August 9, 201113 yr Hey Guys, I just heard Beyonce's new album - 4, and I must say - I'm a bit disapointed... I only like 2 song in this album: Run The World http://tramusica.blogspot.com/2011/07/beyo...rld-lyrics.html 1+1 http://tramusica.blogspot.com/2011/07/beyo...1-1-lyrics.html Aw that's a disapointment - Don't you like Best Thing I Never Had or End of Time ? :( It's a real grower though, I didn't like the album at first but now I really like it :D
August 10, 201113 yr Aah! I love that she's shooting videos for loads of album tracks again. :D 'End of Time' and 'Countdown' are the two which I'm most looking forward to. :D
August 10, 201113 yr The tickets for the first night of the 4 Intimate Nights With Beyoncé concerts went on sale today and sold out in 22 seconds.
August 15, 201113 yr That performance of Countdown was wicked! I'm guessing this era is all about the wind machine though..
August 15, 201113 yr That performance of Countdown was wicked! I'm guessing this era is all about the wind machine though.. All her eras are about the wind machine. :lol:
August 15, 201113 yr I thought the wind machine was to keep her cool while dancing? :P I love the choreography for 'End of Time'. Really liked 'Countdown' swell, the crowd singing was nice. :)
August 15, 201113 yr I thought the wind machine was to keep her cool while dancing? :P It is. She's always got to have her fans working. I've seen numerous clips of her actually kicking the fans when they're not working, and gesturing to people to come and fix them. :lol:
August 17, 201113 yr Inside the Recording of 4. It only seems as though Beyoncé has been a superstar forever. Since her days fronting the hit machine known as Destiny's Child in the late '90s, she has conquered the world with her four solo albums—selling 75 million records and picking up 16 Grammys along the way—triumphed on a succession of increasingly extravagant tours, been praised for her acting in several major feature films, launched successful fashion and fragrance lines, and become one of the highest-paid commercial spokespeople in the U.S. Her latest album, 4, was an instant smash when it was released in late June while she was on tour in France; two days after it came out, she headlined the Glastonbury Festival in England in front of 170,000 people. She's beautiful, talented, independent—and driven. One reason Beyoncé has ascended to these lofty heights is that she is a perfectionist with a fierce work ethic. To quote a previous generation's R&B giant, she works hard for the money. And that includes the many long days and nights she puts into recording her albums. This isn't some diva who pops into the studio after everything has been tracked, lays down some lead vocals and then splits. Instead, she's involved with co-writing most of the songs she sings, often has very specific arrangement ideas, and is always deeply invested in the album's production. Like so many contemporary R&B albums, 4 is loaded with songs by multiple writers and producers, many of them high-wattage hit-makers, including The-Dream, Babyface, Kanye West, Switch, Tricky Stewart, Jeff Bhasker, Shea Taylor, Symbolyc One (S1) and others. "The majority of the album, we would bring writers in and B [beyoncé] and I would be in one room, and then we'd have one or two writers in one or two other rooms working on things," says Jordan "DJ Swivel" Young, who was the principal engineer throughout the project, which stretched out over a year. "I think there was a period of about three months where we had three rooms going at MSR [Manhattan Sound Recording]. But at every studio, we'd usually have two rooms going. We'd bring different writers in for a week or whatever. Dream would come in, Jeff Bhasker came in, and they would write and they might already have some tracks together, or Shea Taylor would come up with tracks, and when they were done with the records they would play them for B and she would add ideas of her own, mold the lyrics to fit her and then we'd start cutting them. "Shea Taylor was sort of the day-to-day producer, so a lot came from him," Swivel adds. "If B wanted to add a bridge section, she would give it to Shea and he would go and add the parts. He wasn't one of the guys who came in for just a couple of weeks; he was there every day. But B ultimately produced the album. She's very hands-on with everything, lyrically and musically. If there's something she doesn't like about a track, we're pulling the track apart and fixing it. A lot of it is B getting her ideas out and then having a team around her to help execute those ideas. But everything was very collaborative and open. It was sort of like 'the best