Back in the day when I was a gear head and trolled the local Guitar Center to hear
the latest sounds and effect boxes, I came across the latest issue of Keyboard magazine with Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis on the cover. They were 2 people that I had admired as musicians as well as songwriters. After seeing Donnie Simpson interview them I knew they were open and liked to talk about the details of the recording process. I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up the mag and started reading the article.

They talked about their work with Janet, collaborations, how they didn’t view themselves as producers in the classical sense, and their ongoing work on the new Time record (Pandemonium).

They caught Jam & Lewis right after they moved to their new recording facility.
One of the things that struck me was when they described their production techniques as low-tech. I had always assumed they were on the cutting edge of technology especially when I listened to the work they were doing in regards to Janet. The interviewer asked Jam what kind of keyboards they liked and used and his response was, “old stuff”.
They were still using the older Oberheims OB-8s and Arp Omnis on a lot of the records they were producing.
They had a Synclavier which they had since being at the old facility but Jam admitted to not really using it on Janet’s Rhythm Nation album. They were just beginning to start getting into it since being settled in at the new spot. Funny because I used to think that in order to sound good, you had to have the latest crap that was out. I remember finding out late in the game that Prince was still using a Linn on SOTT. The way he pitched the drum samples on some of those tracks made it sound like a new drum machine to me. He knew how to squeeze every ounce out of those boxes back then. It just went to prove you didn’t have to have the latest, just be effective and creative with it.

The interviewer asked how they got started producing and Jam explained with a funny story about how they faked their way through at the beginning while in the presence of another seasoned vet. He said that he and Lewis weren’t, at that time, producers in the classical sense of, say a Quincy Jones. Q could receive a finished song and then take it to the next level where they felt their strength was in the songwriting and then producing what they wrote. Jam also revealed that all of the songs they had left over from projects basically had gone unused except for one. They never reverted back to the vault when working with new artists.

Jimmy talked about the work they did on the Rhythm Nation album and how each of them came up with different ideas for the different songs. Janet’s insistence on real strings on one of the songs proved to be the right decision after Jimmy had originally said the electronic strings would work best. Jellybean was the one who helped Janet with Black Cat and Jam mentions how Jellybean had just discovered this new group called Mint Condition.

The fact that this article had transcribed some of Rhythm Nation as well had me sold even further. I couldn’t wait to get this mag home to try to play and sequence some of those snippets. Overall, this was a great article and I was pleased they were still open to talking about their limitations and weaknesses as well as the music and their recording/production techniques. I had a Musician and Rolling Stone mag from 1990 w/Prince on the cover. One of them had him talking about Graffiti Bridge and the song Schoolyard but I lost that one somewhere. Anybody got that?

sounds like a very good article, I love them as producers, and RN is amazing start to finish, janet's perfect album

"Is MIDI enough for the '90s?"