HorrorStories Archives

“Does Dre hate my beats?”

In time for Halloween, we teamed up !llmind for the finale of #HorrorStories, as he reveals the moment he learnt to make failure his friend.

Having his beats met with indifference by his hero in their first session together, the two-time Grammy award-winner shares how a situation he initially perceived as his greatest failure, became the driving force for the culmination of his success.

Full transcript:

“I was like ‘Fuck, he doesn’t like any of this shit, like, Dre hates my beats’.

Back in 2013, I got a text from a friend of mine. His name’s Tyhiem. And he was like ‘I’m actually up the block from you. I’m with Dr. Dre.’ I did double take on my phone. I was like ‘Dre? Like Dr. Dre? Okay, cool!’

Tyhiem and Dre walk to the studio and he’s like ‘Yo, plug in. Let’s hear some stuff’. I’m playing beats for like 10 minutes and I glance back and I see Dre sitting down on his phone, with his head down, like not moving at all, just bored.

I stopped the music. I turned around and Dre was like ‘Yo ill, your stuff was cool. But it wasn’t anything I haven’t heard before’. I felt like I really failed in that moment. So I went back to the studio and it gave me that extra fuel to go a step further with my music.

A year later, I got a call back from Ty and he was like ‘Yo, we’re in the studio with Dre, he wants you to come over.’ I was like ‘oh shit, perfect’. So I ended up being in the studio with Dre and we ended up recording like three songs.

So it worked out in the end, but it was a super big learning lesson for me and I’ll never forget that.”
Picture this. You’ve produced a track packed with potential to realise you’ve later deleted the entire project. Many may abandon it, however Alina Smith from the production duo, LYRE MUSIC GROUP, proves just why you shouldn’t in her edition of #HorrorStories.

After losing the session files for one of her tracks, she reveals how remaining positive and deciding to rebuild the song from scratch allowed her to achieve a better end result than she initially expected.

Full Transcript

“About a year ago, I wrote this song for a YouTube collaboration. So it was part of a video. And I accidentally deleted the session.

I never ever do that I have everything backed up like 17 times, but I think it was in the folder with the video files. And I usually, you know, delete old videos that already were posted.

Months later, I looked for it and was like ‘oh, yeah, this was really good. I should like finish this for real as a real song and pitch it to Kpop’ And then I was looking for a session and it was gone. It was not anywhere.

But I asked a collaborator of mine to rebuild the track around the mp3 that I had. And he did such a spectacular job. It ended up being so much better than the original version. You know, something very positive came out of me losing these files and being really upset about it.“
With Halloween around the corner, we’re asking the best in the business for their #HorrorStories. First up to the plate is two-time Grammy-nominated engineer Teezio.

Every pro has one – the unwavering memory of a mistake too big to forget.

#HorrorStories brings these memories to the surface, as the world’s biggest producers, songwriters and engineers unveil the most outlandish blunders of their careers — providing a much-needed reminder that even the greats make mistakes.

Full Transcript:

“There’s a really big fuckup that goes like beyond the average fuckup. And it wasn’t entirely my fault. But you could say that it is the engineers fault to make sure.

There was a thing a long time ago that UNICEF did where everyone was singing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. So I recorded a bunch of actors, David Arquette just his daughter, like all these people like all these famous actors, everything is being filmed as they’re recording, right?

So guess what? The audio somehow has to line up to the video. So usually with Pro Tools, if the interface is capturing at one sample rate 48k and the Pro Tools session is at 44k, you’ll get some sort of error automatically Pro Tools will tell you ‘hey, you need to change it’. Cool.

There’s one converter in New York and I’ll never forget it. It was at Jungle City Studios. This thing did not communicate with Pro Tools. Everything sounds fine in Pro Tools. But then when I started making the renders to give to the video people they’re like, ‘dude all of this is off sync. How could it be off sync?’ The assistant opens the closet and the converter says 48k and we literally had to throw everything away. We couldn’t use any of it.”
Jesse Ray Ernster’s rise has not been without a few bumps along the way, which he shares with us in this brutally honest edition of #HorrorStories.

With a Grammy win and over a billion streams to his name, it’s safe to say that Jesse is one of the top mixers in the industry, but the journey has not always been so smooth.

