Axel interview on Bad Boy Blog

July 23, 2007

Axel spent a a month in Trinidad tracking beats for Puff Daddy. The sessions formed the backbone of Bad Boy's Multi-platinum smash.
He discusses the making of that record in a recent interview on the Bad Boy Blog



Niehaus: I think the lion share of the material that was on No Way Out had been created at the Sound Basin in Trinidad. The 3 engineers that were brought down to do that were Tony Maserati, myself and Doug Wilson was sort of the assistant for both of us. We stayed there for - I forget how long. I think it was almost a month or two months. It was quite a bit of time where we stayed there and essentially did nothing but record all those beats. There were, I think it was 5 different producer camps that were coming down at the time, if I remember right. And then, every once in a while, certain artists flew in. You know, Faith came in to do a whole bunch of vocals. Aaliyah came down and actually was there for 3 days.

Tony got one room, I got another room. We essentially just started working with the producers. Producers had all kinds of beats and they needed to be tracked onto two inch. So, that's what we did. Pretty much day in, day out. When one producer team was done, the other one came in. Obviously, the one thing we didn't think about was sleeping. So, twelve midnight, the third producer team left; the fourth producer team came in and you go like "Alright, this is a really good idea. But, you guys do realize that we have to sleep sometime."

It was quite a cluster of an amazing amount of work that Tony and I did. Every day was just plain work. We worked really, really hard. We hardly took any breaks. It was just - I mean, we're talking fifty, hundreds of beats that were laid down, I remember and that was quite impressive, actually.

Puff was always around. Puff actually stayed at the hotel. Puff was there. And he was always hanging out in one of the other rooms. We didn't do much mixing at the time. It was all about gathering ideas and gathering new tracks and gathering new material. And, at the end of it, we had a couple of sessions where Puff essentially just came into the room and listened to one beat after the another on the DAT of all the stuff we recorded and put together. And then just yayed and nayed it. And he goes like "oh, keep that", "no, I don't like that", "keep that", "no, I don't like that", "I don't know", "oh, that's great" and, at the end of the day, you had the "No Way Out" album.

3/15/96 was my first day at the Carribean Sound Basin. And, that's the thing - [I did] basic tracking of 30 songs on the first day and that was producers Puffy and Nashiem. And, on the second day, we did preproduction and basic tracking of Dramatic by Puffy and Nashiem Myrick, then Puffy and Nashiem Myrick and Deric Angelettie. But, they're all working titles, too, so you don't really know which titles worked out to become what. Puffy and Ron Lawrence. Puffy and Deric Angelettie. Puffy and Nashiem Myrick. And Puffy and Stevie Jordan. It was quite an incredible amount. My last day was 5/1/96.

And we all stayed at the same place and we didn't see much of each other because we really, essentially, just woke up and went into the studio and started working. And Puff just worked incredibly hard. If I can tell you one thing about it, it was the most concentrated work effort that I've seen a producer do in a long, long time. It was great. And he wanted to come out of that time with a lot of material and he sure did. He was a bit of a slave driver, but in a good way. I mean, you didn't really have to, you know what I mean? Like, not in a bad way, but he essentially was just all focused. He was all about getting it done. And I think that focused everybody else really well.

And then we came back and then, obviously, we did a lot of those basic tracking sessions. Then we sort of processed a lot of the things we did there at Daddy's House in the next month.