Manny Marroquin
Mixing For Kanye West & Alicia Keys
Published in SOS May 2005
People + Opinion : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers
You might not know his name, but you’ve definitely heard his work: Manny Marroquin is the mix engineer of choice for leading artists in both urban and rock music.
Dan Daley
Manny Marroquin at the SSL 9000K desk in Larrabee North Studios.
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In an industry where specialist mixers sometimes achieve celebrity in their own right, Manny Marroquin has purposely kept his profile low. However, the 33-year-old Guatemalan native has created a discography that makes one wonder if it took more effort to keep it quiet than it would have done to promote it. Marroquin’s credits include not only R&B and hip-hop, but more than a sprinkling of rock and pop. He’s worked on recent albums from Kanye West and Alicia Keys, Grammy winners for Best Rap Album and Best R&B Album respectively, and he has garnered previous Grammy nominations for tracks for Cher, Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton. Producers including Babyface, R Kelly, Rick Nowels and Daryl Simmons have turned their work over to him to be mixed, most often on the SSL 9000K desk at his ‘home’ studio, Larrabee Studios in North Hollywood. Other artists whose records his deft touch has enhanced include Usher, Mario, Maroon 5, Carlos Santana, Janet Jackson, the Nappy Roots, Lee Ann Rimes, Will Smith, Cher and Seal.
Marroquin began mixing full time about six years ago, after a stint engineering at various Southern California studios. He moved from Guatemala City to Los Angeles with his family when he was nine, at the height of an intense civil war that gripped Guatemala and much of the rest of Central American in the 1970s and ’80s. “I don’t think it affected me like it could have,” he says. “I don’t remember it as shocking or scary. War… was just a part of life then.”
In LA, Marroquin was a student at Hamilton High School, a magnet school for students showing talent in the arts. He went into high school as a drummer; by the time he was a year away from graduation, he had the keys to the school’s recording studio, where he would record demos for other students on its Tascam eight-track deck and Ramsa mixer. “I knew that after graduation I wanted to… mix,” he says. “I didn’t really know what a mixer did, but I knew that I wanted to mix.”
Despite several offers of college scholarships, Marroquin followed a teacher’s advice to get an entry-level job at a studio. Upon graduation, and much to the consternation of his mother, he began working as a runner at Enterprise Studios in LA. “My first day there was the best and worst day of my life,” he recalls. “The best because I was at a huge studio; the worst because I was cleaning bathrooms. At that point I made it my mission to get out of the ‘runner business’ as soon as possible.”
There was no one magic moment that enabled him to transition from assistant engineering to the first chair. Rather, he remembers it as a progression of projects, each more complex than the last, and meeting a succession of producers to whom he could prove himself. As a result, he says, “I treat every mix as if it is my last and never take anything for granted.”
Rap and hip-hop seem to Marroquin to have more facets than other genres. “Rock, for instance, has certain rules,” he explains. “You have guitars, drums and vocals. If the kit is recorded well, you’re not going to change the sound of it that much. Why would you want to, unless you were trying for a specific sound?
Some of Manny Marroquin’s ‘favourite toys’, including Neve 1066 preamps upgraded to 1073s by Brent Averill.
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“Urban music, though, that’s the Wild West, man. The sounds can be very varied, from so many different sources, and all of them encourage you to get more creative with how you put them together. The percussion is made up of a lot of samples from a lot of different sources, so, unlike a drum kit, if you change the balance slightly between kick and snare and hi-hat — for example, if you make the hat 2dB hotter than it would normally be — the feel of the track changes. You move the fader a half dB and nothing’s the same. Rock’s about sound and sonics and the song; urban’s about the feel and the vibe.”
Rap and hip-hop mixes are almost like mysteries to be solved with non-verbal clues, which Marroquin enjoys following. “It’s often about using samplers and loops to capture an older feel,” he says. “Like Alicia Keys. She’s a big fan of old R&B sounds. On ‘You Don’t Know My Name’ [one of four hit singles on Keys' Diary... LP that Marroquin mixed] there was a sample in there from the original recording of the song by the Moments. It’s surrounded by a bunch of other tracks and the misconception is that all you’re supposed to hear is the ‘boom’. But with this particular song it wasn’t about the boom, like other more pronounced hip-hop tracks. You dig deeper and you find that sample and that’s what makes it all make sense. If one of those tracks isn’t balanced right, you lose it.”
