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

OVERBOARD EFFECTS

“On ‘Twinkle,’” Chav explains, “I used a Line 6 DL4 pedal. I ran the vocal through the pedal on an aux end from Pro Tools, and on the way back, I ran it through a couple Neve preamps, then back into Pro Tools and recorded it. I manipulated the controls on the pedal as the track played and recorded it, just feeling off the track to make it live. I like to make effects live instead of just sitting on them. I rode the delay on the pedal in real time to get those backwards-sounding effects. Almost like automating, but it was recording, just one chance and that was it. Otherwise, you have to redo it. Erykah wanted that track to get crazy. I was trying to match what she was asking of me. I would try to go overboard on things just to be really creative and then get her feedback. A lot of people would ask to scale it back, but she was with it.”

“Twinkle” is one of the album's true mindblowers, a crisscrossing, effects-heavy track complete with white-noise bursts, helium-endowed gerbil voices, lyrics about “Venus bitches,” madly panned effects and instruments and layers of twinkling keyboards. Even Chav is unsure of some of the sound's origins, in retrospect.

“I am not sure exactly what is producing the bass in that song,” he says with a laugh, “but it is definitely keyboard bass, and it was played live, all the way down. When we got the track, it was just the drums, bass and a little sample. The bass and drums are the heart of it, the way they lock together. We effected the arrangement drastically, added a lot of elements that really build. We played with the sonic textures and the way that it moves. That is the song that I added the most things to, like static; I wanted it to feel futuristic or like an interrupted transmission from space. I used the Signal Generator plug-in in Pro Tools to make a lot of the effects. For the little blips, I used a simple 1 kHz tone and threw it in here and there for a percussive element along with the static. That, and along with the DL4 delay and a Moogerfooger pedal, I took a piece of audio and ran it through those effects and manipulated the frequency as the track played and recorded it. Basically, it's just seeing what you get 'cause those pieces aren't predictable. There was a lot of automation of the SoundToys EchoBoy plug-in, too. We used effects and delays as instruments.”

And what created the darting vocals and gerbil effects? Like an outtake from Frank Zappa's classic Over-Nite Sensation, “Twinkle” is as insane as it is totally creative.

“Those vocals at the end of the song are being contorted through a combination of riding the delay time on the EchoBoy plug-ins and the Line 6 and the Moogerfooger plug-in, and also the D-Fi package,” Chav says. “Those are some basic Digidesign plug-ins that everybody has, but I don't know if anyone uses them.

“In ‘Twinkle,’” he continues, I had an idea of what I was trying to accomplish. I took an aux end of the track and fed that to the aux input and had the Lo- or Sci-Fi plug-in on that one, and pretty much had the send-level static but bussed that aux track to another track and recorded it. Basically, whatever changes I made to the plug-in I was recording — pretty much the same way that I do with the outboard pedals but using a plug-in, doing things like manipulating the effects frequency and modulation parameters. Then it is just about blending those sounds 'cause there are lots of layers in that song.”

Chav's ability to get down and dirty with effects came from Badu's need to destroy expectations of what she should be recording in 2008. She seems ready, willing and able to risk it all, evidenced by an ongoing battle with her label (at the time of this writing) over whether Universal/Motown would release her second set of songs in '08. She won.

“Erykah is an artist, but she is also a producer,” Chav states. “People don't look at her like that, but most of the time in modern-day hip-hop, the songs usually aren't created with the producer around. But in order to take these songs to the next level, to take them from beats into records, it takes more production. And Erykah is very direct and very knowledgeable.”

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