http://remixmag.com/ar/remix_beats_boom_bap/
There's a nice long article but I cut a section out for ya....
Premier samples and sequences from vinyl into a first-generation
Akai MPC60 — “the Roger Linn original” — and into
an Akai S950 (at one point triggered by an old Alesis HR-16 drum machine). Before that, he cut his samples on
an E-mu SP-12 — “the blue one with the giant 8-inch floppy disk” — and later, an SP-1200. But when Premier started working at Manhattan's D&D Studios in 1992, where he still tracks most of his music, a D&D engineer enlightened him to the virtues of the MPC. “He said, ‘The MPC is like a tape machine without the tape machine. Instead of layering track after track on tape, you can do it all on the MPC.' And that was exactly what I needed.”
For Premier, vintage samplers are necessary because they keep him in check. “The old Akai is cool because there's limited sample time,” Premier says. “It keeps me from going overboard. That's the way we've been doing it from the beginning, at least since Daily Operation, though I've added
an E-mu Planet Phatt module for occasional bass lines and classic keys.”
Those funky, skewed piano lines — a hallmark of the Gang Starr sound from early joints like “All 4 tha Ca$h” to 1998's “Work” to fresh tracks such as “Put Up or Shut Up” — are either sampled or played live by Premier. He even imports live tracks into his samplers so that they fit in with the textures of his sample-based productions. “I love piano, and I do like to play it,” he remarks. “On ‘Put Up or Shut Up,’ there are some keyboard sounds, a nice harmony over the chords, which I laid down along with a sample. You can hear the difference between them, but it still fits with the samples. It's not like, ‘Oh, here's where he plays the keyboards.’ It still fits into my overall guideline for the song, stylistically. There's a lot of more of me playing keys on this record, but, again, it's being imported and arranged into a sample form. But I'm laying it down raw; it's not MIDI when I play it.”
WIDE OPEN SPACES
Premier says producing is a little bit like cooking. After getting the beats together for a song, he keeps adding elements and stirring the pot. “I keep working up the layers until the concoction is boiled and ready for drinking,” he says. Although plenty of Premier's finals boast upward of 13 or 14 tracks, they never sound cluttered. His is one of the cleanest — you might say the most minimalist — sounds in all of hip-hop, a combination of smart compression, clever arranging and an awesome ear for separation and relative EQs.
“It is minimalist, actually,” Premier says. “But minimal in a good way. If a tune sounds good with one strong element, then you don't need anything else.” Leaving space also means leaving room for the MC, and Guru extols Premier's ability to “bring out the lyrical side of any rapper. You'll want to push yourself when you're doing a Premier joint. There's a science to his shit, to the way he weaves the cuts. He keeps it pure.”
That spare approach leaves plenty of space for Guru to lay it down, and the technique of tracking his “king of monotone” vocals — close-miked with
a Neumann U 87 or an AKG 414 — is another aspect of the process that he and Premier have down to a science. Generally, Guru writes his lyrics in the studio, focusing his attack with a style of brainstorming that he calls “freestyle writing.” “I'll write under pressure, but the goal is that it won't sound like I'm reading when I spit,” he explains. “Sometimes, I'll do it all in one take. ‘DWYCK’ with Nice & Smooth was like that. I came in all mad, and I was like, ‘You ready?’ But the way it usually goes is that Premier will let me have at it for a few takes. I'll freestyle it out loud just to get the flow that I want; then, I'll write six to eight bars and then say those eight bars to see how it's feeling, and then I'll continue from there. It's cool because Premier coaches me on my vocals. He'll make me do it over, and he'll fuck with me, man. He'll be like, “C'mon, man. Do you rap? The good thing is that by the time I'm done in the vocal booth with him, I'm out, man — it's done.”
Not quite. “I've heard a lot of people lay down hot shit, but then the mixdown is horrible,” Premier warns. “You're sitting there enjoying the track, but then the vocal comes in, and it just doesn't sit right, or the right effect is not there. So the mixdown is key, and in mastering, you get the chance to fix all the little things you wished you'd fixed back at the studio before you brought them in to be mastered! But in the end, it's all about the head nod, man. It's got to have the boom and the bap, and you can have Pro Tools and make it all easy to do loops, but if it doesn't have soul, it ain't hip-hop.”
“I drive a lot,” he continues, narrowing his eyes, “and I like to drive totally in my zone, where nothing outside of the music I've got on is going to affect me or fuck up my day, where I'm so into the music that I don't care. I'm just enjoying it, and it makes me feel good. So that's the reason I've got to have my head nod first. Then, I'm ready to hear some motherfucker just spray it, kill it, so that I want to sing it back. I want to feel good when a record comes on, and a lot of people ain't doing that these days, so I just got to keep putting out these joints.”