Interestingly, Marroquin liked the way that that LP’s progress through numerous studios in LA, New York, London, Paris and Amsterdam upset his routine — just enough, he says, to put an edge on his mixes that he wouldn’t have gotten staying in his own studio. “It’s good to get out now and then,” he says. “I was following the production around, and I would ride the cab at night through the streets of the cities. You get inspired in a different way.”
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One On One
The discography on Manny Marroquin’s web site at www.mannymarroquin.com takes the trouble to list the specific tracks he worked on for each artist’s project. This degree of transparency is unusual these days, especially in urban music genres, where credits are often a meaningless recitation that fails to separate posse members and hangers-on from front-line engineers and musicians. “It seems like it gets out of hand sometimes,” he says, on that topic. “I think it has to do with being organised — or not. When you’re young you don’t really know how the whole record-making process works, and more people can learn it on their own now because they can record at home. There are so many people involved in productions that it’s hard to know who to give credit to. They don’t realise that you can create a better sound and a better feel in the studio with one or two guys working consistently on the same project together. Really great music is the result of collaboration, but there’s a point at which too many collaborators can diminish the outcome, lose some of the focus. I think sometimes that the business gets to the point where lives get so crazy that they just don’t have the time to work like a team. It’s like a luxury these days for producers to be able to bring one engineer everywhere he has to be to work on an entire album from start to finish.”
I mention that mixing is something of a solitary profession. Marroquin, however, views it as something more akin to a one-on-one tutorial, an opportunity to spend time with an artist and a producer, learning about the nature of the project and the aspirations for its outcome as much by listening to them talk as listening to the track elements.
“Every time I mix with someone, I learn so much just by talking with them and getting a sense of the personality — theirs and the project’s,” he explains. “If I’m going to style their record — and that’s really what a mixer is, a stylist for records — I need to know something about them as people and as artists. The mix is an extension of the artist’s or producer’s vision, and I have to become a bit like a mind-reader to understand what it is they’re trying to get across.”
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Kanye West
Kanye West has become a household name as an artist — his very public frustrations at missing out on new artist honours throughout 2004 seemed to have made his Grammy win in February as much a vindication as a prize. But Marroquin regards West first as the exceptional producer that he is, citing his work with Jay-Z in particular. Marroquin mixed virtually all of West’s Grammy-winning The College Dropout LP, including the singles ‘Through The Wire’, ‘All Falls Down’ and ‘Jesus Walks’. “He wanted one person to mix the album,” he says. “That’s a rare thing these days, but I hope it becomes more common again because of the consistency you get in the end. I see this as a trend — in the 1990s I used to get one or two songs on a record; now more often than not I’m getting half the record or more. It’s not me — it’s the idea that working with a consistent team can give you a better result.”
At the age of 16, playing the drums.
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Kanye West’s ‘Through The Wire’ would have been a challenge to any engineer. The track was about the serious car accident that left the artist’s jaw wired shut during the recording schedule. “It does sound unique, yeah — it’s hard to sing when you can’t open your mouth,” Marroquin chuckles. He used a Sony C800 condenser microphone to take advantage of the Sony’s higher sensitivity under the circumstances, but running it through his usual signal chain of a Neve 1073 EQ and a Tube-tech CL1B compressor straight into Pro Tools.
On West’s record and others, Marroquin finds that creating stems as he mixes makes for more efficient mixes later on. Based on an audio post-production methodology, he’ll create submixes of guitars, drums, percussion, keys and even background vocals. The key, says Marroquin, is to compress these stems, rather than the overall stereo mix. “I’ll send individual elements, like the kick and snare, to their own compressors,” he explains. “I’ll put them on separate busses and send them to a Fairchild 670. For example, I’ll put all the drums through that to give them some ‘glue’ and then make a stem out of them with the bass. You can also get a compression-like effect without squashing the tracks by using EQ. As you know, compression brings out certain frequencies in different instruments, so you find them and you tweak them with EQ. I like the way guitars sound through a Neve 33609 and a Motown EQ to bring out a pleasant high end.”
