Again unique to InsideTraxs, we offer a Power Hour, where we provide one to one tuition totally tailored to your needs and experience. My job during this stage is to get everything into Pro Tools, and I'll be making extensive notes and I'll also be polishing the sounds in the box, using EQ and compression and so on. Many of the sounds needs some massaging to get the blends right. I generally use a Neumann M49 on Justin, and if we don't have one, a U87, going into a Neve 1073 mic pre and then a Tube-Tech CL1B compressor, going straight into Pro Tools, which was running at 44.1/24. We don't do vocal comps, because Justin knows what he wants. He listens to himself, and when he wants to touch something up, we punch him in and we move on. We don't end up with five takes of the same vocal. This makes working with him very fast and very easy. Blast Off built another room — I got to see how studios were built — which became my room. I worked with Wiz Khalifa there, and a whole bunch of Atlantic artists. Soon after that I met up with Michael Brian, and we started our own studio in SoHo. We got bigger and bigger and after eight years, in 2016, we decided to move the studios to LA. A year later I did my first session with Young Thug.” On May 30, 2022, Burnham uploaded the video “Inside: The Outtakes”, to his YouTube channel, marking a rare original upload, similar to how he used his YouTube channel when he was a teenager. I had some plug–ins over the stereo bus, even though I have driven myself crazy over the years with many different stereo bus plug–ins, and in the end found that it doesn’t matter. You can get to the same point using different plug–ins. On this song I used the Slate Digital VTM virtual tape machine, which gives you the flexibility to decide how much you want to push the bass in the Settings tab, and which has very realistic hiss noise. On History Of Man I actually used tape, to hear what it would do to my sounds, and when I used the VTM, I found that they dialled that sound in spot on. I also used the Pro–MB, very subtly, just to glue everything together in the song.

I’m Thug’s full‑time engineer, but also sometimes record Gunna, though he has his own engineer, Flo Ongonga. In the past, when Thug and Gunna were in Atlanta, Flo would record them, and here in LA I’d record them, and neither of us would sleep for days. But since Covid, with them working so much, I go to Atlanta to work with Flo and when we work here in LA, he comes over to work with me, so it’s both of us in action at the same time all the time.” Angad Bains, aka Bainz, works primarily in the Atlanta rap scene. There used to be a time when the red light ruled — make a noise or enter a studio when it is on and you’re dead meat — and artists would come into the studio with carefully prepared songs, with chords and lyrics written down and laboured over for weeks or months. But Atlanta rap culture completely ignores the old paradigm. A relaxed vibe is imperative, and sonic corruption a problem to be solved after the event. In writing and producing material for his latest album, Abel [Tesfaye, aka the Weeknd] and I were in so many different studios and locations, and we were travelling so much, that I did not have a solid reference point. Sometimes I was sitting on a sofa with headphones on, sometimes I’d be in a studio working on NS10s, sometimes I’d be in Abel’s spare room using whatever speakers were there. In every place we used different mics, different mic pres, different monitors, and while it may have appeared like a nightmare to bring all that together, the technology makes it easy to do that. As a producer I see my job as making sure the songs are great, by getting great performances, and doing whatever it takes to achieve that,” explains O’Donnell. “It can include choosing the songs, and working on any aspect of them: the tempo, the key, the lyrics, to the structure, parts and so on. With a different artist it can mean a lot of guidance, but with an artist like James you know the songs and the performances will be there; it’s just a matter of capturing these the best you can.”Deep in the middle of 2020 and of the pandemic, YSL hatched a plan for another Slime Language album. The concept of the Slime Language compilations is to showcase YSL’s artists, as well as a large collection of guest artists and Thug’s close friends. And so Slime Language 2, which also became a Billboard number one, features the likes of Travis Scott, Drake, Lil Baby, Lil Uzi Vert, Big Sean, Skepta, Future, Kid Cudi, Meek Mill and many others, as well as Young Thug and Gunna, of course. The Barn is a property built about 15 years ago on James’s land,” explains O‘Donnell, “about 300 feet away from his home. It’s a very functional, modular kind of space, which he uses for rehearsals and recordings. The main room is just a great acoustic space, not so large as to be too reverberant but also not so small that you get a lot of early reflections. It’s a great–sounding room, and inside it we have a couple of makeshift rooms. We use one as the control room and another as a booth for James to be in, plus there’s a small room with the piano. Nothing is 100 percent isolated, either between rooms or from the outside, but it’s out in the woods so it’s relatively quiet. With no permanent control room or recording gear available at the Barn, Dave O’Donnell set up a temporary working area to house a selection of his own equipment and rental gear. The album was eventually mixed on this Yamaha DM2000 digital desk. Tasked with helping the five–time Grammy–winning Taylor in making sure that Before This World could hold its own in 2015 was the album’s engineer, mixer and producer, Dave O‘Donnell. From his Studio D, an hour’s drive north of New York City, O’Donnell gives a detailed account of the making of the album, which began in January 2010, continued four years later, and involved recording sessions in Taylor’s wooden barn, hotel rooms and various studios across America. At the end of this process, during the final mixdown, O’Donnell found that he was making a slightly different record than he had in mind...

