Rob van de Wouw: the album project...

I’m on the final couple of days mixing down the new album I’ve produced for dutch trumpeter Rob van den Wouw. All done it’s been 20 days from inception to completion and we’re all really excited by the results ☺ it’s an album of jazz, funk, soul and twisted beats in the mashi fashion. ha.. Rob was at the Numoon Festival I played almost two years ago in Rotterdam. I was there with Bembe and the Numoon Collective band doing an improv set. Rob liked what he heard so he hit me up to do a gig fusing the mpc and synths with his big band (heads up… Jan 9 2009 in Rotterdam!), and by the way “I’d love to get you to work on my next album”. Everything fell into place from there…

We started with two days pre-production out at Bullet Sound Studios near Amsterdam. What a sick sick studio - 30 min out of the city in the countryside, with everything you could want or need. Walking in we were greeted with pictures of some people who'd recorded there - Lenny Kravitz, Prince working on the Studio One desk and at the grand piano... the place felt good straight away. Starting off in Studio Two with a great sounding SSL E series desk, Rob played me some simple demo sketches and I’d reinterpret them on the mpc and radias synth. Some of the tunes were pre-produced just on those two machines, some of them with logic running as well. After the two days we had 12 tracks pre-produced and ready to go. The next two day session was recording the band along with the pre-production tracks. Rob brought in his band – keys, guitar, bass and drums – and I had them playing to the pre-production tracks with little sense of arrangement, just the dynamic changes I’d direct during the sessions “play the next 16 bars more open”, stuff like that. The band found the process a bit vague at first – I know what I want to hear from them, while they don’t have a clue about the finished track I’m hearing in my head. It made for some fun exploration and some magic moments coming out of the blue. We added one track at that session where the band played a jazz flip on an ambient interlude… it’s one of many highlights for me.

Those sessions followed with a week of intense editing and arrangement, going through all the live session tracks, editing parts, getting to the core of each tune and building the arrangements around that. That 8 days I worked about hours grabbing a few hours sleep in the hotel when morning hit each day. It was a trip!

I came back to Amsterdam a couple of weeks later to record the horn section – Rob on trumpet plus tenor and alto saxes and trombone. Rob had written some horn parts to the edits I’d done and we worked through them. Not everything worked and it was a key moment in the album’s creation where Rob realised the style of horn writing would need to be flipped to make sense along with the music that had been created. We scheduled a couple of extra days to record horns a week later and Rob came back in with fresh ideas, melodies and horn arrangements for pretty much the whole album. The album took on a whole completeness of identity as those pieces fell into place and the rest of the recording time Rob got to have fun with it recording his solos.

We’d talked about some vocal guest spots and those all fell into place like they were always meant to be – Rob brought in Ivar on vocals for a full vocal feature on ‘Common Ground’ – some fresh Ivar meets Earth Wind & Fire vibes. One of my favorite MCs around at the moment, replife, dropped science on the interlude ‘Angel’ (I gotta say, this cat’s work ethic and creativity are unmatched!) and Sharlene Hector dropped a great vocal on one of the downtempo p-funk jams. The last step for me was to edit and arrange all the new horn parts and solos and finish the production on the tracks – over four days I did that adding some keyboard parts, doing the final edits, at the same as we were starting mixdown with Han in Studio One (another dope SSL – damn I love working on these desks!). Mixdown’s been fun – a big part of the sound is the right blend between the live drums and mpc, the synth bass and live bass, and the sonics of everything else. We took a few hours break from mixing to add a bass clarinet and flute player – final icing, and ending up with a great sonic landscape for the music.

… it’s the last day of mix now and we’re about half way through – by the late hours today the album will be complete. I’m really looking forward to people hearing this – it’s one of the kinds of albums I’ve always wanted to make and now it’s there ☺ Watch out for the album in Europe early ’09 on embrace recordings….

Big thanks to Branko (‘Don’t Rush It’) for hooking up the hook ups and making everything happen and the Bullet Sound Studios crew – what a dope studio and totally professional crew. Personally I’m hyped about this album and look forward to seeing Rob take it live and take it worldwide….

Essential listening: Eddie Henderson ‘Heritage’
Essential outboard: Roland Space Echo 201
Essential Amsterdamage: Silver Pearl

Rob van den Wouw myspace
Embrace recordings myspace
Bullet Sound Studios