For Usher’s ‘Can You Handle It’ from the Confessions album, he applied an anti-sibilance technique he says is painstaking but worth the effort. “One of the hardest things to do is to get rid of sibilance using only EQ without affecting the presense of the vocal,” he says. “It’s an art. I use a Dbx 902 de-esser, which is one of the best-sounding de-essers out there. But it only has one frequency per curve. So I do the de-essing using the SSL EQs through a side-chain. They allow you to really key in on the affected frequencies. Then you send the output to a compressor preset for the frequencies you’ve been tweaking, and when those frequencies trigger the compressor, they get backed down into the track where they belong. I learned that technique from [the late] Barney Perkins, who used to use it on a lot of the Babyface and LA Reid stuff he worked on. I was a huge Teddy Reilly fan — the New Jack Swing sound, I loved that sound even before I started working on SSL consoles and I found that he built his sound around the G-series compressor. I started using that compressor and it was love right from the beginning. Now, the XL reduces the amount of outboard gear that I need to use because of its great musical-sounding dynamics section.”
Unlike some hip-hop and R&B mixers, Marroquin also feels quite at home on rock tracks. He recorded and mixed Maroon 5′s contribution to the Spiderman 2soundtrack, and their track on a Sly & The Family Stone tribute record, the classic ‘Everyday People’. “I tell you, it was hard to do because of Arrested Development’s version of that song, which really set the bar,” he says. “So we decided to take the real indie-rock approach to the sound, putting a lot of the tracks through foot pedals and distortion. And we used programmed drums, so we have this contrast of the essence of garage rock and the essence of hip-hop on the same track. The tricky thing is to do all this and keep them sounding like Maroon 5 — a pop band doing a soul music track with a garage-band vibe.”
Manny Marroquin got into engineering at high school.
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Carlos Santana’s ‘Game Of Love’ was a huge European hit that Marroquin says had nothing to do with hip-hop or Latin genres. “We kept the emphasis off the kick and snare and put it on the guitars and bass,” he says. “With the drums, the kit sounds more cohesive, with less individual emphasis on the kick and snare, like you get in urban music. I’ll use the sub-compression a lot more, to give the ‘glue’ effect and also to add the kind of analogue tone that compression brings to a track.”
Marroquin also worked on singer Pink’s first album, produced in 1997 by Babyface and the hip-hop team Presidential Campaign. The record, which spawned the minor hit ‘Most Girls’, was “Pink before she was Pink”, he says, as the singer was developing both a persona and a performance style. In keeping with her own sharp edges, Marroquin used a combination of pro reverbs, including an AMS and Lexicon 480L and 224XL units, and the clangy spring reverb from a Fender guitar amp. “Hip-hop can tend to have very little reverb, and what there is is short,” he says. “When I get kind of off-the-wall records, I like to play with spring reverbs. They’re cool-sounding. You can make it short and tight with a gate and it adds tone and depth to the sound without washing it out. I also EQ the reverb return. I listen for the frequency where the reverb matches the input signal and tweak that. When you have one thing in a crowded mix you really want to bring out but adding EQ would make it sound too harsh, put it through a spring reverb. They’re noisy, but thank God for gates.”
Marroquin picked up a Grammy nomination for Cher’s ‘Love One Another’, which, like all Cher records, required vocals very far out in front. “The problem with that is that it’s easy for the vocals to get separated from the rest of the track,” he cautions. “What I would do is add tube compression to the vocal. That adds warmth on the low end, around 150Hz, better than EQ can give you there. With Cher, she already has a lot of low-mid tone to her voice, so I would go to the high-mids with an Avalon 2055 equaliser and add a little there.”
