Content area
Full Text
If you thought Richard Carpenter had the densest collection of gold records in North America, drop into Flyte Tyme Studios sometime. Holy mint! Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have racked up so many plaques, trophies, and awards, they're practically run out of space to display them all.
And the accolades keep rolling in. Two decades since bursting onto the scene with the Time, Jam and Lewis are still on top of the charts-most recently with the Janet Jackson single "Doesn't Really Matter."
Here's what we learned during our tour of Flyte Tynne. From synths, samplers, and hard disk recording to the artists he and his colleagues produce, Jimmy Jam takes us inside his hit-- making world.
When last we spoke in 1995, you'd just finished "Scream" for Michael and Janet Jackson. What has changed at Flyte Tyme since then?
Probably the biggest change for us was getting into hard disk recording. Back when we did "Scream" we had a Synclav, and we had actually gotten into doing a lot of pre-production for tours going out. We did Janet's tour, Johnny Gill ... and a bunch of the artists who came through would end up with tracks on Synclav. Of course it's still a good tool, but we don't use it that much anymore. So technologically, the biggest thing that changed is we now have three [Digidesign] Pro Tools systems here. There's also an Otari RADAR in Studio A, which was Terry's personal recorder from his home studio. He liked it so much, he brought it down here. So we're in the process of purchasing a couple more of those.
I'm still very low-tech, though. That hasn't changed. I've always been. It takes me a while to really get into the technology side of things. But if something makes sense... if I can use something and there's not a big learning curve that requires me to really change my way of working, then, yeah, I'll upgrade. The RADAR seems to be a good way to work because it's set up just like a multitrack I tend to work on one project at a time, where Terry always has about four projects going simultaneously. So he wants to be able to call up a project and, boom,...