RZA‘s production style on Return to the 36 Chambers, the debut solo album by Wu-Tang Clan member Ol’ Dirty Bastard, foxed a group of professors and a mastering engineer who were tasked with remastering it.
The rapper and producer explains that his production style is guided by instinct rather than any particular musical rules, meaning that music experts who don’t work in that way were confused by the “weirdness” of the production ODB’s 1995 debut.
“No one has dissected the weirdness of Return To The 36 Chambers as much as my others, but there’s some crazy shit going on. Warner Bros. did a remaster of it recently. I wasn’t involved but I went in to listen,” he tells Tape Op. “They had professors there, and the mastering engineer, and they were like, ‘What the fuck were you smokin’, man?’
“It took them so long to understand it and to recall my mix that they said if you moved one fader by half a decibel the whole track would fall apart! My brain wasn’t technical, it was just what my ear wanted. The science wasn’t applied; it was more instinct.”
RZA also mentions elsewhere in the interview that he primarily used the Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler on the album, which he estimates he made his “first 100 songs” with.
“When you’d go to make a new sequence on the ASR, the default tempo would be 100bpm. Most other machines create tempos at 120bpm,” he explains. “When I was making tracks back then, I didn’t know the difference and I would force a sample into the tempo that I was feeling.
“So if you take a sample like this [hums syncopated horn melody] and put it in the 100bpm tempo, it will speed up and cut the sound off. If you want it to fit, you have to speed the sample up or change the tempo. If I liked the tempo of the sample as is, I’d change the tempo of the beat. Or, if I’m feeling the tempo of the beat, I’m going to change the speed of the sample.”
