Raised in a musical family, Willie Green got his first drum machine and a Casio keyboard at the age of eight, and he’s been making records ever since!
At age 15, Green was part of his uncle’s R&B/Reggae band, playing drums in clubs he wasn’t even old enough to legally step inside. His lifelong passion for hip-hop gained its first serious outlet while attending Berklee College Of Music in Boston. He graduated with a degree from the Music Production & Engineering department, as well as a reputation in the Boston underground scene as a talented beat-maker/producer and engineer.
Check out some of Willie Green’s recent production/mixing/mastering work below:
In 2007, Green moved to Brooklyn, NY where he started his career and built an impressive résumé of production and engineering credits: Wiz Khalifa, The Roots, Roc Marciano, Open Mike Eagle, Billy Woods, and Murs, among others. In addition to his hip-hop work, Green has also been a part of the R&B and Gospel worlds, working with artists like Donnie McClurkin, Valerie Simpson, Corina Corina, and Barrie McLain.
Building on this foundation, Willie Green has released two albums of his own: Blue as Green Can Be (2010) and Doc Savage (2016). The latter combines a wide range of influence with hip-hop mastery to create an epic featuring some of the finest in independent music including Milo, Denmark Vessey, Open Mike Eagle, and Billy Woods, amongst others.
Willie Green is very much dedicated to the art of making records, and his name has become synonymous with quality music making. Whether it’s production, mixing, or mastering, he maintains the highest standards, and the results of that dedication speak through his work.
As an active member of the pro audio community, Green works closely with the International Audio Engineering Society as a frequent speaker and panelist for the annual AES Pro Audio Convention, and now serves as a Hip-Hop and R&B Chair for the AES New York Chapter. Just last year he presented as a main panelist alongside Tony Masterati at the New York Mix Con 2019.
Just this year, Willie Green executive produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered a self-titled album by hip-hop artist ShrapKnel.
Please enjoy this amazing Skype conversation with Paul “Willie Green” Womack!
You’ll find a complete transcription of our chat below:
Warren Huart:
Hi everybody, hope you’re doing marvelously well, I’m with Paul “Willie Green” Womack. How are you my friend?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
I’m wonderful, how are you?
Warren Huart:
I’m good, I’m good. I suppose the first obvious question is why Paul “Willie Green” Womack? Because that’s two different lives, one is an artist, one is a producer.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
It’s funny, the rap name is very much tradition within our genre, primarily, I make hip hop. And forever we’ve always had that stage name and that was part of it, a superhero has their cape, that’s your rap name. So I was Willie Green for a long time, but then sure, I would have non-rap gigs or corporate gigs and that didn’t quite work the same way so now we’ve kind of combined both then I’m very active in the AES, so that’s more of a Paul Womack gig but I still do rap thing every day, so I’m still Willie.
Warren Huart:
So in your AES you put on your grownup jacket and you become Paul, “Hi Paul Womack.”
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Exactly, you got to get the blazer. And we’ve all been to the conventions, got to get the convention blazer on and then you’re ready.
Warren Huart:
Fantastic, how did you settle on Willie Green for an artist name?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Ooh, that’s a great question. Back in college, me and the homeys, we all had like a lot, I think we were all up to 20 rap names for a while, some were real terrible, I was nearly Paulie Corleone, which nobody… I mean, I wouldn’t be here today if I had been Paulie Corleone 20 years ago. So I got lucky and the good ones stuck.
Warren Huart:
Great, Willie Green, I think if I heard it, I’d probably think blues coming from the UK, I’d probably think like a blues guitar player and singer that sort of conjures up to me.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Sure, it does have that vibe. Actually, I got it from the old blaxploitation movie, Dolomite. The villain in that movie is Willie Green. I was like, “That just sounds cool.” He’s cool he’s driving his big fancy car and that just really linked up for me so that’s the one I went with.
Warren Huart:
No, that’s fantastic. Where are you based?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
I’m based in Brooklyn. I was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, but I’ve been in Brooklyn for almost 15 years now and so yeah, just settled in and doing this thing here.
Warren Huart:
And you produce, do you have a separate studio or do you have the studio where you live?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Generally, separate studio. As many of us are doing now I’m set up at home. This is my home bedroom studio as a lot of us are doing. But in general, in regular life I do have a separate space because it’s nice to get up and leave the house, and even if it’s a short distance or a far distance, that’s separation of work and life for me is really important.
Warren Huart:
My studio is behind my house, so sort of six and half-a-dozen of the other. I was just on a business call before we started and my five-year-old daughter came in and gave me a donut. So it’s like there’s definitely some positives. But I understand what you mean, it’s nice to have some separation.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
But even that walk, just that I’m leaving the house and I’m going over here it’s a different thing. For the first eight years, I lived in this apartment, our second bedroom was my studio. And so it’s great, quick commute, the cats hanging out, it’s really just friend coming over to come and jam, and that’s cool. But there’s a certain threshold of how professional you can seem when the litter box is over there and we got to stop cutting vocals because my wife comes home from work, which is her right more than my right to make records in the living room. So we’ve got to find that balance.
