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Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It

It took two weeks to make the album; it didn't take much longer to make headlines.

LOS ANGELES — Brian Burton's second-floor bedroom in his small suburban house is barely big enough for a full-size bed and computer desk.

The walls are bare except for a picture of Woody Allen tacked above the monitor. Next to the keypad there's a turntable and a mixer about the size of a brick. CDs, including the Beatles' recent Let It Be ... Naked, are scattered around the room.

Burton recently built an elaborate recording studio in his basement, but it's here where the producer otherwise known as Danger Mouse has rattled popular music similar to the way Phil Spector did 34 years ago when he finished the last-released Beatles album with lush orchestrations.

Beatles fans thought that was controversial.

In December, when he heard Jay-Z was releasing an a cappella version of The Black Album for remixers, he came up with a crazy idea to blend it with the Beatles' famous The White Album and make The Grey Album.

Three months and a cease-and-desist letter later, the album is at the center of a massive downloading debate and is the most in-demand piece of media since the Paris Hilton sex tape.

Burton, a laid-back fanatic of both the Beatles and Jay-Z, never imagined he would be opening his bedroom door to a reporter. A certain level of ambiguity has always surrounded his music, and he was especially keen about keeping the details behind The Grey Album a mystery.

As the album has become a cultural landmark, though, Burton has felt a need to explain the process behind it. A cease-and-desist letter he can handle, but hordes of rookie remixers thinking it takes a couple of days to make a similar album is burning Burton.

"A lot of people just assumed I took some Beatles and, you know, threw some Jay-Z over top of it or mixed it up or looped it around, but it's really a deconstruction," he explained. "It's not an easy thing to do."

Not at all. In fact, Burton came incredibly close to quitting midway through and releasing The Grey Album as an EP. He eventually discovered another way to make beats from The White Album samples and finished. All together, he worked nearly nonstop for two weeks on the album. (He claims to be more creative when working next to a bed, which is why he never made it to his studio.)

"I was obsessed with the whole project, that's all I was trying to do, see if I could do this," Burton said, opening up the The Grey Album song files on his computer for the first time on camera. "Once I got into it, I didn't think about anything but finishing it."

The first thing the producer did was listen to The Black Album a cappella and measure the amount of beats per minute for each track, a common technique for club DJs who seamlessly mix music together.

Next, he scoured all 30 songs on The White Album, listening for every strike of a drum or cymbal when other instruments or voices were not in the mix. Most were single sounds, which he would later put together to make beats.

With the intricate method Burton used for the rhythm tracks on The Grey Album he could have easily tossed in a kick drum from another album here or a bass drum there, and no one would have noticed, but that never crossed his mind.

"I stuck to those two because I thought it would be more challenging and more fun and more of a statement to what you could do with sampling alone," he explained. "It is an art form. It is music. You can do different things, it doesn't have to be just what some people call stealing. It can be a lot more than that."

After pulling every possible Ringo Starr part from The White Album, Burton repeated the process for guitar and bass samples. Once he felt there was a workable amount of sounds banked, he started with a Jay-Z vocal track and built the music around it using the software Acid Pro, an alternative to ProTools that retails for about $400.

The program allows the layering of separate tracks of samples, with the average song on The Grey Album being 16 tracks, although some have as many as 25.

To make the music fit more smoothly with Jay-Z's lyrics and "sound more like hip-hop," Burton altered the samples in Acid Pro.

"For instance, with these handclaps," Burton said, playing a track from "Dirt Off Your Shoulders." "Taking one little Beatles handclap wasn't going to do it ... but if you double it up and move them away from each other so they're doubling up the delay, and then take the pitch of it and throw it up in the air and make it a higher pitch. I know it sounds all geeky and stuff, but you get a much better sound to it."

He applied the same sort of tweaking to guitar and drum parts.

"This guitar lick right here is just a small little guitar lick," Burton said, playing a sample from The White Album. "But when you change up the tones and the pitches and everything, it just becomes a new thing."

Since the music is so picked apart, Burton decided to begin some of the songs on The Grey Album with an unaltered, longer sample from The White Album song that provided the primary parts for the remix. His "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," for instance, begins with a gentle strum and a bit of John Lennon's vocals from "Julia." "That way people know what I worked with," he said.

Most of the songs on the The Grey Album use guitar and/or vocal samples from only one Beatles tune, although the beats are all from various songs from The White Album. A few, however, use samples from a couple of songs. "Change Clothes" uses the guitar from "Piggies" and the bass from "Dear Prudence."

"This was a nightmare, though. I remember doing this one," Burton said, opening the song on his computer. " 'Piggies' is a silly song to me, and 'Change Clothes' is kinda the same way."

