Jeff Bass talks about getting the most from Eminem in the Studio.
Detroit native music producer, Jeff Bass sat down on Connection is Magic with Samson Shulman for an interview a few years ago which is finally up on Spotify, Soundcloud, and youtube now. At around the 15:18 mark, Jeff Bass talks about how he got the most from Eminem in the studio.
The Bass Brothers may be unfamiliar to you. However, you’ve probably heard of the Bass Brothers. Before Jimmy Iovine, before Dr. Dre, it was Michigan’s Jeff and Mark Bass who were spinning the records of Marshall Mathers, a young lad from Detroit. Eminem used the production duo’s studio on 8 Mile Road like a second home in the early days. And it was there that they recorded The Slim Shady EP, which would eventually secure Eminem a record deal thanks to Dre and Iovine. They’d collaborate with Em for years, creating all but three tracks on The Slim Shady LP, some of The Marshall Mathers LP’s more twisted edges, and Lose Yourself.”
“So I would watch him, almost like a psychologist would,” says Jeff “Watch facial expressions, body, so I would watch what was he bringing to the studio today. Like he was miserable. Well, I’m gonna have to create a piece of music that keeps him miserable today. I knew he was miserable or angry So If he heard an angry track of music, he could actually express himself through that music. And it sounded like, they fit like a glove, like they were meant for each other. You know his lyrics on top of that music plus the type of melodies that we would come up with for him to sing and stuff like that, like choruses, hooks.”
He continues, “It shows me he was able to tell and get it out exactly the way he was feeling it on the inside. So I was able to tap into that musically for him, artists don’t get that a lot of times. A lot of times artists just go here this is the song do it this way. But when you’re collaborating like that, you’re locked in like that and you’re reading emotions in there. It seemed like we could do this whenever we wanted to do it. I just had to watch what he was doing, watch how he was feeling, watch how his day was going.”
“In between Infinite [Eminem’s independently released first album] and The Slim Shady EP, we figured out how to communicate with him,” Bass said. “Because he doesn’t come from a musical background. We had to figure out a way emotionally to get through to him. So how I approached it is, any song that had a happy feel we’d call a happy tune. Angry, sad, violent — we’d use adjectives to get through to him. So that he could write the type of lyrics that’d go with the track.”
Watch the interview below.
