Word: dre
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...Dre is not an instrumentalist. "I bought a trumpet a couple of years ago, and everybody started hiding from me," he says with a cackle. Yet Dre, ne Andre Young, 36, has been producing and recording music for 20 years. He started as a DJ with the disco-inspired World Class Wrecking Cru, and went on to form N.W.A., help create gangsta rap, have a multiplatinum solo career, discover Snoop Dogg and Eminem, win the 2001 Grammy for Producer of the Year and infuse rap with a permanent musicality that buoyed it across the mainstream...
...Dre is also a global phenomenon. The two most recent albums he has produced, his own Chronic 2001 and Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, have sold 25 million copies worldwide. He's a multiplatinum seller in territories--Japan, New Zealand, Australia and Eastern Europe--that were distant hip-hop outposts a few years ago. Dre's distributor, Interscope Records, receives 4,000 requests a year from labels in such places as India, Turkey, Southeast Asia and Israel that want to add Dre tracks to international hip-hop compilations. Beyond his mere reach, Dre has also brought depth. Pepe Mogt...
Currently, Dre is holed up in a Los Angeles recording studio putting the finishing touches on the sound track to the film The Wash, in which he co-stars with Snoop Dogg. "First off," he says, hands folded in front of him as he waits for a track to be re-cued, "I want to be known as the producer's producer. The cellos are real. I don't use samples." He says this with a touch of derision, as if sampling is a vulgarity in the producer's palette. "I may hear something I like on an old record...
Truck Volume, a track for The Wash, began with a Dre beat and an eerie keyboard riff played on an old Vox V-305 organ. ("I was watching VH1--The Doors: Behind the Music," he says, by way of explanation.) Dre then added layers of strings. Everyone from Eminem to Madonna has been known to beg Dre for tracks, but the Doctor decides who gets his music based entirely on feel. Truck Volume, with its exaggerated haunted-house vibe, seemed like a good fit for the exuberantly hoarse rapper Busta Rhymes. "Busta just sounds crazy to me," Dre says...
Rhymes recorded his vocals a few days ago. Now Dre is icing the cake, playing the track from beginning to end dozens of times, nodding his head to the rhythm and making tiny adjustments as he goes. "More reverb here," he says. The technician tweaks the reverb on a two-second patch of Rhymes' voice. The track plays again. "Now it sounds like he's in the Grand Canyon." When the level is adjusted to his satisfaction, Dre calls Rhymes in New York. "I don't think we should add any more to it. Nah. All the breakdowns...