Kanye wanted to do a complete departure from the standard format of hip-hop albums. What aspects of the album really challenged your skills? It helps making their creativity flow as easy as possible. Maybe we should try it this way.” I can anticipate a lot of times where an artist is wanting to go with a song and have arrangements and other things laid out before they even have to ask. And I can sit back and say, “Yeah this sound is cool, but it doesn’t work with the arrangement. So I can be different from other engineers where it’s purely a technical thing where they’re just trying to get the best sound. I’m a piano player, a guitar player and a songwriter, and I’m aware of all those aspects. What background or skill set do you bring to these kind of notable hip-hop artists that allows you to stand out in the production world? And Kanye and I were checking it out, and he ended up taking the sample and putting it in “Power.” Some random day I saw a T-shirt that reminded me of an album cover by King Crimson, and I went back and listened to that record. … I did some co-production on “Power.” I was the one who found that “21st Century Schizoid Man” sample and chopped it up.
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He’s the master of knowing how to push things almost too far. If there’s a sound or an idea he wants, he’ll take it to, like, an extreme, to where you start to wonder, “Why is this so far out there?” Then he’ll pull it back to a perfect amount. But Kanye went through his process and worked on it solid for a good six to seven months.īut as far as engineering, there are certain sounds and certain production aspects that he really likes. I literally would leave to go shower, change clothes and come back to the studio. 1, we were getting into the recording sessions and worked pretty much 24-7 for six months straight out of Hawaii.
He flew everyone out to Hawaii the day before New Year’s Eve … and I remember on New Year’s Eve I was in the studio getting everything ready to go for the next day. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” pretty much started New Year’s Eve 2009. How did you get involved with the “Fantasy” album, and what were some things you talked with Kanye about in terms of engineering and mixing it?
When Kanye was halfway through “The College Dropout,” he’d fired about six to eight engineers in about a month because they weren’t up to snuff, and it was eventually my turn to be next on the chopping block. I haven’t been fired since, seven or eight years later. And what do think it’s taken for you to be successful working with him prior to his latest album? The LA Times recently spoke to the man who was an integral part of creating that sound, Kanye’s engineer Andrew Dawson, about the creative process on Fantasy, being the man behind the King Crimson sample in “Power”, and Fantasy setting the bar high for other hip hop projects.ĭescribe how you started working with Kanye West. Sonically, the mastering and mixing far surpasses anything I’ve heard on any project in my recent recollection. “It just sounds so good…” is all I kept uttering when I first listened to Kanye West‘s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
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