Warren Huart:
Absolutely, yeah. I know what you mean. And then just either from a creative perspective it’s something we all experience, it’s like when you’re in a zone, somebody walks in the room at which they entitled to do, say your wife wants to come in and say hi, she’s been at work for eight hours, hasn’t seen you. “Hi honey.” And you’re in the middle of a mix and you’re like… it’s really hard. Sometimes I find myself not liking myself and the way I respond and then being like, “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to be sure.” Or apologizing that evening, when you came in, I was like, “Yeah, uh-huh.” It’s really difficult because we’re so focused and it’s hard to get back to that place, it almost takes 20 minutes for the 30 seconds to get back to the place.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
It’s so true, I’m the same way. And often my wife will be like, “Well, that was a lot of attitude before.” And I just get in that way, I don’t want to be bothered when I’m right in that zone and especially if it’s like doing vocal rides or something. I’m trying to get the rest of the world to disappear and so yeah, I get that way too. Yes, indeed.
Warren Huart:
So what do you have in your home setup? Is that a pair of Adam’s you’ve got going on there?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, I’m a big Adam fan, I’ve been working with them for a little while, so I [inaudible 00:04:53] the A3Xes. So keep it small, but I’ve got a subwoofer over in the corner here. I work on bass-heavy music and my neighbors are cool so they don’t mind that I have, I don’t go too crazy with it and I just let them know, “Hey, just give me a knock and let me know if it’s too much.”
Warren Huart:
Do you find that you are working increasingly on headphones?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
A bit, definitely more, I don’t love to work in headphones all the time. I like to put them on a bit because that’s how so many people are now listening to music, it’s more headphones than anything, so I got to check in there. But for me, I like moving air and the energy in the room. So I will when I need to be polite to people but if I can turn up, I’d rather do that on some speaker.
Warren Huart:
Give me a little bit of a story of how you got here, were you producing the tracks that you were performing on? Is that how it sort of grew organically from being a producer of your own music, or did you discover production by being an artist that went to a studio?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
A little bit of all of that? My uncle is a musician, and so from a young age he brought me up playing in bands. When I was born, he told my mother, “Hey, I need a drummer.” And I happened to just kind of go that route. So by the time I was 15, he’s sneaking me into clubs and I’m playing and then sitting out in the van on set breaks, that kind of thing.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
So I grew up as a musician but he also had a studio. So I would go over and hang out with him and just see what he was doing. And then it’s like, “Oh, okay, I want to hit these buttons too, I want to press the buttons.” So that sent me off in that path and I did the Berklee thing. And I was hard-headed and I was like, “I don’t want to go be someone’s assistant, I’m going to open my own studio,” which was smart but also challenging and it’s just the path that I took. So I’ve been kind of doing that and building my own studio in various ways for the past 20 years.
Warren Huart:
It’s very similar to me, I mean, I was the same way, I like having assistants and I beat them up pretty heavily to get them to do great stuff. But the reality is I relate to that, I was an artist and I wanted to have studios. I listened to albums that had amazing production that inspired me so I always wanted to be involved in that. In fact, I think I fell in love with the production before anything else, to be honest, before even knowing that girls might like you if you’re in a band, it was pre that it was pretty puberty, if you like, so I relate to that.
Warren Huart:
I also think your journey is the way that everybody has to do it now. I mean, the amount of studios, there’s still studios around, especially in Brooklyn there’s a very vibrant bunch of studios where you are. But at the same time, it’s still a fraction of what they used to be. So the opportunity to come in as an intern/assistant is pretty rare these days. So your journey is what most people watching here are being forced to do, have no choice.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Absolutely, I’ve got a small studio, it’s one room and I got a nice sized booth and whatever, and I’m mostly producing and mixing kind of vocals there, but I do like to have an assistant, at the moment I actually have two. That training that you get one on one with somebody, that’s the part that you can’t get on the internet. You can learn a lot about the procedures, being in the room on a session and seeing that energy and how to interact, that’s producing, that’s engineering, it’s not just the knobs. So I do like to bring people in to learn and be able to get that experience too.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, I agree. And I feel like probably when we both first started, there was probably a clear delineation between a producer and an engineer, now I think that’s-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
That’s out the window.
Warren Huart:
That’s out the window, there’s still engineers and I remember the best engineers I worked with, they were amazing because they got the best sounds and they had zero opinion. The producer and the band would be like, “Hey, we’re trying to get this, this and this.” And then that engineer would just conjure up that sound, put the mic in the right place, and God bless it, and it kept the momentum going, but now you are everything, you’re the producer, the engineer, you’re probably the co-writer more often than not, you’re probably playing instruments, which sort of leads me, one of the things that struck me, you were talking about playing drums at 15 in clubs.
Warren Huart:
I often say to people, if I was starting again, I started as a guitar player, which is fantastic, I love guitar. But if I was starting again, I would be a drummer and a piano player because I feel like those are the two elements for production that are really… once I started playing drums, albeit very badly, but once I started playing drums and started playing piano, everything in my understanding went up because with piano you’ve got melody and harmony simultaneously, plus throw in the baseline. And then drums, wow, it’s like completely changes your world if you can actually figure out the groove of a track.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Absolutely, I fully agree. If you can master those, I would even say if guitar or piano, something that covers all of the melodic and harmonic end of things, if you have one of those you really kind of have understanding for… it opens up your understanding for arrangement and for composition and so much more. You don’t have to be a virtuoso, but when you have the understanding it just unlocks everything else.
