The Kanye West session we weren't allowed to talk about.
Kanye West — "All of the Lights," from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
I'd been under a gag order not to talk about this until the all-clear for the official release date. That was not an easy task - I'm a gregarious person by nature, and not being able to tell people that I recorded something for Kanye West nearly did me in.
Whoops - cat's out of the bag. But it's OK.
Yes, the recording Tony and I did back in May was the brass for Kanye West's "All of the Lights." The track features Rihanna, plus cameos by John Legend, The-Dream, Fergie, Alicia Keys, Kid Cudi, Elton John on piano, Ryan Leslie, Charlie Wilson, Tony Williams and La Roux's Elly Jackson. That's a whole lot of wow.
Layering a "deep monster" brass sound, one ribbon mic at a time.
Stacking horns at Ken's home studio - note the Kanye "Late Registration" platinum plaque on the wall.
Ken Lewis of the production team The Skywalkers got in touch with yours truly for help making his MIDIs sound real. With at least 50 #1 hits under his belt, Ken is great at getting the sound he's after - and he needed an extremely fast turnaround with lots of options. Trumpeter Tony Gorruso came with me to Ken's home studio and the three of us arranged the tracks at top speed, aiming for a deep monster brass sound.
Quick background on Ken: mix engineer, songwriter, musician, vocalist - you name it. He's done a lot of work with Kanye West, including "Gold Digger" and "All Falls Down," produced for John Legend, and mixed back-to-back #1 albums. Six Grammy Awards, 29 nominations, dozens of gold and platinum records.
Ken cranks it to eleven.An Oktava ML52 catching the room's acoustical space.
Our phat oval brass tones were captured mostly with ribbon microphones - a Royer-122, the Oktava ML52, and my own custom-designed ribbon mic. Making the end result not sound like one instrument recorded over and over is the real challenge. A good engineer manipulates many takes into an ensemble and reduces phasing with three tricks:
mic positioning
player positioning
instrument variability
With Ken at the console, Tony and I pivoted around the room every few takes while Ken moved the mics. After about the hundredth take we'd each done several 360s around the studio - a slow game of musical chairs that keeps the section from going brittle and thin.
Instrument variability - my favorite part - phattens the sound: French horn, trombone, bass trombone, tuba, trumpet, bass trumpet, flugelhorn... and the cimbasso.
I've often wondered what a police officer would say at the sight of so many brass instruments piled in the back of my car. So if you're driving down a New York parkway and see rolling lights and some dude playing tuba to the officer - it's probably me.
A trombone solo, a rare 1960s Conn 20H, and a bright orange pBone.
Prepping the solo - warming up on the pBone before the real take.
Haven't posted in a while - too many exciting musical projects. In this picture I'm prepping to record the trombone solo you can hear on "Somewhere in America" from JAY-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail.
The final take was done on a rare 1960s Conn 20H and dialed in with Ken Lewis - music genius and one of the foremost pop/loop/hip-hop producer-engineers around. The 20H is one of the last tiny-bore horns made before everyone switched to medium and large bores. That warm-up pBone, 99% plastic, sounds surprisingly good - it excels at a dry jazz tone - but for the final result we wanted something meatier.
The year the work landed on four Kanye West Grammy nominations.
The 54th Grammy Awards.
This year my work is featured in four of Kanye West's Grammy nominations. Getting everything squared away with the Recording Academy's Member Services has been an odyssey, to say the least - but the paperwork itself feels like an accolade.
I hear this year's show is going to have a host - LL Cool J - something the powers had opted out of for a while. The broadcast could use some personality; naturally, the job goes to a New Yorker.
Billions of miles away, and you still can't get away from a bone player.
"Bone"-like: Comet Hartley 2 as seen by NASA's EPOXI probe.
NASA's EPOXI mission successfully flew by comet Hartley 2 this morning, and the spacecraft began returning images. Hartley 2 is the fifth comet nucleus ever visited by a spacecraft - pretty darn cool.
My friend Adam Dichter, who dabbles in sax playing when he isn't reporting news, pointed out that the comet really looks like a big "bone." This is a huge spinning space iceberg - about 1.4 miles long, some 280 million metric tons, and roughly 2.9 billion miles away.
Billions and billions of miles away, and you still can't get away from a bone player.