idea wins.'" Originally from Toronto, the 26-year-old Swivel had some DJ and production experience in his hometown before earning a Recording Arts degree at Full Sail University in Florida. Two days after graduation, he took the leap and moved to New York City, a place where he knew no one. After a brief internship with a jazz studio, Full Sail's placement program found him an opportunity closer to his own musical interests—working as an assistant in the private studio of Desert Storm Records CEO and one of the hottest mixer/engineers in New York, Ken "Duro" Ifill, whose voluminous credits include Jay-Z, Mariah Carey, Ludacris, Busta Rhymes, DMX, Diddy and scads of others. "Everything I learned there was from watching Duro do it and seeing how he interacts with clients, how he mixes a record," Swivel says. "I assisted a hundred or more of his mixes. It was really beneficial having such a good mentor to learn from." It was one of Duro's artists, Fabolous, who gave Swivel his first big shot at engineering: on the 2006 album From Nothin' to Somethin'. "When I did that, I was still assisting Duro at the same time, but eventually the engineering took up so much of my time I stopped assisting. And then in 2010 I got the Beyoncé call. "The way the whole B thing happened," he continues, "a friend of mine, Omar Grant, who had worked with Beyoncé during the Destiny's Child days, gave me a call, and said, ‘Listen, she needs a fill-in today, can you do it?' So I showed up at Roc the Mic [studios in Manhattan], and we recorded the song 'Party' [written primarily by Kanye West]. At the end of the session, she said, 'You did a great job, you're really fast.' Several weeks later I got another call, came in and did a few more days. It was that week that she began discussing the beginning stages of the album with A&R [and Roc Nation exec] TyTy. We basically started the next week." The writing and recording process on 4 encompassed numerous studios along the way, including MSR (used the most), Roc the Mic, KMA, Germano Studios and Jungle City (Swivel's current favorite haunt) in New York; Conway in L.A.; various producers' rooms; and even a few overseas. When Beyoncé's husband, Jay-Z, toured Australia and New Zealand opening for U2's 360 Tour this past December, she and Swivel showed up for a nearly two-week stretch in Sydney, during which Jay-Z had planned to do some recording with West on their forthcoming Watch the Throne disc. Two makeshift studios were built inside a Sydney mansion, with Jay-Z and West working in the living room, and Beyoncé and Swivel ensconced in the top-floor's home theater space working on her album. "We had a basic [Pro Tools] HD rig, all the plug-ins I needed and a [Lexicon] 960. There was no booth. I recorded her on headphones and strategically placed the mic and had a reflection filter to take care of some of those issues. There was actually no problem." Swivel's chain for Beyoncé's vocals throughout the album was a vintage AKG C24 stereo mic (using only one capsule) through an Avalon 737 mic pre and a UA 1176 compressor. Another foreign jaunt—also connected to the Jay-Z and West project—took Beyoncé and Swivel to Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Bath, England. While Jay-Z and West were in the main studio, Beyoncé was in Gabriel's personal room, "which is like a musical toy factory," Swivel says, "with instruments all over the walls, keyboards hanging from the ceiling. It's such an amazing creative space, and the little village there looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings." Once again, vocal recording was the focus of their work. Vocals, obviously, take center stage on all of Beyoncé's albums—her supple, three-plus octave voice is quite astonishing, and she takes great pride in arranging and performing the lush, sometimes silky layers of background vocals that are part of her signature sound. Asked about Beyoncé's vocal stamina in the studio, Swivel responds, "She's good for as many takes as she needs, but she's also one of the best singers in the world, so she doesn't require that many takes. Recording vocals with her is actually the easiest part because I'm fast enough that I can keep up. Usually, we'll cut a whole song very quickly—we can cut a song in an hour, two hours at the most. I remember there was one time we worked for 36 hours straight and we cut six songs in their entirety—backgrounds, lead vocals, comps, everything. She's so talented when it comes to cutting vocals. "The more stressful thing is executing all the production ideas she has because she'll bring a horn section or a string section and live drummer and bass and we'll do all this