Warren Huart:
Absolutely, so for you, because you’ve got a unique position because in a world of a lot of modern hip hop and EDM in particular, there’s almost zero organic instruments. There was a period, obviously, if you go back to the, well, 80s and mid-90s, where there was a lot of sampling, it was very predominant in that period, I noticed a lot less of that now. Although I think something still exists, but probably into Ableton and so mangled that you don’t really know.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Well, you got to twist everything, you got to freak everything now because here’s the thing, DJs don’t break records anymore, Netflix and HBO break records. And if you want those placements, you can’t have those samples in there as clearly as they used to do. I’ve got a stack of records in my closet, six waist-high stacks that I don’t touch because I don’t sample anymore like that.
Warren Huart:
Right, I sort of miss those days though in a way because-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Oh, I do.
Warren Huart:
There was something grainy and beautiful about the period of mid-80s to mid-90s, which was just so special and I loved it. And I loved also when you’re stealing things, and I know it’s a big word to say stealing, but I did it. You take a loop, it will have a groove. It will have a slight wrongness to it, which just is so beautiful to hear.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
That’s the head nod, is the wonkiness in there, yeah.
Warren Huart:
So I suppose my question is you’ve got an advantage, you’re a drummer, you’ve got enough knowledge, you’ve been surrounded by music your whole life, when you’re in a more whatever the word is, sterile environment or just a keyboard in your room, how do you bring in? What do you do that brings it in that gives it that looseness, that feel, that groove, that swing, whatever the word we want to say is?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
So even just within the drums, I may quantize things a little bit different. Like my snare is going to be mostly right there but the hi-hats, I might even just a slight different quantize percentage just to give them a little bit different light because if I’m playing drums, my right hand may not be synced exactly with my left hand, so that’s my hats and my snare drum. So if I’m programming drums, I don’t have to link them exactly the same because that’s where the humanity comes into it. Sometimes you want that if you’re doing the fast trap hi-hats, maybe you don’t want to shift those so much because they’re so busy so maybe you lay the snare back a little bit or you do something with the kick just to give a little bit of push and pull within the drums. But then harmonically, I mean, I have the most rudimentary of keyboard skills. I can play the chords [crosstalk 00:12:59]-
Warren Huart:
I’ve been there.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
But something, and it’s really stuck with me, my buddy, Prince Charles Alexander, said to me sometime while back, he was like, “Records aren’t even as much about chords and specific notes as they are about textures and vibes and feelings now.” So I’ve been really into this concept of just ambient loops where if you take four bars, or 20 seconds or whatever of any sound, if you loop that long enough, you’ll begin to find rhythmic patterns in there just naturally by whatever crickets or creeks or whatever might’ve been in there, I find that cool, let’s find that interesting loop and put that with something that’s straight and let those work against each other.
Warren Huart:
That’s great, I like that a lot.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, for me, the weirder the better. I make what’s called art rap and is avant-garde hip hop and we go as far as we can. So yeah, what is weird and it makes you scrunch your face and listen again because you don’t know what happened, that’s when I did my job.
Warren Huart:
I like that. Now, you’re going to make me scour through your whole catalog now you just… that’s it. For me, there’s extremes, isn’t there? I almost feel like it’s easy to do the extremes; to be completely over the top and just make absolutely no sense and total art. And then, of course, it’s quite easy to just write a vi-IV-I-V song and the melody almost writes itself. Let’s be honest, there’s a sense of predictability in the extremes, but then there’s this little tiny piece in the middle where it crosses and that’s where the genius is, where you can have extreme art and also like, “Wow, what was that? That was so… I’ve got to hear that again.”
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Right, I really think you have to have both because if everything is just completely left field, okay cool, you’re doing weird stuff, but people are not going to know how to even approach it because it’s so far out. They have to have some of that familiarity so they know how weird the weird is.
Warren Huart:
Sure, yes. So for you, so you grew up in a musical family, outside of that, what were your inspirations? What got you making music? Obviously it’s surrounding you, but I’m sure, I know I grew up in an art family. My dad was a painter and a sculptor, so I grew up surrounded by art. So I did like what he liked but I’m a kid so I rebelled and I started liking the most random stuff like super-modern-art when he was a realist that kind of stuff. So what was the things for you that got you going outside of that?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
I grew up very much in the hip hop thing. I’m a 80s baby, I was born in ’81, so hip hop has been my life. I came of age in that early 90s period, so all that stuff is embedded in me. But I was also a jazz drummer, so I was very focused on that, and I loved big band and then, of course, the combo thing. Outside of music, I was a big basketball guy and so I’ve kind of focused on that and separated but I had pretty diverse musical genres in my life. And then I played with my uncle, that was the R&B and reggae cover band; we were a dance band, so that stuff always… it’s just ingrained in me, if I can make you dance, then I won, that was the lesson I learned from doing that. So I try to take as many-
Warren Huart:
What reggae covers?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Again, it was a dance band so there’s a lot of Bob Marley, of course, but we did a lot of Peter Tosh and Dennis Brown, I mean everyone will do the famous Bob Marley’s stuff, we dug into vaults a little bit too, we got a little Steel Pulse in there.
Warren Huart:
Oh, I was about to say Handsworth Revolution, that’s one of my favorite records, yeah.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, so we would definitely stretch out. But again, as we were talking about, we’re a cover band who’s playing clubs on Friday night, we also got to give them the hits and then you sprinkle in the sauce to let them know what they’re missing. So it was a lot of that but I have a classical background too.
Warren Huart:
Bob Marley is that guy, isn’t he? Because Marley’s the guy that does what we just talked about, he’s one of the most credible artists that ever lived with a really strong message that also wrote freaking songs you could sing along with, you know what I mean?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, that balance is so rare, it’s so, so rare.
