TodayI started my research on Noah Shebib otherwise known as 40. Noah is a canadian producer and engineer best known for working with canadian super star Drake and also for the many songs he’s produced/co-produced like, Drakes Marvin’s Room, Dj Khaled’s I’m on One, Jamie Foxx’s “Fall For Your Type”, ASAP Rocky’s “Fuckin’ Problems”, Lil Wayne’s “I’m Single” and so on.

“I built this out of passion I didn’t build this off a business plan. This place is here to make history, it’s not here to make money,” 40 said of the studio. There is an advantage as well of working in Canada, he said, as big names don’t often stop by, allowing them to focus and reveal their work all at once. – Native Instruments Interview ~ 00:50 

When working on any of Drakes music, Noah tried to build character and emotion with his beats, in an Avid interview at around 04:10 Noah states that he doesn’t start his work process with a drum kit when making beats but the melody. He even uses samples however he sees them more of as a tool than anything else and tries not to rely on them too much when working, He could create a beat using the sample then remove the sample to get something wonderful, even though He likes using samples he just doesn’t want to rely on them as a producer.

When Noah works with an artists, in the Avid interview around 11:30 he says he starts from scratch with artists and that he really caters for the artist and doing the best they can to help deliver what the artist wants to deliver, for example is his relationship with Drake, when working on music together Drake would struggle because in his words, “Drake doesn’t hear the beat, he hears the spaces between the beat”, So knowing this Noah makes his beats with enough space in them for Drake to fill.

For Noah as a engineer, At around 7:45 minutes Noah says how he likes to take risks when making his beats and saying it’s okay to break the rules and be creative with music. In my opinion I would describe Noah’s sound as “sparse, ambient, slow-jam-like tracks dominated by brooding synths, minimalist piano or guitar parts, stripped-down, often muffled/underwater like drums, and cinematic atmospheric treatments. An example is the song “Marvins Room”, where Noah mixed the record so that it is very dark and quiet and muddy and with the vocals cutting through like a razor and is notorious for being heavy on the low end. However on the song Headlines which he produced for Drake in the Take Care Album, It was like the opposite and tried to make it loud with a lot of high end and barely any low end. In the Pensados’s Place interview around 09:04 minutes Noah says that in the rap world the kicks should crush you because thats the difference between a rap mix and a rock mix. at 7:20 he says that people always assume he uses a low pass filter when programming his drums however Noah says he don’t use a LPF to get that underwater effect but just cuts down the sample rate from 44.1/24 to something like 22.05/16. So what Noah does is he lowers the sample rate which reduces the quality of the sound. Th higher frequencies equates to higher hertz values for the wavelengths, and this leads to them being lost at lower sample rates. Lowering the sample rate also introduces “artifacts” into the sample which can include weird echoes that resonate in between the blank audio gaps of the lower sample rate. This is where you kind of observe low-pass-filter-like effects. I believe he uses this method not only to create a unique sound but also peace as he said before that Drake visualizes music. He sees music by hearing the gaps or spaces rather than what is already there. He uses these gaps and spaces as locations where he can fill up with his voice and create melodies.

“I’m actually degrading the sample rate,” he explains, “so I’m removing those frequencies from the top end. They’re not even getting sampled in the first place. They don’t even exist. When you take out that pristine high end and sort of lower the sample rate, it would become a little more authentic almost, different, like it was sampled or like it was taken from somewhere. The most important reason was back to what I was talking about about focusing on an artist versus focusing on myself as a producer, so instead of focusing on my music, I was carving out an entire space in the frequencies so the artist occupies the top end completely almost exclusively and the music sits in the bottom end. In a way that nobody would do it.” – Native Instruments Interview ~ 02:30

In a SOS online article it talks about Noah Shebib and Boi-1da and the recording behind Drakes track Headlines. In this article it says, The ‘Headlines’ session is meticulously organised, starting with a stereo track at the top containing Boi-1da’s original backing, then 10 drum tracks from Boi-1da, four 40 drum tracks, four Boi-1da music tracks consisting of one low arpeggio and three string tracks, six 40 synth tracks, a drum master track, 12 Drake vocal tracks and one Divine Brown vocal track, a Drake vocal master track and the same for Divine Brown, four aux tracks, a general vocal master track and a general music master track, and the final stereo master.

In this article Noah also talks about him using his laptop or pc to work he says, “I use both Mac and PC, and there’s a very important reason for this. I am a laptop guy, because I always want to have the ability to tweak my mixes when I leave a studio, wherever I am, just with my laptop and a set of headphones.” Noah continues and explains how in the rap game the lyrics are number one. He says, “In hip-hop, you must write your own raps. If someone else were to write them for you, you’d have no credibility whatsoever, and you’d be out of the window immediately. But when it comes to the music, there’s not really the same pride in writing it yourself. People don’t care who wrote it, or where it comes from or what the sample is, they just want the hottest beat.”

in the article it talks about working with other producers and how a common way of writing songs in hip-hop and R&B is to use a track written by another producer as a starting point, and in the case of ‘Headlines’, the starting point came from fellow Toronto producer Boi-1da who, with some help from one A. Palman, provided the basic string staccatos and synth arpeggios that resulted in a slightly more full-on and energetic arrangement than is usual for Drake. 40 elaborates: “Boi-1da sent us the beat as a stereo MP3, and Drake loved it, so I popped it into Pro Tools and Drake started going to town over it. He probably spent a couple of nights writing. I added quite a lot of stuff to it, like lead lines and extra basses and pads, some 808 rides, that sort of drive the record. All these additional tracks are marked ’40’ in the session.

Noah done the mixing for the Headlines track and in the mix he uses

Drums and bass: SSL desk EQ, SPL Transient Designer, Waves Renaissance Axe and Renaissance Bass, Avid Lo-Fi and Xpand!. 

Strings and keyboards: Pultec and SSL desk EQ, Avid Lo-Fi, Sansamp PSA1 and Xpand!, Waves GTR Solo.  

Vocals: Antares Auto-Tune, Waves Q8, De-esser, Renaissance EQ, Vox Compressor and SSL EQ, Bomb Factory Pultec EQP-1A, Avid Smack!

In the Pensado’s interview around 23:55 Noah says that he mixes for laptops because it’s something drake wanted and a lot of people these days listen off a laptop

References

Pensado’s Place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESUHhXgIaos&t=2628s

SOS Article: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/noah-40-shebib-recording-drakes-headlines

Native Instruments Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl23qnQQ3J0 / http://www.rap-up.com/2016/03/16/noah-40-shebib-talks-drake-underwater-sound/