“I didn’t really have one big break, it all came through my work with Kendrick,” explains Ali. What’s more, despite his home-schooled audio background, Ali prefers to mix in the analogue domain rather than ‘in the box’. To Pimp A Butterfly sounds like it had a dyed-in-the-wool engineer and mixer at the controls, not someone who very modestly claims that he’s still learning his craft. I often sat for 12-18 hours a day to hone my skills.” Becoming Top Dawg I tried to learn everything I could about recording, mixing and mastering techniques. The more I got into it, the more I wanted to know how the professionals did it. The fact that I could record somebody’s vocal and could manipulate it in all sorts of ways really intrigued me, so I started to explore engineering.
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Growing up there was very, very hard, but I managed to buy an Audio-Technica 2025 microphone for 100 bucks and an M-Audio Solo interface and I used them to record into Fruity Loops and Cool Edit Pro in which I created personal ringtones for people. “But I was a curious kid, and back in my neighbourhood there were these Nextel cell phones for which people wanted custom ringtones. “I never had the patience to actually learn to play an instrument or make a beat, or something like that,” recalls Ali. Ali’s rise to the very top of the American engineering and mixing world in the amazingly short time span of seven years is, by any standard, a remarkable achievement, especially as he grew up in extreme poverty, in the Gardena neighbourhood of LA. The two have been working together for Ali’s entire studio career: he also engineered and mixed Lamar’s first album Section.80 (2011) as well as Lamar’s commercial breakthrough and major-label debut Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (2012). Keeping everything together were relative rookie Derek ‘MixedbyAli’ Ali and Lamar himself. The album took more than three years to make, involving multiple studios in LA, New York, Washington and St Louis, as well as Lamar’s tour bus. Many of the tracks are stream-of-consciousness collages, which unexpectedly change musical styles, moods or tempi.
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A sprawling, intense piece of work, with 16 tracks clocking in at nearly 80 minutes, it is full of original, played and programmed music as well as samples, with the most important influences being jazz and the funk and soul music of the ’70s. Speaking from his Los Angeles home, Derek Ali still sounds a bit overcome by the success of Kendrick Lamar’s third album, To Pimp A Butterfly, which topped the UK and US charts and has enjoyed almost unanimous critical praise. But the response to Kendrick’s album has been crazy, and that people also notice the sound of the album, and therefore my work, is just amazing!” “I’m 25, I have been doing this for only seven years, and I’m still learning. Derek Ali was Lamar’s right-hand man during its making. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly is one of the most ambitious hip-hop albums of recent years.
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