Burton was stuck on Jay-Z's "What More Can I Say" when he was about to quit. That's when he discovered a different way to double up drums that sounds more like a burnt CD error than rock music.

"It also samples '[While] My Guitar Gently Weeps,' which is one of my favorite Beatles songs," Burton said. "I really wanted to make it sound like it was really part of the Beatles, like it wasn't just laid on top of it."

"What More Can I Say" took some time, but nothing was more difficult than "99 Problems."

"Generally, when you're doing a track, you want to have the drums set the tempo," he explained. "But it wouldn't work on this, so I had to use the bass line itself to keep it going, and I accented the bass line with the drums and put the drums here and there, as opposed to, like, the normal way of doing it."

Burton also felt added pressure because his remix samples "Helter Skelter," a sacred song in the Beatles catalog.

"My whole thing with this was I didn't want to mess up the Beatles song either," he said. "I don't want to disrespect the Beatles. A lot of people thought it was sacrilege in the first place. I knew that would be something, but I didn't know it was going to be [distributed] on a wide scale. I knew my friends wouldn't think it was sacrilege, so I just made sure it was something I would dig myself."

As much time as Burton spent at his computer, he doesn't take all the credit for The Grey Album. He truly believes the two source albums were a good fit.

"I was lucky in a lot of ways," he said. "If it had been the Who, we wouldn't be here. If it had been LL Cool J, we wouldn't be here."

Not that he is against trying something else.

"Someone asked me if I would ever use Joni Mitchell's Blue album with Weezer's 'Green Album' or R.E.M.'s Green and make The Turquoise Album," Burton said, smiling. "While that's funny to say, it could be interesting if I sat down to do it."

Послушал первые два трека. Больше пока не скачалось. Я в отпаде. Хотя лучше бы были Битлз + Эминем, например, или Марли. Интересно, что бы получилось...

~> Strannick:
Слушать - спасает только битловский "бриз". Если бы этого "дыхания" не было - вообще невозможно было бы как-то обозначить - что это такое...

Unofficial remixes of Beatle tunes have sprouted up all over well before the recent "Grey Album." Bootleggers have been doing their own versions for several years. According to a report on E! Online , official reworkings may be coming.
In the article, which tells of David Bowie's decision to let fans remix his songs, it says:

And, according to the Times, after liking a remix of Elvis Presley tracks, Paul McCartney is even considering getting in on the game, giving his approval to an official album of mashed-up Beatles tunes--that is, if a deal can be struck with Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and George Harrison (news)'s estate. (One of biggest tracks to make the Internet rounds of late is Go Home Productions' "Karma in the Life," which combines the Beatles "A Day in the Life" with Radiohead's "Karma Police.")

Это очень тупо, что на обложке мерзкий негр находится перед Битлз

~> The real Mitya:
Может быть. Но, согласно конечному "продукту" - логично. Было бы странным, если бы представить себе Битлз впереди, а негра - позади (в дымке). Вот тогда бы логики точно бы не было...

Да в общем то и продукт-это ошибка.

Есть какя-то пословица, типа незачем мешать дерьмо с отличной вещью.

Миксовать Битлз с Репом, -это как дополнить Библию порно сценами( познания Адамом Евы например)
Может про Библия я и загнул, но, надеюсь вы меня понимаете

A Grey Video made its appearance on the Web recently, but the link to the page (www.greyvideo.com) now seems to have disappeared. The video used scenes from "A Hard Day's Night' with a remix of the Beatles' "Glass Onion" interspersed with rap. An usual creation, to be sure.

http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/news/217greyalbum.html

~> The real Mitya:
Может быть про Библию и загнул, но... вобщем-то всё верно. :)

Репперы достали уже - своим гундежом они пометили уже столько хорошей музыки, что...вообщем все слишком предскажуемо и скучно
((((((((((((
Твердая двойка!!!!!!

Ради справидливости скажу,что сама музыка ремиксированная местами интересная, но этот мотонный однообразный рррррррррррепппппппп((((. А ремиксинг кстати напомнил Бека (Beck)
Так что нафик - слабая тройка)))

2Primal Scream:
Этому чернокожему парню еще здровенный косяк,как Бобу Марли на небезызвестной пластинке, и все будет супер! :)

Лучше я Афромэна послушаю!

Видео "Encore"
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/11/18/the_grey.shtml
http://www.ericrice.com/podcast/archives/2004/11/the_grey_video.html

Danger Mouse squeaks by Beatles dispute

Richard Cromelin
Los Angeles Times
Jun. 21, 2005 03:30 PM

How the Gorillaz saved the Mouse. How does that sound for a 21st-century fable?

The story was all too real for musician, producer and DJ Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse. In the last 18 months he's gone from respected but obscure underground figure to cause celebre in music and legal circles to key collaborator on one of the most acclaimed new albums on the charts, "Demon Days" by the Gorillaz.

