One of the biggest selling projects you have ever worked on also happens to be a Rap album. What was your experience working with Eminem on his multi-platinum “Marshall Mathers” LP?
He was really great to work with. His work ethic was top-notch. We worked like 17 hours a day for two weeks straight. When (Eminem’s manager) Paul Rosenberg called me about doing the project I had just become familiar with the song (“Guilty Conscience”) Shady had done with Dr. Dre. I was really inspired by his style and vocal technique. I asked Paul if I could rent some microphones because there were certain types of mics that they didn’t have a Chung King, the studio I was working at (during that time). Paul said, “Yeah, get whatever you want, whatever you need”. They had a pretty good budget for the Marshall Mathers LP. I ended up renting like 12 mics, all different things, vintage tube mics, and ribbon mics, rare stuff that you couldn’t necessarily get anywhere else. I set them all up in the vocal booth. The first day we had Em go in and just move from microphone to microphone and just try different things. At the end of the session we had narrowed it down to a couple of mics that we liked. I was like “Which ones do you want to keep?” Em’s response was “Keep them all” so that’s exactly what we did. We ended up using everything. We used different mics for different songs.
The reason we kept all the microphones was that maybe three or four days later Em would come back to a song (where we had already recorded the lyrics) not for performance purposes but because he changed the lyrics or something. That meant that we had to do a punch-in for one bar (and to make it sound like the rest of the song we would have to use the same mic)
Marshall always knew which microphone we used for a certain song. We had all the mics left in the vocal booth for the entire time and he would go straight to the right mic. He had a great microphone technique too. He would do certain things like (blocking a nostril slightly with a finger) for a hook or certain things like that. He could hear if he was a millimeter off. He would hear that difference. Most of the time with artists I would have to tell them “Let’s try that again. The tone’s off.” Em would pick it up himself. Within a couple of takes he would match the sound perfectly.
With his vocals Em would sit and really get his rhyme together before he would even get on the microphone. We might do a couple of bars to warm up his voice and for the sound level but then he would nail it in one take.
What else can you remember from Eminem’s Marshall Mathers sessions?
I remember he wrote “Stan” in the studio. He came up with the first two verses. It was just him and me in the room. He was asking me “What else could a fan say to an artist?” I told him that I thought that he covered it all but I asked him why he didn’t write the third verse from his own perspective back to the fan. I had a big imprint on Stan in the sense that I guided him in that direction. I think that’s one of the parts of the song that really made a big impact and really gave the song direction.
After finishing up the verses Em was trying to come up with a hook. While he was writing the hook I was just sitting there playing around with the board. The beat consisted of a kick (drum), snare, hi-hat and the Dido loop. I cross-patched the Dido loop into two other channels and I used the EQ to filter out all the vocals and all the high-ends so you just had a bass track. During the verses I cut the Dido loop and just left the filtered version in and after the verse was over, I dropped in the Dido loop with the vocals. He looked at me and said, “That’s the hook.” We just knew looking at each other that he didn’t have to write a hook.
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