Warren Huart:
My hairs were standing. You’re thinking like, Could You Be Loved, whenever that comes on the radio, it’s just like, you cannot stop dancing whether you’re driving, whether you’re sitting. I mean, it’s infectious.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, if you don’t dance to that song, I can’t trust you.
Warren Huart:
Very true. Yeah, there’s just certain things… that’s beautiful. So as a jazz drummer, that’s quite fantastic. Do you have any heroes that you would obsess about?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, Bob, specifically, Max Roach because he was so musical, so melodic. When you listen to a Max Roach solo, a lot of times drum solos is all crash, crash, all that. No, he’s playing melodies, he’s referencing the melody from the head of the tune, he’s bringing things back and it’s just like, “Wow, you’re taking what people…” Well, a percussion instrument people just think is banging and you’ve made it melodic and so that fascinated me. And then Art Blakey, and it’s just the pocket and the shuffle, the Blakey shuffle is just the comfiest thing in the world. I don’t have sweat pants that comfy, you just lay back in there.
Warren Huart:
I feel like jazz drumming, if anybody’s watching here and they’re a drummer and they play any… whatever genre you play, definitely go back to the greats of jazz drumming because I think one of the things… I had a discussion with this with Simon Phillips, who’s obviously a great drummer and very technical, very accomplished drummer and we were talking about Ringo. And the thing about Ringo was, is he grew up in an era of jazz. As much as we think, “Oh yeah, Beatles, 60s.” the reality is most of the music you would have heard in the UK in the 50s, 40s and 50s as a child would have been jazz, that’s what he would have heard, big band. So he was listening to drummers, because people say what makes Ringo unique, now Ringo wasn’t technically… but what he was, he was a song drummer like… where drumming now seems to be a groove and then the parts are on top of it.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
And then fill, right, sure.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, and then fills, exactly. And there is Ringo playing the song because for every Chuck Berry record he listened to, he listened to nine jazz records where the drummers, as you were saying, what Max Roach would do is playing the song with everybody else.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
That’s absolutely right, that’s absolutely right. That’s it, it’s not about the chops, that’s cool, all the cool fills are cool but it’s the stuff in between there, that’s the song. The fills aren’t the song.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, that’s beautiful. It’s a good thing, I feel like that’s one of the sort of secret sources in production that probably doesn’t get talked about enough because it’s not as quantifiable as technical issues. It’s very easy for us when we’re talking about production to talk about the gear and the EQ and the compression and then this and then that. Well, it makes all of those songs that we’re talking about so unbelievable is that everybody was playing the same song. I know you know, listen to like great Stax and Motown, Heard it Through the Grapevine, it’s like… James Jamerson-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, and you can feel the energy that they’re all sharing.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, they’re all playing the same song. There’s no part, there’s no like, “My part’s…” It’s something that the few bands that get it just off they go. I feel like you too actually. And they managed to get it quite a few times? It’s one of their secrets. It’s like in the back of it, I always feel like even though there are a bunch of white Irish kids, I feel like they get R&B and Soul, they know how to bring it in. But I know obviously a gift of a great voice, but there’s not every band does that. I don’t understand where it comes from.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Well, there’s that nuance. You can hear something a couple of times and play those notes because there’s only so many notes, but to get it and to know why you’re playing which note, that’s a different game.
Warren Huart:
So I liked that conversation you had earlier about the randomizing of the drums, moving the hat around. I’ve worked on records where I’ve been forced to try and figure out why I like something, especially when I’m engineering back in the early days where I wasn’t producing as much or I was only producing my own projects. Producers would force me to think twice about everything I was doing and I would listen to grooves and fills and they’d be like, “Yeah, it’s got to feel like that.” And I was a Pro Tools editor trying to go like, “Aah,” and it’s just trying to recreate that magic.
Warren Huart:
So what other tips do you have to do that? Because I think it’s a discussion that I think we need to have and their needs to be more of, because there’s a lot of finger-wagging like we were talking about in the even type thing with the you kids gritting stuff. And it’s like, I get that, I understand but this is a different world, you’re building tracks inside of computers, inside of DAWs. So what do you do to keep that groove? Because you have an understanding of it, you’re in a sort of unique position to talk about it.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
There’s a few different ways about it. So many people are going really loop-based where it’s, “Okay, well, I’ll go on Splice and I’ll find some different loops and put them in whatever.” I don’t have a problem with that, I’ve got a Splice account, I use it. I’d send a very fine song in there. I’m going to move stuff, I’m going to shift it just to make sure that no one else out there first has that same loop that I do.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
I’m not against looping, but you’re not going to have my same one because this now has to be mine. With the grid thing, I’m not anti-quantize, and I quantize by quantize purposely. It’s too easy just to be like, “Okay, here it is, hit the cue button and then move on,” and you’ve now edited the life out of whatever performance that is.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
This changes for a genre if you’re doing a super Pop Top 40 thing, yeah, you may need everything right iron to that ruler tight, but you can very easily edit the soul out of anything. You can over-tune a vocal, you can over-quantize some drums, you can over-edit a guitar and then it’s like, “Well, you took the fun part out. Now that’s just a computer loop.” The part of music that we lose with that is the human part and that’s what we have to fight the most to put back in there or to keep.
