Marcella Araica interview

Here's an interview of Marcella Araica aka Ms. Lago by mmusicmag.com.
Check the parts of it that mention Timbo:

How did you meet Danja?
I’d been working with Timbaland for a few years and he was thinking about retiring, so he brought in Danja to join the team and follow in his footsteps. The first time I met him in the studio, he walked over to Tim’s equipment and started messing around on the Korg Triton keyboard. In 10 minutes he created a beat that was phenomenal. I remember thinking, “Who is this kid?” Danja and I would be in the studio with each other for 12 hours a day, so we started growing with each other.

How did the partnership evolve?
Tim’s music would come out of the speakers and smack you in the face. The challenge with Danja in the beginning was that he could make phenomenal beats, but his music came out of the speakers sounding tiny. So I’d tell him, “Give me your parts and I’ll rough mix them for you and make them sound bigger than life.” Given that I had this studio at my fingertips 12 hours a day, I started mixing his music more and more and getting a feel for the sounds he likes. That’s how I became his sole engineer—I learned who he was as a producer. We met Keri Hilson a few months later when Tim signed her to his label [Mosley Music]. I have a 300GB hard drive of music that nobody will ever hear, because for the first six months we would just go into the studio and create. That’s how I got to learn Keri, and how I got to be such a big part of her music and album-making process. I became so familiar with her voice, recording and mixing, that Tim trusted nobody else to mix her vocals.

Recall your favorite sessions.
Working on the album Loose [2006] with Nelly Furtado was like family meeting at the clubhouse every day. All those records came out of a vibe session. I worked with Timbaland, [sound engineer] Demo and Danja on that project. Demo had a 64-channel SSL 9000 J mixing console and we were recording to two Pro Tools HD 4 systems. Danja and Tim would work on building tracks on their keyboards with headphones on—I’d be recording Danja and Demo would be recording Tim—so they wouldn’t know what each other was working on. But when it was time to put the tracks on the speakers and present what they’d made, it all made sense. There was a lot of, “Let’s put this part in here and shift this there,” and it would come together as a song. Then Nelly would come in and sing. The product that’s out there was based on vibe and pure free spirit. That was one of my favorite projects.

for the whole interview, visit mmusicmag.com.

Interesting to read that Timbaland got Danja to his camp to step into his footsteps because Tim thought about retiring...
And damn, I wanna hear those Keri songs on this 300 GB hard-drive!


props to Ed from the Danja Blog!