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Lee Ann Rimes’ vast dynamic range led Marroquin to automate a slew of EQs and compressors even as he manually rode the fader on her vocal. “The problem really was that the vocal recording was overcompressed in places,” he says. “Which I can understand because of how big and dynamic her voice is. Like many women singers with big voices — Toni Braxton is also like that — the louder they get, the less you have to do to the vocal. By the finale I’d have nothing on the track at all. You can often fix over-compressed vocals, but it’s tedious. You EQ the problem areas out and then compensate for the lost volume with more level. The key is to pay attention to the lines leading up to the problem spot and the one after it. Think of them as a line on a curve instead of a square. You trick the ear with gradual changes before and after the problem part.”
Marroquin cites a number of influences as a mixer, including Bob Powers and Bob Clearmountain, who he says “changed the game forever on how mixers work and are regarded by the rest of the industry”. What seems curious, though, is why Marroquin’s discography, so full of urban rock and pop artists, lacks Latino names. “I’m not sure, I never really thought about it,” he replies. “It’s funny — I worked with Ricky Martin, but I did his English-language stuff, not the Spanish. I remember when I was first starting out, people would tell me ‘Don’t do this, you speak with an accent, you’re not white, you’re a foreigner.’ Some people thought I should be a technician; they didn’t think I could hold my own with someone like Madonna in a control room. But I never thought like that, and I never took any of those comments personally. I think people were trying to help me avoid getting hurt or disappointed. But I’ll tell you what — it really comes down to what comes from the heart. It’s not about money or status. It’s about music.” 
Published in SOS May 2005
Eleven mix engineers tried their hand at Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’ before Manny Marroquin finally turned it into a record. He was rewarded with one of the biggest hits of 2007.
Paul Tingen
Manny Marroquin’s room at Larrabee Studios has an SSL K-series desk as its centrepiece.
Rappers Kanye West and 50 Cent intentionally put their latest albums under starter’s orders on the same date, September 11, 2007, so they could slug it out in the charts, 50 Cent sulkily declaring that he would stop releasing records if he lost the race (a statement he since appears to have retracted). As both artists had enlisted the services of celebrity producer Timbaland, the whole thing felt rather like a family feud gone public. There appears to be no clear winner yet in their who-sells-the-most-albums stakes, but West has had one of the hits of the year in ‘Stronger’, which was a UK and US number 1.
‘Stronger’ is constructed around a sample of ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ by French duo Daft Punk, itself based on a sample of a song by ’70s funkateer and keyboardist Edwin Birdsong called ‘Cola Bottle Baby’. Daft Punk strongly quantised the beat and added vocoded vocals, giving the song a Kraftwerk-like robotic feel. They also added a melodic chorus with a descending chord sequence, which was the section West sampled. The American rapper and producer then slowed down and loosened the rhythm, and overdubbed pulsating synths, evocative rapping and singing, transforming a robotic feel into something much more soulful.
Sculpting ‘Stronger’ to its rousing and ear-catching final shape was reportedly not an easy process. Eleven mixers are said to have tried their hands at mixing the song, each of them creating several different versions, but all were found wanting. Enter star mixer Manny Marroquin, who has regularly worked with West for several years, including mixing West’s first solo album, The College Dropout (2004), and West-produced material for Slum Village, Dilated Peoples and Twista.
Over a gestation period of several sessions, beginning at Marroquin’s room at Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles, and ending at Battery Studios in New York, West and Marroquin finally managed to knock the song into a shape they were content with.
Freaking The Sample
“The song was really tricky to mix,” confirms Marroquin. “What helped me was that Kanye and I worked together a lot, so we communicate well and I tend to know what he’s going for. We started with one full 14-hour day here at Larrabee, and after that we did four more sessions at Battery of about three hours each. I was in New York mixing Alicia Keys’ new album, and I could only work on ‘Stronger’ during time off from that. Kanye and I adjusted the arrangements and instrumentation in the mix with each session. A lot of keyboards were added in New York, for instance. Kanye is the kind of guy who likes to search and explore. Maybe he’ll find something that was not there before. So he’s constantly changing things, and you have to be prepared to make changes on cue. Saying ‘Oh, give me two hours to recall that,’ does not exist in his world. You have to be prepared at all times.”
