, if you have only one person working on all your music, it cuts down on the bootlegging. I absolutely never leave a session on anyone else's computer."
How Things Came Together
"DOA" came out of an hour-long conversation between him, No ID, Jay-Z, Kanye and Timbaland. "We were all in Kanye's room having a conversation about where the album should go, the direction of hip-hop and all that kind of stuff. At the end Kanye was like: "I've had enough of talking, No ID - play whatever is in your computer!" No ID happened to have a sample up of a track by Janko Nilovic and Dave Sucky called "In The Space". Everybody loved the sample, so No ID constructed a beat to it in 15-20 minutes, and everybody was just going crazy. Jay took the beat back to the hotel that night, and wrote the words to it. We had been talking about the Auto-Tune thing, and Jay was basically saying that we can't all fall into these trends and get lazy and all sound the same. He laid down the whole song the next morning in maybe 15 to 20 minutes. Once he gets into the booth he is extremely fast. No ID works completely in Logic; even when he is in a room with all this equipment, he does not use any of it. He bounced his tracks to stereo and I loaded that in Pro Tools to track Jay's vocals to; I didn't want to track into his laptop."
The Gear That Was Used
"My signal chain is normally a Neumann 87 or 67 going into an Avalon 737. I love the way the Avalon preamp sounds with his voice. It's a perfect match. I use the 737 compressor as well as the preamp. I recorded Kanye's vocal with a Neumann 67 going into a Neve 1073 and then an [Urei] LA2A. From there I go straight into input 1 of Pro Tools, at 24/44.1. I am not a big fan of super-high sample rates. One, the files gets too big, and two, I don't hear enough difference to make higher sampling rates worthwhile for what we do. The music itself is often coming from a 16-bit sampler, so arguing about bit depth is not going to make a big difference. Also, I have to go down to 44.1/16-bit at the end of the day, which makes higher resolutions even less relevant."
Beefing The Guitars & Bass Up
"I used the Renaissance Bass on the guitars ['AG101', 'AN201'] because they seemed a little thin, and they needed to have more body because they are going against the heavy rock guitar inside the sample. The Eleven plug-in was put on by Kanye, for the tone, so I just left that. The Massey TapeHead made the guitars sound as if they were coming off tape, and this was also done to make sure that they blended in with the sample, which had been taken from a vinyl record. I didn't use any outboard gear other than the SSL EQ. The guitars are low in the mix, as they only add support to the guitars in the sample. "'BAS05' is a bass Moog, played by Jeff Bhasker. Like the guitar, it is mixed in low, as it's more there to add texture. It occurs during Jay's last part of the verse and throughout the hook. So it was really an additional sound. The REQ is not adding any EQ. Many of the stereo tracks I get are uneven in volume between left and right, and I'll use the REQ to level the two channels. You can see that the right channel is up by 1.4dB. That was just a quick fix."
Working On The Samples
"I use the RE6 to boost the sample at 496Hz. I wanted to bring out the mids of the guitar figure in the sample. There also wasn't enough bottom end in it, so there is a little boost around 34Hz as well. I did not want too much of the sample bass line, but I still wanted some of the rumble. I also EQ'ed the sample with the SSL, and again with two Focusrite ISA 110 EQs. Somebody took the EQs out of a Focusrite board and put them in a rack and we have that in Baseline and I love them. Why three EQs? Most of the plug-in EQs happen during my initial listens to the track and when I hear things that need to be fixed. That first plug-in EQ is like starting at zero: it neutralises the sample for me. After that, I use outboard EQs to adjust the tone to my liking. I also compressed the sample on the board, using the SSL compressor."
The Final Mix
"I mixed back into Pro Tools, taking the left and right outputs of the board and sending these into inputs 1 and 2 of Pro Tools. My preference is to mix to half-inch, because it sounds better, there's no discussion about that: the half-inch glues everything together. But not every project allows for that, and I couldn't do it this time because of the speed at which this project was done. I rarely put stereo effects on the mix, even though I think that the SSL 4000 stereo bus compression is absolutely the best stereo compressor for this. But I try to leave that up to the mastering engineer."