Warren Huart:
I have done a couple of times, I don’t know if you’ve done this, taken a track that I love, loaded it into my DAW and found like eight, 16 bars, that just feels amazing and then placed my kick and snares to that groove and then play to it. I love this idea of talking about how to preserve groove and feel and I think one of the difficult things is when trying to teach or talk or educate people in this world, it’s just so unquantifiable, isn’t it? Because you can’t measure it, you can’t say, “Well, if you lay back the snare four milliseconds on every third…” You know what I mean?
Warren Huart:
It is definitely a feel thing, but for me, it’s that part that we were talking about earlier with somebody walking in, it’s part of that hypnosis thing, isn’t it? You can be in a zone for 10, or 15 or 20 minutes listening to something and nudging it around or taking something you love and thinking, “Why do I love this?” And it’s a tough one, but it can be done. Probably the reason why it’s not done enough is because it is a little bit of work.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Well, but I think it’s a brilliant thing because it also just comes down to practice. You’re examining something that’s great and figuring out how they did it and so you’re investigating, you’re researching, you’re working on it yourself to get there and I’ll be the first to say, when I go to my studio, I go there to work and I love what I do when there’s nothing I’d rather do than make something to sound great, that’s what excites me in this world. But I don’t necessarily practice my craft as opposed to I just go to work every day and that’s different things.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
I want to take this pandemic opportunity to be able do more of that. I don’t just sit around and make beats for myself like I used to, I make beats when a client asks me to, but now I’ve actually just been sitting around like, “Yeah, let me just mess with something today because I can.” And it’s like, “Oh yeah, music is fun, it’s not just the paycheck.” And it’s been a nice refresher.
Warren Huart:
Yes, definitely. Did you do the whole… stay at Berklee the whole time?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yes, I did the four years, was super-active in the MP%E program and it was great. The thing with music school, and I’m very active, I speak at a lot of schools and do a lot of education stuff with AES now. And it’s important to me because you get that hands on training, you got the classroom and stuff. But the most important thing about music school and music education to me is everybody in your class, all your classmates are going to become your colleagues later on in life and you grow at the same rate as them because you’re in that same boat. I have people I went to school with 20 years ago that still play on records with me today, that I still talk with, we’re still colleagues, they send me work and vice versa because that’s my network. So, even that little thing of just being in the room with people go just so far.
Warren Huart:
I agree, I talk about that a lot. So thank you for reiterating it. Collaboration is so important and-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
It is.
Warren Huart:
And you can’t really grow in isolation. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think when you’re learning editing skills and things like that, it is actually nice, like we keep reiterating, to be in the zone and work on it. But I’ve always grown my most actually from even young inexperienced artists because they come in and they might have the craziest idea ever. But that’s actually kind of cool because they-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, that’s exciting.
Warren Huart:
That’s exciting. Even quite frankly, just obvious things like if I’m writing with a teenage girl, how am I going to know what… I’ve never been a teenage girl, you know what I mean, I don’t know what they’re going through. You’ve got to bring a lyric out with them, make them feel comfortable to write about something that they’re going through to get a great song, everything we do is collaboration.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Absolutely, because it’s so easy just to be in our rooms and be in our headphones or whatever and go down that rabbit hole. And that’s fun too but there’s so much to learn from other musicians that you get from, “Oh wow, Tommy, that was a great baseline. How did you do that? Okay, now I understand that.” So I can ask for that again, or I can do that myself next time or whatever, just a little bit of what does somebody else do? That’s the art part of it, that’s fun.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, absolutely. So what are you working on the moment?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
I got a few really good things happening. A project that just came out about a month ago with a duo called ShrapKnel, that’s Curly Castro and PremRock, two MCs from Philly and New York and just brilliant deep stuff and it’s produced by a super phenomenal MC producer named Elucid, dark, murky intellectual, deep hip hop with kind of, I don’t know, some end of the world vibes. So not to lean harder into that now, we’re all going to be fine, we’re going to make it. I like that, I like challenging music, so I make a lot of that.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
So the ShrapKnel album and then also there’s another duo called Armand Hammer who is Billy Woods and then Elucid who I mentioned produced for ShrapKnel. In my opinion, two of the finest MCs walking the planet regardless of level, or style, whatever. When these guys rap, you got to listen through super deeply to catch what they’re saying and then they blow your mind. So the Armand Hammer is coming out in June and I executive produced that, recorded, mix, mastered, we do it all like we were saying.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
And then there is a singer named Fielded who I’m working with and we’ve actually got a new single coming out tomorrow and the EP coming out soon and is called Sacrifice Zone and Fielded is just a phenomenal song writer, phenomenal vocalist and I’m very lucky she trusts me to mix her records and we just experiment and try to find what’s beautiful or what’s grimy to accentuate the beautifulness and all of that. So just very exciting stuff that I’m working on and experimental and meaningful.
Warren Huart:
That sounds very rewarding. And you get to do all kinds of things with different people. Sometimes you’re producing, sometimes you’re mixing, you’re writing, yeah, that sounds like a dream.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, we’ve got to do a bit of all of it and I came up in the more rigid segmented style of this person is producing it, this person is mixing it, they will never master it, this person’s mastering. But at first, my thought was, “Well I can’t keep sending money out the door without doing all of these things.” But as now it’s just like you said, it’s become the job. And so I’m a record-maker and I make the record and whatever that song needs, that’s where I try to fill that spot or call the right person who can.