One way in which Marroquin prepared himself was by working with stereo submixes or stems. It’s a preferred working method, because it offers him the flexibility to instantly adjust his mixes, and it also made it easier for him to switch from Larrabee to Battery. “Stems give me a lot of control,” explains Marroquin. “I work on an 80-channel K9000-series SSL at Larrabee, and my approach is still very much a hybrid of analogue and digital. When mixing to stems I print everything with the analogue effects. This way I avoid having to recall things or having to take some of my gear with me. Everything is easily accessible, and I can change things instantly. When we went to Battery, where they have a J-series SSL, I just opened the stem session in Pro Tools, and it included all my analogue effects, and of course also my plug-in setttings. If I needed to change something, I either did a hardware insert or used a plug-in.”
What set Marroquin’s approach apart from the other mixers’ was his decision to put the Daft Punk sample in the foreground. However, this presented him with particular problems. “The way Kanye ‘freaked’ the sample was one of the unique things about that song. He works by sampling a section, and then cutting it up and putting words and phrases and chord changes under different keyboard keys, in this case on the Ensoniq ASR10. He uses samples both as rhythm and melodic parts. The sample drives the song, but because he slightly slowed down the track, and also because of the way he chopped things up and played the notes, there were a lot of glitches. He tends to leave these glitches, because they’re such a pain for the engineer to fix. Since I wanted to feature the sample I had to get rid of the glitches, to make sure that they didn’t detract from the vocal. So I did drastic volume drops of just a few milliseconds on each glitch.
“The other issue about making the Daft Punk sample the focal point of the song was that because it’s so mid-rangey, robotic, and piercing, it tended to dominate everything and take up all the room. The song was about the sample, the vocals, and the kick drums, and I wanted Kanye’s vocal and the lyrics to be the focal point, and for the sample not to get in the way. I couldn’t just pan the sample to one side, because your attention would be drawn to it, so I ended up using a [Waves] Doubler plug-in and a little bit of EQ to spread the sample, ie. to make it sound bigger, and at the same time move it out of the way of Kanye’s vocals in the middle.
“In addition, the song had a lot of elements, over 100, which included a lot of layers, and it was a challenge to make sure that it didn’t sound busy. It was one of these tracks that could easily have sounded way too crowded, with way too much ear candy, and the key to making sure that this didn’t happen was the beat. We really wanted it to work in the clubs, so we worked really hard on the kicks to make sure that the low end was right. The kicks carry the whole bottom-end register; there is a bass, but it didn’t act like a traditional bass, it was more a synth tone following the root notes. Maintaining the warmth and roundness of the song was to me the most important thing. I remember putting a Manley Passive across the stereo bus on the SSL, taking out 2-3dB at 3k, because the more elements we had in the song, the more mid-rangey it was sounding. I prefer Kanye’s work to sound round and musical and warm.”
‘Stronger’ Writers: Kanye West, Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Edwin Birdsong Producer: Kanye West
Marroquin: “The first things that happens when I begin a mix is that my assistant prepares the session for me. I’m old school, I treat Pro Tools like a tape machine, so he puts the drums and the whole rhythm section on the left, the vocals on the right, the guitars towards the middle. I have specific channels on the SSL for all instruments, not necessarily because I always want to use the same equipment, but it’s comfortable for things always to be in the same place. After that I listen to the rough mix. This usually gives me a pretty good idea of where the artist and producer want to go. I always think of it as a blueprint. When I begin the mix, I tend to start with the rhythm section, and I’ll be referencing the vocals every 20-30 minutes. With ‘Stronger’ I began the mix by working on the drums, which were very simple: three kicks, one of them an 808, a snare, and a hi-hat. After that I worked on the sample, then the keyboards, and finally the vocals.”
Drums: Neve 1073, Avalon 2044, Waves C4, Renaissance Bass & Renaissance EQ, SSL EQ, Lexicon 480
“The beat was extremely hard to get. Getting the kicks right was probably the biggest challenge in mixing this song. I think we ended up auditioning a dozen different kick sounds in different combinations, with different EQ, plug-ins, outboard, different filters and triggers, and so on. The funny thing is that in the end we went back to the kick-drum mix we had on the very first day. On the last day, when we were about to print the mix at Battery, and we’re feeling good about it, Kanye says ‘Let me listen to the LA mix one more time.’ I played it, and he said ‘That’s it!’” (There’s a video on YouTube of Kanye, Timbaland and others working on ‘Stronger’ in an unspecified studio, and they’re already visibly struggling with the kicks:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-ZhIgJbsuY).