Full transcript:

“I’ve lost like hundreds of gigs by overstepping you know, the bounds of their intention and their desire sonically.

I had this thing for a while where I would send the first pass like, ‘Hey, this is my liberty pass, I took some liberties, I threw in some ideas, I really think that this takes the song to the next level, like dynamically, this improves the record. And you can either take some of the ideas, or we could just put it back, I’ll put it back. And I’ll just give you the mix that I think you probably want.’ I would do that a lot.

I think that first pass just scares people and they’re like ‘No, this is this is wrong. This isn’t the song we made’. I mean, my life could look way different. If I had gotten that gig, and it’s just not the way to look at it.

So the encouraging message to anybody else out there is like, you get some W’s get some L’s, like you win some, you lose some.

The coolest thing about losing a gig is when the mix comes out. You can stack your mix up against theirs, and listen and try to deconstruct what that individual did to those files in order to get it to knock the way it did. And that is extremely educational. This is a universal principle to it’s not just about mixing or career. It’s life. If you’re not learning from the L’s, you’re not looking at it the right way.”
Producer and songwriter Matthew Genovese revisits the moment when he learnt the importance of backing up your projects first-hand.

“I was freaking out!”. The saying goes that your work isn’t backed up until it’s backed up twice.

Having completed a recording session with a Toronto-based artist in his LA studio, Genovese recalls when he went to master the tracks and discovered the whole project was missing.

Full Transcript:

“I still don’t really know what happened. I did a song with an artist and the artist was from Toronto. They flew here and we did a session. We wrote the song and I sent them the demo at the end of the day.

Then like, three, four months later, they call me and they’re like, ‘hey, we want to release the record, we want you to finish it and mix it.’ And I was like, ‘okay, great’. I sat down on my computer and tried to open up the session and it was not on my computer and I could not find it anywhere. The whole file of the artist was not there and I was kind of freaking out.

I think my time machine was set in a way where it was using the wrong master drive. So it was replacing all of the things on my master drive with the things on the backup drive. So it deleted that stuff. But luckily, I had the fire safe drive in my house that I backup all the time and take out of the studio just in case of a fire. And so I ran in the house and plugged that in and luckily the session was there. The artists never found out about it, and I was saved.”
Mixing engineer Bainz looks back on one of the defining #HorrorStories from the early days of his career, sharing his approach for remedying an obscure glitch that was out of his control.

“This is probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me in a session environment”. It can be tough being the youngest or least experienced in the room on a session – if something goes wrong, the suspicion is that it’s your fault, whatever the truth of the matter. That said, if you navigate the situation correctly, you can turn into a major win.

Full transcript:

“It’s crazy because it happened very early into my career. The main engineer at that studio had gone on vacation. We were recording and we were working, doing a lot of stuff. Somehow at some point, they had installed a printer at the studio. The printer software was contacting HP that caused some glitch.

Anyway, none of the audio files that were being recorded were getting saved. Halfway through something happened and it eventually crashed. And when we opened it back, nothing was there. I’m like, ‘yo, what is going on?’

What saved me in that moment was while we recorded we were vocaligning as we went along, so I went into the committed files folder found those vocalign regions, flew them on the grid, pieced the song back together, in the early days as engineer, whilst everyone in the room blamed me for something because I was a new engineer.

It was so easy to blame me. Luckily, that tech came in and told us that’s what happened and then it went from ‘wow, you fucked up’ to ‘wow, I can’t believe you actually figured that situation and navigated through it.’”

“Does Dre hate my beats?”

Full transcript:

Picture this. You’ve produced a track packed with potential to realise you’ve later deleted the entire project. Many may abandon it, however Alina Smith from the production duo, LYRE MUSIC GROUP, proves just why you shouldn’t in her edition of #HorrorStories.

With Halloween around the corner, we’re asking the best in the business for their #HorrorStories. First up to the plate is two-time Grammy-nominated engineer Teezio.

Jesse Ray Ernster’s rise has not been without a few bumps along the way, which he shares with us in this brutally honest edition of #HorrorStories.

Producer and songwriter Matthew Genovese revisits the moment when he learnt the importance of backing up your projects first-hand.

Full Transcript:

Mixing engineer Bainz looks back on one of the defining #HorrorStories from the early days of his career, sharing his approach for remedying an obscure glitch that was out of his control.