Warren Huart:
Yes, I agree. I mean, I had exactly the same experience. I was always a producer, engineer, mixer guy on local and to bands I would be developing. But my first real gig, gigs with actual credits of albums you’d recognize, I was just an engineer and then as I gravitate toward doing more production, I realized I was sending out my stuff to get mixed. And you’re right, it was like the budget again.
Warren Huart:
I just went and made an album with the band in a studio, paid to go into a beautiful studio and then take that whole budget and then give it to somebody to mix an album in a week. And I’m like, “I just spent three or four weeks making an album. Now one dude wants that whole budget again to sit in his chair.” So it was just money. It was almost out of necessity, that’s what artists expect now. They want to come to you and they go, “Okay, here’s my demo idea, take it away.”
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, there’s so much of that. I get people a lot songwriters and that kind of thing, it’s like, “Okay, here.” Artists are like, “I’ve got a voice memo. This is a part of a hook idea, what do you think?” And I’m like, “All right, give me a couple of days.” I’ll take that, I’ll drop it in the Cubase and then start finessing around it and then send them something back and they’re like, “Yoh, this was just my voice in a memo.” It’s like, “Yeah, but you gave me that spark.” So now we’ll work together and we’ll get it but I can’t say, “Yeah, but maybe someone else could do this better than me,” because then my client should just call them. And I want everybody to win, but I also want me to win. So I’ve tried to keep that in the house and offer everything that I can.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, absolutely. So you just touched on a question of is your DAW of choice Cubase?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, it is. I’ve been on Cubase for, man, 16-17 years, something like that. And a lot of it is because, again, just this many hats thing, it lets me do all the different things. I compose in Cubase, I do my tracking, I mix there. DAWs have gotten so powerful now that a lot of them can do all of the same things, it’s just how does that work for you? And I’m fast on Cubase. When I’m on Cubase, it’s now seamless and we’re just making music, I’m not looking for what button to click. Like if I’m on Logic, then this thing is going to take us three times as long. Pro Tools I’m up on because you got to be, but I’m in my comfort zone on Cubase for sure.
Warren Huart:
I totally understand. For Pro Tools for me, because coming up as a guitar player, Pro Tools was like, “Hey, I can be like a keyboard player.” We were always envious of keyboard players as they played the part down and just put it in, quantize it in MIDI and boom, it was all perfect and we were punching, punching, punching and then suddenly, “Oh no, I couldn’t actually move that one cord that was out of time that bothered me.” So yeah, Pro Tools is quite liberating, but I do remember for the first maybe 10 years of using Pro Tools, I was very envious and jealous of you guys with Cubase because the MIDI functions in Cubase has always been absolutely superlative, it’s been fantastic.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
That was the original deal-breaker because years ago I was graduating in school and was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to put together a rig here and start to work.” And I wanted to make beats, I wanted to produce and at that point the MIDI and Pro Tools in 2002 or whatever was essentially nonexistent. It wasn’t powerful enough for what I needed to do out of it and I wanted something I can do everything in one piece of software.
Warren Huart:
I often talk about the fact that people have mentored me without them realizing they’re my mentors because you work with somebody for six months or a year sometimes on projects or whatever and you learn so much from it. Is there any sort of either experiences or people that you really feel indebted to that have helped you?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
I would say definitely some of both. First starting off, of course, my uncle. Shout out to Dave Mac, he just set me off. And I’ll never forget, I was going to college and he was like, “Look, I’m already proud of you. I’ve been proud of you for your whole life. Go make yourself proud and do your thing.” And I was like, “Whoa, like that unconditional support from the person who taught me, I’m good, I’m just going to go do my thing.” So that was, I would say, the main turning point for me.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
And then there’s one experience, in the studio experience that hit me, I was like, “Okay, I’m doing it right.” I had been in New York maybe like a year and somehow I wound up in this session where some Wu-Tang affiliates were looking for beats and so it’s not like Method Man in there, but talented folks around the Wu-Tang Clan and Welcome to 36 Chambers is one of those albums I heard it, I was like, “I don’t know what this is but I need to make records like this.”
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
And so I’m in this lane now and I’m in the room and there’s some heavy hitters and Large Professor, legendary hip hop producer was in the room and so these MCs are looking for beats and I’m there and I got my little… and I’m still burning these beat CDs to put on for somebody and I’m waiting my turn and Large Professors like, “I got to go, I’m going to put on my joints first.” I’m like, “I got to follow Large Professor play beats after that, try and play something?”
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
So he plays a few and I’m like, “All right, well I’m screwed.” And then they look at me and it’s my turn and he hasn’t left the room yet as I put on my beats and he looks over and he’s like, “Yo, this is you.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” He was like, “Yo, these sound like records, these are dope.” And then he dipped out and he left, I was like, “Yo, Large Professor said that my beats sound like real records?”
Warren Huart:
Just giving a shout out in the room.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, and even if they didn’t hear it and I didn’t place anything that night but when you just see when that slight co-sign from legends like, “Hey, you’re doing something right.” Let me keep going down that path and refining my craft, so, I would say those two experiences really letting me know to keep doing it.
Warren Huart:
Sometimes it’s just sort of validation, isn’t it? That it is so huge that I can imagine. It’s funny, I had a complete visual of the studio, it’s funny, that was-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, the validation thing is great because that’s another thing that we don’t necessarily get when we’re all isolated solo working on our [inaudible 00:36:15] you don’t get somebody else in the room like, “Yo that’s dope, keep doing that.” And so you might not keep doing it and then you lost that opportunity.