“In the end we had three kicks. ‘Kick 2’ is the four-to-the-floor chorus kick, and the other two, ‘Kick Soft’ and ‘Kick’, play during the rest of the track. ‘Kick Soft’ is an 808 kick. On ‘Kick 2’ I used the Waves C4, Renaissance Bass and Renaissance EQ plug-ins. The C4 is accentuating highs and lows, in fact it’s adding across the spectrum, the Renaissance Bass is adding at 47Hz, and the Renaissance EQ is rather extreme, adding 16dB at 2k and 17dB at 14k! It’s like ‘Give me more!’, because it’s what’s driving the song, besides the sample.
“On the two non-chorus kicks, I had the same signal paths. Each sound was bussed to a Neve 1073 EQ and then to an Avalon 2044 compressor, and then came up under a separate fader. On the fader itself I added a little bit of SSL compression and SSL EQ, the latter to take some of the woolliness out of the kicks. On the 1073 I added 4dB at 220Hz, and 2dB at 12k. The Avalon was set to a 5:1 ratio, and with the SSL EQ I added a little bit of 50Hz and 300Hz on Kick 1 and took away around 600Hz. The [McDSP] Filterbank E4 is indicated on the soft kick, but it’s bypassed, I didn’t use it.
“The snare wasn’t your typical hard snare; it didn’t have as many low-mids as other snares. I wanted to keep the emphasis on the kicks. When your snare is too big, it doesn’t work with a four-on-the-floor kick. I added 5dB at 100Hz to the snare on the desk, because the snare had a lot of high mids and I didn’t want it too harsh-sounding. Many people will take that frequency out so the snare doesn’t get in the way of the kick, but I wanted roundness on the snare, I wanted to beef it up. You feel it more than you hear it. I also added some 1.3k, and took away some 7k, all using the board.”
Although ‘Stronger’ had relatively few drum tracks, a lot of processing was applied, most notably the multi-band compression and extreme EQ used to craft the four-to-the-floor kick drum.
Daft Punk sample: SSL EQ, Waves Doubler, Eventide Eclipse
“The sample was a stereo track, and it goes really low in places, like almost an octave below Kanye’s voice. If you left it alone, nobody would hear it. Because I wanted to feature the sample, I had to ride the levels, sometimes as much as 6-7dB on certain words. You can see the sample rides I did in the Edit window, with most of the peaks in the ‘break’ section. These rides also include the millisecond volume drops to get rid of the glitches. I didn’t use the Filterbank E4 EQ here either. The EQ settings on the sample are the same throughout the song, it was all about the rides. I also added a Rich Chorus effect from an Eventide Eclipse.
“The other important issue, which I mentioned before, was to get the sample out of the middle, to make space for Kanye’s vocals. I tried two or three different harmonizers and stereo spreaders. I auditioned outboard like the AN2 Spreader, the Vitalizer, a PCM42 delay and an AMS delay, to try to get something that sounded natural, but they all took away from the focal point, which was the vocals. Very often with spreaders, you start to hear a doubling effect, and I didn’t want that. I simply wanted it to sound like the original, just spread out. I ended up using a Waves plug-in called the Doubler, panning things 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock; I didn’t want things panned sharp left and right either, it was just a matter of making the sound less thick in the centre. I printed the Doubler effect with the stem.”
Fitting the Daft Punk sample into the track required extensive automation to eliminate glitching and maintain a consistent level. Waves’ Doubler plug-in was used to make it wider and leave space for the lead vocal.
