![]() When Bauer received an advance copy of 'Heard 'Em Say', he found his name nowhere on it. Several of his mixes were credited to others, and he gets credit for others' mixes. I know, because they still ask me to help them sell them."Ĭraig Bauer displays his annoyance candidly at the haphazard manner in which the credits appear on Late Registration - when they appear at all. When you're young and new at it, lots of guys are happy just to get a few hundred dollars for a beat. But that's just part of getting yourself across in that genre. The number of POs to the studio kept going up, even though Kanye was not getting the credit for all of that work - I checked those records when they came out. "He'd bring the MPC in and we'd track it and lay it off to tape and it would get shipped off. "He was doing an increasing amount of 'ghost' beat work for other artists," Bauer says. West's beats were quickly gaining the attention of artists on the coasts, including P Diddy, RZA of Wu Tang Clan, and Li'l Kim. The talent was in the process of revealing itself."Īnd not only to Bauer. But what was there was there on the tracks was an attitude in the sound, grittiness. ![]() If you could route a quarter-inch cable in a patchbay you could engineer those sessions. He'd take a kick drum or a hi-hat where he could find them in the open on a track, sample them, and then 'flip' them - record them 'hot' to add a little distortion. It was all stuff that was sampled off of other records. It didn't suggest the genius you hear now on his records. "If you listen back to the stuff now, which Kanye and I did not too long ago at the studio, it would not stand out and I doubt he'd disagree. "It wasn't what you'd call 'challenging'," he recalls. Bauer is candid when he says that there's little to talk about in terms of recording West's early work. But that's exactly how Bauer treated West, and he believes that his respect for him as a client is what led to a strong bond of friendship developing between the two.īauer worked often with West during the two years that 'Monopoly' had installed him as a regular client in the studio, through the artist's stint in the Go-Getters, a Chicago rap group that West was a member of and produced. Bauer was drawing the leading artists of that genre, including Dave Koz, Brian Culbertson, Steve Cole and Peter White, out of their sunny colonies in California and into a studio in gritty downtown Chicago.Ĭompared to the glossy tracks that Bauer was giving them through the Euphonix System 5 console and the Genelec 1034B/7072 sub array of monitors at Hinge, Kanye West must have seemed as much an exercise in cultural relativism as just another client. The beat-making process might have seemed technologically primitive to Bauer, who by then had already established a successful niche as a mixer specialising in the much-maligned smooth jazz format. ![]() ![]() Johnson had cadged hours here and there over two years off the studio invoices for his protégé, and it was at Hinge that West learned to go beyond eight-bar loops on his MPC sampler. ![]() So the disappointment that Craig Bauer felt when Kanye West told him, in 2000, that he was headed for New York City to take his career to the next level was both understandable and predictable.īauer, a passionate musician from Cleveland who came up through the ranks of that city's studios in the 1980s before migrating to Chicago to set up his own facility, Hinge Studios, in 1992, had watched as West progressed from a promising but anonymous local beatmaker, brought to the studio in 1998 by local producer John 'Monopoly' Johnson. Craig Bauer has been part of Kanye West's career from the beginning, and as a mix engineer on the smash hit Late Registration album, he had to marry West's artistic perfectionism with his own technical standards.Ĭhicago, home to genre pioneers like Steve 'Silk' Hurley, and the sophisticated city blues of Buddy Guy, is a great source of innovation in urban music but often lacks the gravity to keep those innovators there. ![]()
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