Engineer Alexis Seton
shows you homeboys
how to keep your house in order..

STORY kether gallu-badat | PHOTOGRAPHY Steven Barston

Hip-hop has always been known as a male-dominated sport. But don’t get it twisted—there are plenty of women making power moves behind the scenes. Meet Bronx representative Alexis Seton—one woman who controls the boards with the best of them. She cut her teeth interning at D&D studios, assisting at Quad studios, and then became head-tracking engineer at Puff’s Daddy’s House studio (2000-2005). “In college my major was recording technology and my professors would try to steer me away from it,” she remembers. “Even Puff would ask me little questions here and there about what I knew—things he wouldn’t ask the other engineers. As a woman you have to be 10 times better than the next dude.”
She’s earned her stripes working with top dogs like Mary J Blige, 8Ball & MJG, and Usher. After re-locating to Atlanta last year, she now adds Young Jeezy, Mr. Collipark, and D-12 to her ever-expanding client list as well. On a break from recording the new D-12 album, Alexis sat down with Scratch to shed a little light on how to make a home studio situation proper.

HOME-A-LOAN

It’s 2006—you don’t have to pay money for studio time anymore. $125 an hour adds up when mixing an album. Instead of paying someone else—pay yourself. For a good home studio, expect to pay around $10k. That might seem like a lot, but think about how much you save in the long run. I know people that record and mix in their home studios, they don’t have to go anywhere else. If you don’t care about sound quality you can walk into a store and ask for the cheapest thing that works, but if this is your career, take it seriously. A lot of A&Rs have good ears and if you give them something that doesn’t sound good it will turn them off—even if the content is hot. The more finished of a product you give someone, the better.

TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET

With most home studios, you are dealing with untreated rooms. My main client for the past nine months was [Young] Jeezy. He has a studio in his basement and it’s built up now, but when I started with him, the room was untreated, no closet, just concrete walls! If you have an untreated room and you cut vocals in a closet, I prefer to leave clothes in there—the clothes absorb more sound than Auralex foam, which a lot of people put on their walls. Jeezy didn’t have a closet so we put up a blanket and had the mic facing the blanket. When you put up a blanket, it dampens the low-mids. If you don’t put up a blanket, you will have a lot of reflection (frequencies bouncing off the walls) and you’ll pick up a lot of garbage tones. If you put a blanket up, try and have it hanging from the ceiling. You can put it up against a wall, but free standing is better. Jeezy had big monitors that looked like loudspeakers, so we hung the blanket from the top of the speakers. He might kill me for saying all this, but we were cutting vocals behind the blanket for a long time!

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