Earth, Sun, Moon

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef

As grounded or otherworldly as she wants to be, R&B singer/producer Erykah Badu and producer/mixer Mike “Chav” Chavarria balance the extreme with the practical on New Amerykah

VOCAL CONFESSIONS

Talking drums and tuning forks aside, what jumps out on first listen to New Amerykah is Badu's multifaceted vocal approach. The queen of neo-soul is still in full force, cool and clever, but on tracks like Shafiq Husayn's “Twinkle” and “Me,” Madlib's “My People” and “Emotions” and Badu's own “That Hump,” she scales high walls and makes you wonder, “How the heck did they do that?” Often, her layered harmonies sound purposely time-stretched or at least pitch-altered, so wide are the intervals she hits. But put it down to the gear used and her eclectic mic technique, not Electric Lady's Pro Tools|HD3 trickery.

“I prefer a $37 Shure SM57 mic,” Badu reveals. “I have a very nasally voice. That mic has a lot of bottom in it. I put my mouth right up on it like an MC. I sit right in the control room between the two speakers next to the engineer, and I can hear what is going on very well. I used to have candles and incense in the studio, but I don't require that now. I am in the mood all the time in the studio. I might do a vocal take 100 times and not get it, then come back the next day at 3 a.m., and laying down on the floor, my ears will get it. Pitch is good but feeling is better. I never cut and paste or punch in, I like a single vocal take.

“When I do vocals, I am singing with a certain volume in my voice,” she adds. “I am singing the double and triple harmonies at different volumes. You don't have to adjust it; I have already done it. We mix as we go, so by the time we put the vocals to ½-inch tape, I know it. If you touch a damn thing, I will know it.”

Badu prefers to cut her vocals in the control room with the monitor mix blasting over her head as she sings. That obviously presents leakage problems for Chav, but he has developed ways to work around her methods while also getting a usable take. Sometimes Badu would sit in an overstuffed chair about six feet behind the SL 9000 J board, alternately using a Neumann M 269, Shure SM57 or AEA R44 ribbon mic with Sony MDR-V900 headphones into a Furman headphone mixer. But she was just as likely to discard the headphones and sing right into the studio's Adam Professional Audio S3A studio monitors.

“There's not any feedback there when you do that, but there is a fair amount of leakage,” Chav explains. “We worked to make her vocals fit into the track, phase-wise. I asked a lot of people how to do this. They said, ‘Sit her in an equilateral triangle with the speakers, putting one of the speakers out of phase, so the leakage should cancel itself.’ But to do that, the mic has to be stationary, and she likes to hold the mic like an MC. She is at home as a live performer. What did work was to keep the monitors fairly low and turn the microphone out of phase, and we would move her around the room until she found a spot where the leakage was reasonable and where she felt comfortable and could hear herself. But just as often she would just sit in that chair behind the board in the A Room.

“Her voice has so many frequencies,” Chav continues, “from a subharmonic of her tonic to a thin raspiness, and she wants to hear all of that. And she couldn't hear all of that in the headphones. I tried to get her a pair of $3,000 Stax phones, but the label didn't go for that.”

DILLA TO DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

New Amerykah is jammed with old-school samples, including Blaxploitation trailers, Eddie Kendricks' “My People Hold On” (for Badu's “My People”), what sounds like The Meters in J Dilla's “Love,” Nancy Wilson's “I'm In Love” (“Honey”) and James Brown's “Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf” (“Dirty Dirty”). But beyond the samples, what raises the sonic level of the album are the dexterous live performances by trumpeter Roy Hargrove, Jr., bassist Thundercat, drummer/producer Karriem Riggins, keyboardist James Poyser and guitarist Jef Lee Johnson. Badu and Chav's embellishment of the 2-tracks with live performances is particularly evident in Shafiq Husayn's “Me.”

“We recorded the original track in Dallas with her vocal,” Chav recalls. “Erykah went to L.A. with just the 2-track and had Thundercat play bass over it. So it is his playing over her singing on the 2-track, and when we got back to New York, Roy Hargrove came into the studio, and there wasn't time to organize the Pro Tools session. So he ended up playing trumpet over the 2-track, as well. It was like playing over three generations of 2-track. It built up as it went along.

“I had never worked like that before,” he elaborates. “On this record, I did more over 2-tracks than I have ever done on any record. And that is because it came straight from her laptop, and we couldn't get Pro Tools sessions from producers. We were able to build around them. Erykah made this record to display to the world that there is this whole group of producers out there who are outside of the mainstream making great music. She was trying to highlight what they do. We didn't want to change what the producers originally brought to the table. We didn't change it; we just added to it.”

“I work in layers,” Badu explains. “The first layer is the track. The second layer is the songs. The third would be the musicians who add a certain nuance. And when they play, they play like they are a sample. Or we take a piece of what they played, and we sample and loop it.”

Badu and Chav, along with engineers Chris Bell and Tom Soares, worked hand in glove, creating off a shared vibe built from endless hours spent listening to older Badu records such as Baduizm (Kedar, 1997) and Mama's Gun (Kedar, 2000), as well as 1973-released albums, including Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Stevie Wonder's Innervisions. Chav took these influences and Badu's prodding creative flow into the realms of effects and vocal processing throughout New Amerykah. Using a variety of plug-ins (SoundToys' EchoBoy, Digidesign D-Fi's Lo-Fi and Sci-Fi and Pro Tool's Signal Generator) and guitar pedals (Line 6's DL4 Delay Modeler and Moog Music's Moogerfooger), Chav had a ball and earned his keep.

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