June, 5th 2017: Stay Woke - Posted on 2017-06-19 by Tenoch Villa

So yeah, another studio session again. His name is Brandon. Brandon and Prince were workng on mixes for 3 songs that were gonna be on his upcoming album. He has a very particular idea of exactly how he wanted the mixes to sound. He likes having a lot of low end present in his vocals. But the more Brandon wanted, the more it crowded the mix. That seemed to be the case for each song Prince was mixing that day. But he kept wanting as muh as possible. Sometimes more so. I'm about to be honest, I really didnt think it made the song sound any better or worse. It sounded different sure, but in a way it didn't. I'd be annoyed if this happened to me a two months ago. But I learned you need to fight through these things if you want to get continuous work. Or any work for that matter.

I noticed Prince uses a lot of plug-ins on each recording. One vocal track had six on it alone. Prince told me each one on their and what he was using them for. One was an equalizer, a compressor, a reverb, a REDD.37 console emulator, a delay, and one more I couldn't remember. I asked him how different does the vocal sound without all of thema and he tturned off one by one to show me. After muting one I already could tell how essential it was to the tonal quality of the vocal.

At one point Brandon noticed on one of his song that the vocals were not coming in on time to where he wanted it. He asked Pronce to move them in a litlle later, by a few milliseconds, 1 millisecond to be exact. I admired Pronce's patients at that point. 

If he was my client, I'd question my commitment. But then agian, the songs are really good. He has throwback beats and a pretty good voice. He is a conscious rapper for the new age. But very much a product of his inspiration. Anytime I'd feel like, "okay, tthis is taking way longer than it should", he'd say something in his song or right there that was really intelligent. He has a lot to say and the content is important. What his songs represent is bigger than him. It's world music. So why not have it as perfect as possible? I was honered to sit in on this session.