Keyboards & guitars: Waves Renaissance EQ, Pultec EQP1A, Neve 33609, Eventide Eclipse, AMS reverb, SSL EQ, Empirical Labs Distressor
“On our first mix day in Los Angeles there weren’t as many keyboards in the mix, a lot were added during the New York sessions, I think using a Juno 106 and a [Clavia] Nord Lead, among other synths. Mike Dean played many of those, and he also played the little bits of guitar that are on the track. I had eight stereo tracks of keyboards in LA, and some of these were replayed in NY. The bass synth [BaSynth01] only plays the root notes, and doesn’t do anything else. The [GARYNE01] track is a Gary Numan sound, it’s a hooky line that only appears in the instrumental section. The ‘4’ is the Renaissance REQ4 plug-in that I used to boost 354Hz and 3364Hz on the Numan sound. Other than that I didn’t do many treatments on the keyboards, they sounded good as they were, so I preferred to leave them alone. It was just a matter of balancing and a little bit of EQ’ing. The only thing I did on the LA keyboards was to sum them all to couple of Pultec EQP1A equalisers, just to add some body, 4dB at 100Hz, and bite, 3.5dB at 8k. On that first day I also added some 3:1 compression with fast release using a Neve 33609. Finally, the main synth line was treated with the Rich Chorus effect from the Eclipse, and I also added some AMS reverb to the keyboards. As for Mike Dean’s guitars, I sent those to a pair of Distressors and added, again, the AMS reverb.”
‘Stronger’ featured numerous keyboard parts, which were not heavily processed, although some plug-in EQ was used.
Vocals: numerous processors
“I wanted Kanye’s vocal to be really thick and to make sure that you can hear the full frequency spectrum of his voice. I had a lead track for the first and second verse, and a track for the third verse and the vamp, and a track for the ‘I need you right now’ bit, and two tracks with the ‘That don’t kill me’ hook, panned hard left and right, plus an additional track with the tail end of the hook. There were already a lot of heavy effects on the vocals when I received them, mostly filtering.
“The main lead is coming up on an SSL fader, and I’m filtering at 160Hz and 200Hz on the SSL. I’m then sending the vocal to a bus where I’ve inserted a Neve 32264 with a 3:1 ratio and a fast recovery time, and then to another fader, putting a Tube-Tech CL1B compressor on the insert, followed by an Avalon 2055 EQ, followed by a Dbx 902 de-esser. The CL1B was set to a 4:1 ratio with medium attack; the Avalon adds some sizzle way up there at 25k and I’m cutting at 220Hz. There are two compressors because I must have been looking for a speed of attack that the CL1 doesn’t have. The CL1 is a very smooth-sounding compressor, but its attack is not as fast or pronounced. In addition, there are a few bits I delayed with 577ms using the [Line 6] Echo Farm plug-in, you can hear it on words like ‘more’ and ‘haters’.
“For the ‘I need you right now’ section I used an Avalon 2044 on the insert, ratio 20:1 — I really wanted to grab it — fast attack, slow release, and there’s also a [Line 6] Amp Farm plug-in, which is distorting the vocal, emulating as if he’s saying things through a guitar amp: crunchy, distorted, mid-rangey, cutting out all the lows. On the hook section, the ‘That don’t kill me’ bit, I bus the vocals as a stereo unit to two faders, and on the inserts of each channel I have an Avalon 2055 EQ, a Summit DCL200 and a Dbx 902 de-esser. The 2055 has the smoothest high end possible, so I like to use it if I want to take away or add high end, and the DCL is a nice, very smooth, soft-sounding compressor. I used two Dbx 902s to de-ess, in case I added too much high end. I also used a [Waves] Renaissance EQ plug-in, and I used the cue sends, left and right, to go to an AMS delay harmonizer. On the small faders I also had a couple of [Lexicon] PCM42s, set to slap delays, somewhere around 80ms. That creates a little bit of depth, but they’re mixed quite far back, so you don’t actually notice them.
“I also used an SSL side-chain to de-ess the vocals. The 902 is a great de-esser, but it only takes away one frequency. On the board I have a full spectrum, and I use the side-chain to grab other frequencies. I have more control by using both the SSL and the Dbx. What I do on the SSL is an old trick I learned from engineer and mixer Barney Perkins, who used to do all those Babyface records, and it makes the vocal sound. There’s no de-esser that sounds better than this, but it’s a technique that’s complex to explain.
