Kendrick Lamar

Derek Ali’s engineering skills were tested by the amount of live recording that took place in the making of To Pimp A Butterfly. “I mostly use our Stephen Paul-modified Telefunken U47 to record Kendrick, going through a Neve 1073 mic pre and then a Tube-Tech CL1B compressor, which gives a great, fat, warm vocal sound, especially in conjunction with the U47. Sometimes I’ll run his vocals through a Pultec EQP-1A3. On ‘Alright’ I used a U67 instead of a U47 on his voice and on ‘For Free?’ two Electro-Voice mics, the RE20 and the 666. We stacked the two EV mics on top of each other, and this gave a warm, almost distorted sound.

"[Kendrick]'s also had a studio in his tour bus ever since we were on tour for the first album. If he didn’t have that, he’d be recording in GarageBand! So we made it easier for him, and set up this studio in the bus, with a simple setup, consisting of a Pro Tools HD rack, two mics, the Sony C800G and a Telefunken U47 and an Avalon mic pre. Nothing crazy, just stuff that allows us to get down ideas"

Item can be seen at 1:19

Engineer Derek Ali on recording To Pimp a Buterfly : "On ‘For Free?’ [we used] two Electro-Voice mics, the RE20 and the 666. We stacked the two EV mics on top of each other, and this gave a warm, almost distorted sound."

Engineer Derek Ali on recording To Pimp a Buterfly : "On ‘Alright’ I used a U67 instead of a U47 on [Kendrick's] voice."

Engineer Derek Ali on recording To Pimp a Buterfly : "On ‘For Free?’ [we used] two Electro-Voice mics, the RE20 and the 666. We stacked the two EV mics on top of each other, and this gave a warm, almost distorted sound."

A picture of Kendrick Lamar using the SKM 9000 at Coachella Festival in 2017.

During the Super Bowl halftime show, Kendrick Lamar uses the Sound Devices A20-HH Astral Series Wireless Handheld Microphone, as identified by Reddit user Rhythmicbasher.

Kendrick Lamar is confirmed to use the Sennheiser MK4 microphone for recording his vocals in the song "Pyrex (It's Alive)" with Dr. Dre, as evidenced by a Beats by Dre commercial spot. The specific moment showcasing this occurs at 0:23 in the video by Parox on YouTube.

In the header photo of the article by Regina Cho on VIBE.com, Kendrick Lamar is seen holding a microphone that can be identified as the Lewitt W9 Wireless Condenser Microphone Capsule, recognizable by its prominent logo. Latto used the same microphone during the show and was seen with the W9 also at other shows