‘These Walls’ is a song by Kendrick Lamar featuring Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat; off his album ‘Pimp a Butterfly’ from 2015. This track is one of the most melodic instrumentally over the album and inspires me with the overall balance of bass heavy sound and mid-range sound. The tempo for the track is 108 bpm in the key signature of F major.
This track is probably one of the most publicly documented songs with the recording and mixing process thanks to an interview with the Mixing Engineer Derek Ali by Sound on Sound. The album was recorded and mixed on an SSL 4000 G+ at Dr. Dre’s No Excuses studio. Majority of the instruments used were recorded through Pro Tools, but the drums, bass and keyboard were recorded through Ableton. The aspect I enjoy about this track the most is the way that Ali has balanced the light timbre of the guitars and brass instruments with the heavy bass and drums accustomed to Kendrick’s style.
For the project I'm working on we are recording guitars and bass. Therefore, I found that Ali used a Shure SM57 and the Royer 121 on the amplifier for the recordings. This process was used with digital processing on the instruments that are stock standard on the DAW (Ableton for the bass and Pro Tools for the guitars) which they were recorded in and the later replaced with analog outboard gear. Specifically Ali talks about using a Pultec EQ, a Waves Doubler and a S1 Imager on bass. The other instruments on the track include acoustic violin, trumpet, double bass, saxophones, clarinet, organ, piano, as well as extensive backing vocals. Microphones that were used for the recording process include AKG C24 as a room microphone, RCA 44, RCA 77 and Royer 121.
The main effect that establishes space for the frequencies is the sidechaining of the Neve Compressor to the SPL Transient Designer the allow the drums to sit next to the bass. This can be seen in the spectrum analysis. The Kick Drum is most prominent at 80Hz whilst the bass jumps around 220Hz.
Ali also notched out 1kHz in instruments to allow the vocals to sit prominently there which is also visible in the spectrum. An interesting aspect to note is the hard cut at 15kHz of everything but the snare snap and rattle, as well as a clap sound.
To give even more space throughout the song Ali uses panning to effect in the vocals to give variance to a predominantly mono mix. The main places of note are the vocals in Verse 1, minimal panning of the guitars in the Verse Rap 1 and 2, with the most in Verse Rap 3 where the reverb effects used with the panning create a close proximity sound of warping around the head with far left and right movement.
The song is technically fascinating and I could talk about the different outboard gear and the reversal of mixing with outboard gear and recording with plugins for longer but even the use of a Lavry Gold A-D Converter to half-inch tape for mastering the album is intriguing for the amount of perfectionism placed in this piece of work.
References
Engineers: Derek Ali. Sound On Sound. Retrieved from https://www.soundonsound.com/people/inside-track-kendrick-lamars-pimp-butterfly
Kendrick Lamar - Topic. (2018). These Walls [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHNK4k3Cr24
Key & BPM/Tempo of These Walls by Kendrick Lamar | Note Discover. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.notediscover.com/song/these-walls-by-kendrick-lamar
Tingan, P. (2015). Inside Track: Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly Secrets Of The Mix
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