Just recapping the saga seemed to tire the usually intense and restless Burton, 27, as he sat on a red sofa in his downtown Los Angeles loft recently.

"It was just a very bad time," he said. "I was up, I was down. ... The biggest burden during that time was emotional. I learned in about five months what most artists would have learned in four or five years."

Burton's burden -- and to some extent his renewed future -- stems from a quirky little experiment he cooked up. Working for a solid 2 1/2 weeks, he spliced together music from rap star Jay-Z's "The Black Album" and the Beatles' so-called "White Album" and called the result "The Grey Album."

He intended it for limited circulation, which might have been a little naive. Once it was out, people burned it and downloaded it until it reached the ears of the media, music cognoscenti and -- uh-oh -- the legal department at EMI Music, a tenacious guardian of the rights to the Beatles' recordings.

Burton was ready for the cease-and-desist letters and was happy to comply when they arrived. But "The Grey Album" was bigger than ever, becoming the focal point of an escalating debate over the fair use of intellectual property.

He also found that he wasn't in the clear legally and faced the prospect of being forced to give up any money he earned from musical activities to EMI.

Ironically, his rescuer turned out to be the same corporation that was after him. First, Burton signed a long-pending contract with EMI's publishing division, and then English rock musician Damon Albarn asked him to collaborate as a producer on the second album by the Gorillaz, his conceptual "band" of four cartoon characters that was signed to Virgin Records, an EMI label.

Burton knew that with his paychecks coming from EMI, the legal pressure would dissipate. It was just a matter of securing the Gorillaz job.

Damon had to kind of convince" record label executives, Burton said. "They didn't want me to do the record; he's told me that -- 'He's had no experience as a producer and he's done all this stuff with the Beatles, it just doesn't look good. What are you doin'?' "

Albarn got his man, and the two formed a close team in his London studio, Burton said.

With its echoing, deeply shaded atmospheres and ominous tone, the album reflects Burton's dark musical leanings, and it attracted high praise when it came out in late May.

Danger Mouse's "stunning flourishes ... help place 'Demon Days' notches above any vaguely electronic release in recent memory," Q magazine said in its review.

Albarn and Burton are working on a project with Nigerian musicians -- "Neil Young meets Afrobeat meets the Beatles," is how Burton describes it. He also has albums coming soon with eccentric Southern rapper Cee-Lo, teaming under the name Gnarls Barkley, and with even more eccentric Los Angeles rapper MF Doom, as Dangerdoom.

Burton himself isn't without eccentricities -- he says he can't write music unless he's in a room that has a bed, and he insists that in photographs he be accompanied by a shrouded "spiritual adviser" named Dr. President.

Without serious technical skills as a writer or instrumentalist, Burton is essentially a passionate advocate for rethinking the whole creative process from the ground up.

His first love was movies, and he likens his role to that of a director.

"I don't know how to write a song traditionally," he said. "The only thing I can do really is distinguish what I think is good and bad. As long as you have enough good for three minutes, that's a song to me.

"I can hear somebody play me two songs and I can have an entire concept as to what we should try to do, how I think I can use your voice as a character in a story. ... I'm an artist first and a producer second. I don't want to do the next Weezer CD, just to pick a band at random. If we would like to collaborate, I want to do something different. You leave your world and come into mine when you want to try something."

He's currently fielding proposals for what he describes as intriguing collaborations, but you get the sense that his excitement also stems from leaving the "Grey Album" contretemps behind.

"When I did what I did, I didn't think I was doing anything morally wrong," he said, summing up the episode. "Technically, yes, but I don't think either side was hurt. ... It was negative for a while, and now I definitely look back on it positively. It all worked itself out."

http://www.azcentral.com/ent/music/articles/0622dangermouse.html

Можно скачать здесь:
http://www.otvali.ru/news/music/7700/
DJ Danger Mouse - The Grey Album
01 Public Service Announcement
02 What More Can I Say
03 Encore
04 December 4th
05 99 Problem
06 Dirt Off Your Shoulder
07 Moment Of Clarity
08 Change Of Clothes
09 Allure
10 Justify My Thug
11 Lucifer 9
12 My First Song

1) Обложка дебильная, но смешная
2) Достаточно прослушать по одной начальной минуте в плохом качестве, например delit.net
3) альбом не смешной
4)рэп не ацтой
5) а каково мнение сторон, в итоге?

Я вот очень Grey Album люблю.
Впрочем, к Black Album Джея Зи тоже очень хорошо отношусь. (Про White Album некоего коллектива, известного как The Beatles, говорить надо?)

Если уж на то пошло, то и совместное выступление Linkin Park, Zay-Z, Danger Mouse и Пола Маккартни на Grammy торкнуло не по-детски.

:)