Warren Huart:
I don’t know about you but I find the stuff that I’m so carried away with and think is going to be amazing is usually the stuff that’s not amazing and then the stuff that I have so many doubts about, people like, “That was really good that record you made.” You’re like, “Really?”
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
It’s, always, always there and somebody had asked me recently, “Well, how do you know what beats to send to rappers?” I’m like, “Send what you think will work and always send one or two things that you don’t because the beats you don’t expect them to pick or the one that they will always pick every time.”
Warren Huart:
I agree 100%. Do you ever do a lot of film and TV stuff? Because that’s actually always been my, actually, almost entirely my experience. I had a trailer for Inglorious Basterds, whatever it was 15 years ago and I only had a very short time to do it and I just went… just to like a really generic kind of blues kind of riff, I found a loop of a… Flow Tom thing, put a baseline down and I think a solo lady part or something, I can’t remember what it was, and I sent it in and I got it and then I had a Disney thing and they’re like, “Yeah, this is what we want.”
Warren Huart:
They sent me this huge broad sheet of all of the things they needed and I thought I hit every single point and I spent three or four days building it and they rejected it within 20 minutes of sending it, so it’s like… and that’s just sort of been my experience. I wonder if that might speak to what we’ve been talking about with like groove and feel, I probably didn’t have enough time to mess up that idea that got used and I had too much time to preserve what maybe was good with my original idea on the other one.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, you can over-bake something pretty easily. The over-baking has been a problem for me where it’s like, “Okay, I could keep tweaking, I’ve got the time, I’ve got my studio, I’ll keep tweaking it.” It’s like, “No dawg, that was good a half hour ago and now you have just ironed the life out of it.”
Warren Huart:
I suppose for me, when we talk about those classic kind of Stax and Motown Records where they’re all in the room together and they’re all playing and every single person in the room is a master of their instrument. Now we’re here on our own, maybe with an artist but quite often on our own trying to be 12 of the best musicians in the world, you know what I mean?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
There’s no way to win that, there’s no way. Yeah, and I’ve started outsourcing a bunch of stuff, again, my keys are very rudimentary so it’s like I go to have a keyboard player on deck. I can’t play any guitar, I have a guitar player, my bass is very fundamental as well.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
And it’s important to know the things that you don’t shine at, so you know when to bring somebody else in just to make it right because at the end of the day it’s got the song’s got to be right, that’s what we’re doing here, that’s the point. So it’s not about, “Well, it’s got to be my base because I want to play the bass.” The listener doesn’t care about that, they just want that baseline to be funky, they don’t care who plays it. So that’s got to be important, you can’t be precious about stuff.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, absolutely, I love that. I say that all the time, don’t be precious, because you can never really grow. I have a lot of artists that send me a track to work on and it’s pretty good and I’m like, “Yeah, I mean it’s not amazing, but it’s pretty good.” And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I recorded this with this producer or that producer.” I’m like, “Okay, I can make it a bit better, maybe we could’ve put a background in here or maybe the tempo could be… but ultimately, is there’s a reason why you didn’t release this?” And I find that sometimes I’ve got those three songs that they’re running around going around different producers thinking that something magic is going to happen when really they should just move on and write some new songs.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Right, the magic might not be in there.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, you might just get a better sounding album track as opposed to the single that you’re looking for. It’s tough, I think that’s one of the things. I was talking about this the other day with the Billie Eilish production because everybody’s obviously talking about how it’s produced in a bedroom scenario and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s so many people now and it’s fantastic.” And I love the production on it and I think it’s done really amazingly well.
Warren Huart:
I said, “But at the end of the day, what sells that is that there is a teenage girl singing about things that other kids of her age go, yes.” They believe her, the lyrical choices, her delivery, everything about it is just honest sounding and that’s what sells it. So yes, it could have been done in a big studio, small studio or a bedroom. It’s kind of irrelevant how it was done, the most important thing is her, that’s what people connect with.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
That’s the whole thing and people like you and I would love to discuss all the nuances of production, but again, her fans are not there to care where the 808s came from. They want to enjoy the experience and connect with her and everything is about supporting that, so outside of our small niche of the world, they’re just good songs.
Warren Huart:
Yes, I think that’s the human condition though, isn’t it? We all want to try and explain everything away when ultimately there’s so many successful YouTube channels talking about the methodology, whatever and explaining everything away but ultimately one of the beautiful things about art is the inexplicably, the fact that sometimes it’s just, one year of acquired knowledge or a hundred years of quallege, who knows?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
For something to be art, there isn’t that threshold of, well, you have to have done X, Y, and Z, it just, it needs to move you and these make you feel an emotion and then we can figure out what it is from there but once it moves you, it’s art in some way or another.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and there’s a beauty in naivety, it’s incredible. The simplicity I think of like bands, I’ve used this quote a hundred times, but it’s a John Peel quote about a New York Band, the Velvet Underground, where he said they didn’t sell many records but everybody that bought a record by the Velvet Underground started a band. It was so honest and there’s a lot more to music than zeros and ones, and boosts and cuts and compression and-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Exactly, that’s middle ground is where we try to get where we understand that, but we translate that into an experience for the listener.