in one day—getting all that set up and making sure the mics are there and everything is running smoothly with no hiccups." Actually, the bulk of the music on 4's 12 songs is electronic, generated by various synths and beat machines, twisted by plug-in processing and occasionally combined with more organic traditional instruments. For someone so embedded in the mainstream of popular music, Beyoncé is not afraid to take chances. What seems on the surface to be a ballad-heavy R&B album actually has quite a lot of radical sonic underpinnings on most songs. The primal first single—"Run the World (Girls)"—erupts from a sample of Major Lazer's odd dancehall tune "Pon De Floor" and is almost entirely made up of drums, electronic effects and vocals; hardly your usual radio fare (and indeed, the song was not a hit). Another strong tune, "I Care", begins with a haunting mix of just looped percussion, a keyboard and Beyoncé's lead vocal, then opens up into a much larger musical landscape: "In the hook there's a horn section and she used a lot of baritone sax mixed with a synth to create a new kind of instrument," Swivel says admiringly. "One of the cool things on that song is she riffed the entire guitar solo, so her vocal is matching the guitar solo perfectly. It's a genius idea and she totally pulls it off. She's pushing the boundaries of music and experimenting with all sorts of things." A whopping 70-plus songs were cut during the course of the sessions, with the work of many top writers and producers left by the wayside (for the time being), so who knows what the really weird stuff sounds like! With so many writers and producers involved, there's always the danger of the finished album sounding disjointed—the "too many cooks" syndrome. Pro Tools sessions came from many sources, but "everything kind of went through me," Swivel says. "If Shea added parts, he would bounce them and send them to me, and if other producers were sending parts, I'd add them, and, of course, all the vocals. Everything was added and pieced together on my central sessions." Beyoncé's lead vocals and backing arrangements are a reliable thread throughout, and Taylor's musicality was obviously a steady, grounding presence. The main mixers are among the best in the business—Tony Maserati and Serban Ghenea—and they seemed to be in sync, as well. (Swivel mixed "I Care" and "Schoolin' Life", a tune off the exclusive Target double-CD version, which also contains three remixes of "Run the World.") "As we got closer to the end," Swivel notes, "there was a lot of work molding the album. It was about creating a cohesive sound and making a timeless record. I feel like the best albums have a sound and direction. I think we achieved that here, and were able to make an album that will stand the test of time."http://mixonline.com/recording/tracking/be...e_4/index2.html
August 18, 201113 yr YES. I seriously don't understand how some people aren't feeling it (plus how some/most never liked 'Run the World'?)! I still think it is her worst single ever :( :puke2: Even more so than the super bland Me, Myself and I!
August 19, 201113 yr I've seen numerous clips of her actually kicking the fans I always knew this bitch was evil.
August 25, 201113 yr Once my K-Ro singles rate has finished, so get in that thread! :P It's time :kink: I have my 11 at the ready for Start Over!
August 29, 201113 yr I finally got around to listening to this the entire way through, and I must say... Incredible. Why this is her worst performing era singles-wise is BEYOND me. Although actually, maybe not. This is a purely cohesive album. It reminds me of Kanye's MBDTF in that way, because while single tracks are great, they really make much sense in the context of each other. I may be rambling, but I'm just in shock at how good this album is. Even Run the World sounds great with the rest, and I DESPISED that song when it came out. On initial listen, I'd have to rate: 1. 1+1 2. Love On Top 3. Party 4. Countdown 5. I Care/End of Time
August 29, 201113 yr VMAs performance of 'Love on Top': ZdXJ9g5YSgk A great performance :wub: The song's always been one of my favourites from the album, too, so it's nice to see her performing it. I loved seeing all the celebrities in the audience singing along it too :lol:
August 29, 201113 yr So.. is the era still continuing? And if so, THAT better not be the next single.
August 29, 201113 yr So.. is the era still continuing? And if so, THAT better not be the next single. Why wouldn't the era continue? And I'd personally love that to be the next single, as I feel it's one of the best songs on the album. ^_^
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