“Dr. Dre especially would love if there was a way to have total isolation with live drums”: Trevor Lawrence Jr. on blurring the lines between acoustic kits and drum machines
“There’s a lot of gating and things, because he really likes everything to be isolated.”
Image: LautenAudio via YouTube
In a new video, beatmaking legend Trevor Lawrence Jr. dives into his relationship with longtime collaborator Dr. Dre as well as the latter’s “drum machine mentality” towards acoustic kits.
Speaking with Lauten Audio about his creative history with Dre, Lawrence says: [via MusicRadar]: “I met Dre in ‘93, right when he was gonna leave Death Row. He was gonna do an all-black heavy metal band, and I auditioned for it and got it. But then everything happened and it kind of just went away.”
“A couple of years later, he was doing Saturday Night Live and he remembered me, so he called me to go and do SNL. That was like, ‘96. In ‘98 we did it again because he’d released Chronic 2000.”
“Then there was a 10-year gap of just random sessions,” Lawrence recalls. “And in 2008 I’d just done my boy Everlast’s album and I was gonna MD him and go on the road. Then Dre called me for some sessions and was like, ‘Yo, what’s your availability?’”
“I was like, ‘I’m here for a few weeks before I start travelling.’, then it was sort of like the movies, I tell this story a lot. I went in the office and they literally put the cheque down, like ‘No. What’s your schedule?’.
“So from 2008 I was there as a producer, started making records with him and was in the control room. And then I never left.”
As for their approach to sound design, Lawrence explains: “There’s a drum machine mentality [towards acoustic drums]. A lot of times, Dre especially would love if there was a way to have total isolation with live drums. There’s a lot of gating and things, because he really likes everything to be isolated.”
Watch the full interview below.