Warren Huart:
So you did touch on this, because you talked about having a couple of assistants and giving them the experience of working with artists so they can understand that that’s a big part of what we do, can we speak a bit more to that? Because obviously, we end up becoming sort of amateur psychologists at times.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, I mean that amateur psychology is vocal production to me. When you come to me like you expect, “Well, yes, I want you to sing in tune, then we’re going to work on the phrasing and all of that.” But a lot of is just we’ll sit down like, “Okay, how was your day?” Let’s start there, let’s start with you as a human and work through there and then, okay, we maybe we wrote the song together, we might’ve demoed it three times, but the first thing before you got in the booth is, “Okay, well, tell me about this song? What is this about? What were you thinking when you wrote it? Who are you singing to? Who’s the target there?” Because I want to get the artist into that space of when they wrote the song, that vulnerability of putting those emotions on paper.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
That’s the honesty that you’re talking about, the Billie Eilish gets that comes through the microphone, that honesty translates through the mic and there is no plugin for it, anything like that but that’s what people connect with.If I don’t believe you, I don’t want to listen to your music, that’s just the way that I feel about it.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
My goal is to always strive to get the vocalist back into that mindset of when they wrote the words and then we’re going to record. And I’ve had people, and I’m not one of the vocal producers who’s going to yell at you and make you cry and that kind of stuff, that’s not my way, but I’m going to push you and I’m going to challenge you and if I don’t believe you, I’m going to tell you so and rappers don’t like to be told that, but I got to believe you. Singers, same thing and it’s like this is what your fans are going to grab, this is why they’re going to listen because they’re listening to you, if you’re lying to them, they’re not going to listen.
Warren Huart:
Yes, I agree, you’re hitting exactly what… the honesty part, it’s got to feel honest.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, good music is honest.
Warren Huart:
Yes, yes. And even if it’s like pure pop and just total fun, if that fun-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Sure, honest fun is fine, yeah.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t have to be… because I often wonder, because these kinds of conversations, we’re not trying to talk about everything’s got to be so heavy man and so sometimes it’s like, yeah, you’re singing your song about being on a beach and having a party but I don’t feel that you’re on the beach having a party, it sounds like you’re just kind of bored and singing it in tune, where’s the energy?
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Take me to the beach.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, exactly. It’s an interesting one because we get, when we talk about feeling and feel in music, I think, it can always kind of go down to that place of everything being so… People ask me sometimes what the best technique for getting a really good vocal and I often answer this, “Distraction.” Sometimes you’ve got to do the opposite, because sometimes, especially, not necessarily younger, but inexperienced singers going into the studio, rapper’s going to the studio for the first time, are so nervous that you actually got to take them out of their head. So make it light, have some fun because otherwise, everything’s going to be like this, and really, really tight and in time and they’re all going to sound like that. Actually, I find that’s one of the biggest techniques I’ve got with somebody, is to just try to break them out a little bit, get them loose and have them enjoy it because otherwise it’s just-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Music is supposed to be fun, that’s what you’re saying like, “Yeah, it’s work, we’re in the studio, we’re working hard,” but I don’t have a clock in my studio, I don’t have a clock on the wall. I mean, yeah, sure everyone’s got their phone and whatever, but there’s no clock, I don’t do a red light or anything inside because there are artists that the second that red light is on, now it’s time to be tense and okay now it’s like, “Unscrew the bulb, get out of here we don’t want that tenseness.” Just be you and relax and then your music is going to flow a lot better.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, exactly and obviously we’re both saying that there’s going to be tons of other situations. I mean, if you were doing a track with a love and aggressive rap, then yeah, it wouldn’t be like, “Hey, we’re at the beach.” But I do think distraction is such a big tool for us, so we can just take them out of their head for a minute and let them enjoy it.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Yeah, because there’s no more vulnerable place in the world than in front of a microphone that’s nice and crispy in your ears and everyone in the room is listening to you sing some song that’s very personal and emotive. That’s a lot to ask from somebody just to do that and feel totally comfortable and natural and nail the performance and also be in tune, that’s a lot.
Warren Huart:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I sing, but I’m not a singer, I’m just sing to write. But when I think about singers, they have one voice, we as producers and instrumentalists, you’re a great drummer so you could play drums pretty much in any genre, you could be hired to play in this band or that band or whatever, if you’re a singer and you’ve got your God-given voice, that’s your voice.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
That’s the one, that’s what you got.
Warren Huart:
So we have to be really receptive to that as producers, don’t we? We have to really remember that the pressure on a singer is quite different from the bass player, or the guitarist or whatever that can just quit that band and go and join another one. Yes, they may have that “sound” but nothing like the human voice, which is just-
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Right, that’s your fingerprint, it’s your Sonic fingerprint, the way your voice sounds, so, yeah, very, very true.
Warren Huart:
This has been a lot of fun, thank you ever so music, I really appreciate.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
No, thank you for having me, this has been great, I’ve been enjoying the show so for a long time so it’s a honor to be here, thank you.
Warren Huart:
Well, we’re going to put a whole bunch of links down there, I’m going to grab some stuff from you. So send me everything we talked about. I’m want to happen to see links, we going to have a blog, everybody can check out the music that you’re working on now, anything you’re proud of that you want to showcase, let us do it and we’ll make a Spotify playlist, I really appreciate your time.
Paul “Willie Green” Womack:
Awesome, thank you so much, I appreciate your time, I’ll send an email over with the links and everything and, yeah, thanks again this has been great.
Warren Huart:
Marvelous, thank you everybody, have a marvelous time recording and mixing if you have any questions, please ask them below in your comments and we’d love to hear from you, bye-bye.