Q-Tip

Used for Q-Tip's verses on We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service, as can be seen in this photo from this article from the 2016 October/November issue of Complex.

Part of Q-Tip's 2008 inventory, as listed in his January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

Shure SM57 mics

Used to record Mark Colenburg's drumming for The Renaissance, as stated in Q-Tip's January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

Just as Open benefited enormously from the signature thwack-driven power of drummer Mark Colenburg, so too did the beats on The Renaissance — many of which were either reprocessed from the original sessions or based on recuts that Colenburg tracked using a Clavia ddrum SE-4 electronic drum kit. The kit has long been a favorite of Q-Tip's for its signature ability to compress drum sounds into a tube-warmed veil that maintains the snap of the original sample while creating a gritty, tape-baked sheen.

“I got hip to that just through searching,” Tip explains. “I have the Roland V-Drums, but with the ddrum, the way the brain processes the sound is just dope. I sampled and chopped up a lot of the drums on the album and then routed them through that. There's compression when you load sounds into the brain, so it really keeps the integrity of the drum sounds nice and even. Then we triggered everything up — I use a Ludwig Vistalite acoustic kit with a Black Beauty snare — and we'd run it through the ddrum and put that back in the room, as well. We'd have a monitor in the room and then mic that, too.”

Once Colenburg's original drum tracks — which were usually recorded with a pair of Coles 4038 ribbon mics and various combinations for the kick, snare and hi-hat — had been processed and loaded into the electronic kit, a live pass of ddrums would often be blended in or used to entirely replace the original. “It was a headache to get the sounds into it,” Wells recalls. “You had to use an old-style MIDI sample dump. But once they were in there, Mark would replay his original drum sounds to give us a take with no dynamics and just a solid groove all the way through. That allowed us to really integrate the drum kit itself between being a real kit and an electronic one. It was all Tip's idea originally, and Mark obviously had a lot of fun with it.”

Part of Q-Tip's 2008 inventory, as listed in his January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

AKG C 451, D 12 and D 112 drum mics

Part of Q-Tip's 2008 inventory, as listed in his January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

AKG C 451, D 12 and D 112 drum mics

Part of Q-Tip's 2008 inventory, as listed in his January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

Sennheiser MD421 dynamic mics

Part of Q-Tip's 2008 inventory, as listed in his January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

AKG C 451, D 12 and D 112 drum mics

The lack of specification and its inclusion with the vintage D12 suggests an original E version (given that the rest of the microphones are XLR, the 451 would be, too, most likely, as opposed to the DIN-based C version).

Part of Q-Tip's 2008 inventory, as listed in his January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

Lawson L47 mic

Part of Q-Tip's 2008 inventory, as listed in his January 2008 Remix interview. Transcripts can be found at the Future Producers forums (linked) and this Prince.org forum.

Manley Reference Gold vocal mic