The songs from the special were released on streaming platforms on June 10, 2021. The special was nominated for six Emmy Awards in 2021, of which it won three: Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special, and Outstanding Music Direction. “All Eyes on Me” also earned Bo his first Grammy win for Best Song Written for Visual Media at the 2022 Grammys.Not much. What I use is this: a MacBook Pro, in my studio together with a PCI chassis with two UAD Octo Cards, and the Metric Halo ULN8 soundcard. When I’m travelling I use the same laptop with a UAD Apollo Twin soundcard. I have two sets of headphones, but frankly, I don’t mind which I use. I’m also happy to work with anything for monitors. I used to use Genelecs, and I really like the Yamaha NS10s. But it does not matter.”

James wanted to have a sense of what he had,” recalled O’Donnell, “which was many musical ideas, including melodies, but only a few lyrics. Steve has worked with James since 2000, and Jimmy since 1991, so they are familiar with James’s music and approach, and part of James’s vision was to have these guys play his stuff. Basically he comes in, plays us what he has and they listen and then start to join in. In 2010 we tried a lot of arrangement ideas, and laid them down, after which James went off and wrote lyrics and more music.” In The Barn This view of the Pro Tools Edit window shows some of the beats, which were programmed in some cases by cutting and pasting audio clips rather than using MIDI. Although the vertical waveform zoom level has been raised to make the contents of each clip visible, Pro Tools’ Clip Gain feature has been used to reduce most of them in level by up to 15dB. Born in New Delhi, India, Bainz got to his position as chief engineer and mixer at YSL in Los Angeles via Australia, Florida and New York. He recalls, “I never played an instrument, but got into DJ’ing and I was into electronic music. I went to Melbourne to do a bachelor degree in something, I can’t remember what it was, but I hated it. I dropped out and then enrolled in the School of Audio Engineering Institute in Melbourne. I was always into the technicalities behind music and there I realised I wanted to be an engineer.By the way, the above vocal treatments are not part of a template. Every song is different. I cannot stress this enough. Vocals are different, and in general I like to change tools with every song. I might have gotten a new plug‑in that I like. I love new technology, so I like to try things out! I work fully in the box, on my six-year-old MacBook Pro, with a UAD Apollo Twin soundcard and Octo Satellite, plus Audio-Technica M50X and Beats Pro headphones. This setup allows me to work anywhere, also at home. I love my A-T headphones! The Beats are not that great, but many people listen to them, so I use it as a reference. It’s not for final decisions, but more for the vibe. At Fight Club I use Yamaha NS10 monitors and the Augspurgers. The NS10s are my favourite monitors. If I go to a studio to mix, I make sure they have the Yamahas — but I can mix on headphones, because the current direction in music is not about hi-fi. People listen with earpods, in the car and so on. It’s rare for people to listen to good loudspeakers. It’s the new generation. I want to bring a hi-fi quality to the records I work on, but everything is about feeling. You can have the most amazing-sounding record ever, but if a song doesn’t have a feeling, it won’t translate to this generation. So that’s my main thing: everything has to have a vibe. I’ve recently started doing things more by the rules, or the guidelines, but I normally go with how it feels to me. Does it feel good? How does everybody else in the room feel?

Justin Timberlake's album release schedule appears to be inspired by the proverbial English buses: you wait ages and then several come along at once. Before 2013, the singer had released only two albums in a decade: his 2002 debut Justified, and the follow-up Futuresex/LoveSounds in 2006. After that Timberlake became preoccupied with his acting career, though he remained an active chart presence by guesting on other people's hits, such as Madonna's '4 Minutes', TI's 'Dead And Gone', Timbaland's 'Carry Out', and Jamie Foxx's 'Winner'.According to Bainz, working on the album made little difference to his daily rhythm, apart from the complications of the epidemic. “Since I started to work for YSL, I have barely had any days off. I am Thug’s and YSL’s full‑time engineer, and they are in the studio every day. Because YSL is such a big camp, as a team and as a label, somebody is always working. They operate like a big family. I do mixes for others as well, sometimes, but I am on call all the time as an engineer. The only reason I can do so many mixes is because I have my room in the same facility, right down the hallway, so I can just walk over to help with recording when needed. From comparing the amount of money placed on a horse versus the total on the race you can tell if a horse is overweighted in the market or underweighted. Forty–seven years after the release of his self–titled debut album, James Taylor finally achieved his first American number one in June this year. His 17th studio album, Before This World, surpassed the chart placings of Taylor’s classic early–career albums Sweet Baby James (1970, US number three) and Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon (1971, US number two). Before This World also enjoyed notable chart success in several other countries, reaching number four in the UK, for example.