“Basically, I route the vocal signal to two separate channels on the SSL, say channel one and channel two, which are right next to each other. Channel one is my side-chain and works like a de-esser on channel two, which becomes my actual vocal channel. On channel one I’ll set the SSL compressor to a fast attack and also engage a high-pass filter — ie. I filter out all the low end — and do extreme EQ’ing of whatever frequencies I want to take away. I don’t cut, I boost these frequencies; +12dB with a very narrow bandwidth, most often around 6-7k, where most of the ‘esses’ happen. So channel one accentuates what I’m trying to take away! Of course, I take channel one off the stereo bus, so you don’t hear it in the mix.
“I then press the Link button to link channel one to channel two on the right. I engage the compressor on channel two, and what happens is that the more I’m bringing up channel one, the more the compressor ducks the frequencies I don’t want on channel two. So my channel one fader becomes my threshold. I take out the bass frequencies on channel one, because I don’t want them to disappear in channel two. With side-chaining, the frequencies you’re accentuating in your side-chain are ducked in the other channel. I’ve been part of forums during which I’ve discussed this technique, and people found it very hard to understand. Even the people at SSL have a hard time understanding why it works! But it does. The key is that you can use compressors either to increase gain or to create a ceiling — ie. they also work like limiters. And if you were to use straight EQ’ing to take away your ‘esses’, you take all the life and presence out of the vocal. But if you de-ess this way, it retains the personality of the singer; it’s like he or she is in the room with you.”
About Manny Marroquin
Line 6’s Echo Farm plug-in was used to add delays to individual words in the lead vocal, while a section of it was also run through the Amp Farm amp simulator.
Born in Guatemala 36 years ago, Manny Marroquin moved to Los Angeles at the age of nine, and though he played drums, he was already strongly drawn towards the recording side of music. Beginning as a runner at Enterprise Studios in LA, he quickly climbed the ladder to tape-op, assistant engineer, engineer, and eventually specialist mixer. Today Marroquin is first-call mixer for an astonishing number of A-list artists, predominantly in the hip-hop/R&B field, although he also works with rock acts. His recent credits alone include Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Rihanna, Vanessa Carlton, Amerie, Toni Braxton, Usher, Natasha Bedingfield, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez, Nikka Costa, Faith Evans, Santana and Lil’ Kim, and he has four Grammy Awards.
Marroquin has had a residency at Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles for the last 10 years, because, he says, “the room sounds really good, and the equipment is very tight and in good working condition, and they have a cool selection. There are always a lot of options here. And of course, they always take care of things when I need to have something fixed.”
The centrepiece of Marroquin’s room is an 80-input K-series SSL 9000XL ‘Super Analogue’ console. “I’ve had it for almost six years now, and it is indeed super analogue, because to my ears it’s the best-sounding SSL after the old E-series. It has a really smooth top end and an incredible low end that mimics the Neve sound. The K-series is by far the best-sounding board SSL has ever had. I thought the worst-sounding boards were the J-series, they were a step back from the G-series. Unfortunately the K-series is the last of its kind, because they’re now working on the Duality, which is a pretty good board. I mixed the whole Alicia Keys album on it.”
Marroquin sees himself mixing on analogue desks for the foreseeable future. “I don’t like mixing in the box. I prefer a hybrid of analogue and digital, because I just don’t get the same depth of sound and feel in the box. I don’t know whether it’s a mental thing, but to my ears something happens to the depth of the sound in the box.”
In terms of monitors, Marroquin likes to use three sets: large, medium and small. “My Augspurgers are my main monitors, then my mids are the KRK E8s, and I still use the [Yamaha] NS10s. One of the biggest challenges with urban music is always to make it sound big in the clubs, but also on small home speakers. With rock stuff you can get away with a more boxy sound, which will sound big enough on small speakers. Rock mixes tend to have more mid-frequencies, so if you play rock stuff on large speakers it can easily sound unpleasant. Conversely, I prefer to mix urban music, like ‘Stronger’, on the Augspurgers and make sure it hits in a certain way, and then once I feel I’m in the ballpark, I’ll go to the NS10s to make sure that it sounds good on them as well, and I’ll do the rest of my EQ’ing on them. You can sometimes tell how much low end you have on an NS10 from the way the woofer moves!”
Published in SOS December 2007
