Polo G could have worked with any superstar mix engineer on the planet. Instead, he chose relative unknown Todd Hurtt to mix his hit album Hall Of Fame.

Hall Of Fame, the third album by Chicago rapper, singer and songwriter Polo G, features a long list of famous guest artists, including The Kid Laroi, Lil Durk, Lil Wayne, DaBaby, Nicki Minaj and Pop Smoke. However, although there are a few ‘name’ producers like Murda Beatz, Nick Mira and CashMoneyAP credited, the vast majority of the (co‑)production and (co‑)writing credits are by relative unknowns. One of them is Todd Hurtt, who mixed 18 of the 20 tracks on the album — including the main single ‘Rapstar’, which was for a while the world’s number one song.

As a recording engineer and occasional producer, Hurtt has worked with the likes of Pharrell, J Cole, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige, Keyshia Cole, Skrillex and Miley Cyrus. He is also credited as engineer on Polo G’s first two albums, but is hardly a big‑name mix engineer. So how did Hurtt come to mix one of the biggest songs, and albums, of 2021?

Post Mumble

“I’ve worked with Polo for three years now,” recalls Hurtt. “He was one of the first young rappers I saw after the mumble rap era from four years ago who was writing his lyrics on his phone. Most mumble rappers just come out with the first thing that pops into their heads, but Polo was actually composing his stuff. That really impressed me. I got drawn to him because he’s a young man who really knows what he wants.

“We hit it off, and I’ve engineered pretty much all his vocal sessions for the last three years. He’s headstrong in many ways. For example, it is always a struggle to find beats for him. He can go through 100 beats a night, and not pick any, because he’s very particular. He writes songs, and then tries to fit them to the beats, and if a beat does not fit, he’ll dismiss it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s made by a major producer or not.

“When Polo chooses a beat to work with, I’ll have that beat on loop in the studio and he’ll do his thing. Sometimes he does something off the top of his head, but he normally takes his time. When he writes a song, we may record just a verse and a chorus during the first session, and he then lives with it for a while. He’ll drive around and will listen to my rough mix. He’ll sit with this and new ideas will come to him, which we record at a later session.

“Because he can spend weeks listening to a demo, he can get attached to the way the beat sounds. You could call it demoitis. Sometimes the beat is just a loop; otherwise I’ll try to create a song structure, by creating drops and transitions. I can do that by EQ’ing out the bass on the two‑track, or using other effects, or when I have the stems by taking things in and out. But I often have to pull that back. He does not like many drops or transitions.

“Polo keeps a tight circle of the people he likes to work with, and once again, whether someone is a big name or not doesn’t mean much to him. He doesn’t pay attention to those things. It either sounds good to him, or it doesn’t. And he tends to like what we did together. So often in the past when tracks were sent out to mix and came back, he’d say, ‘You know what? I like Todd’s mixes better than this new mix.’ That’s how I got tasked with mixing this whole album.”

The X Factor

Like many releases in 2021, Hall Of Fame was recorded under the shadow of the Covid crisis. “Since 2016, I usually work at Paramount Recording — most often Studio X, which is in the parking lot, a little separate from all the other studios,” explains Hurtt. “Polo loves Studio X, so we’ve often recorded there from the moment we started working together. He’s a fan of the studio’s Augspurger monitors, because he loves to listen loud!

“Most of Hall Of Fame was recorded at Paramount Studio X, usually just Polo and I. Sometimes his current A&R is there, sometimes his little brother. Because of Covid, we had far more time to work together. We kept working throughout most of 2020, and ended up with more songs than before. Polo also went to Miami to work with Pharrell, and went to New York to record with Pop Smoke before he passed away.

“Our primary vocal chain is a Sony C800G, going into a Neve 1073, and then a Tube‑Tech CL‑1B or an LA‑2A. He sounds really good with the C800, and I also like the LA‑2A on him. That’s my chain, and everything else is in the box. Many rappers there days like to record in the control room, but I’m not a fan of that. I prefer the rapper or singer in the booth, and luckily, Polo actually likes this. He enjoys the sense of privacy that the booth gives him. He can be on his own with his thoughts and creative process in there. So thankfully, I get to record very clean‑sounding vocals!

“Polo is in the booth with headphones, and if there are people in the control room, I’ll have headphones on as well, and we work things out between us. He’ll trust me to give him feedback, as in ‘I think you can do a better take,’ stuff like that. But he does not like to stack vocals or do many different takes. He doesn’t like to do doubles, and does very few ad libs. He likes to do one vocal, straight. That’s easy in terms of vocal comping, but more difficult when mixing, because the one vocal is all I have.”

The Duke Of Uke

The story of the making of ‘Rapstar’ goes back to 2018, when Polo G for the first time met Einer Bankz, a YouTube ukulele star, who often posts videos of himself playing with rappers, and who also had ambitions to produce full tracks. Bankz and Polo G, aka Taurus Bartlett, released a number of brief acoustic videos, culminating in a semi‑improvised performance that was released on May 25th, 2020. It immediately proved popular with Polo G’s fans, and also started trending on TikTok.

“During the pandemic we were doing a lot of things from Polo’s home. One day Einer dropped by and he came up with the ukulele lick, and Polo with a melody and some words, and they made this snippet of a song. The video they made immediately got a big buzz, but there still wasn’t a song. Polo realised that there was a lot of potential, so Einer and he worked with a producer called Synco to turn the idea into a proper song, which became ‘Rapstar’.

“Polo and I recorded the final vocals at Paramount. This took three sessions. During the first session we got the hook and the first verse, and then he came back for the rest of the vocals. A week later or so he added just the last line, ‘when I am finished’, and that was it. There also were different versions of the beat, and for a long time I was working with only the two‑track. I only got the stems to mix two days before the song was released!”

Learning Process

Todd Hurtt says that the expansion of his work on Hall Of Fame to include mixing meant that he “learnt a lot about myself. I’d done some mixes on the previous albums, but had not been credited for them. My work still consisted almost entirely of recording. But as I started mixing, I had to expand my working processes. I have a vocal recording template, and when I mixed ‘Rapstar’ I thought it was a one‑off. But as I mixed more songs, I also created a mix template. Recording and mix templates are very different things!

“I’ve been recording vocals for so long. Vocals are my thing. My vocal recording template is pretty simple, and it also allows me to do a rough mix very quickly. When a client leaves Paramount after a vocal session, they want to have something that they can listen to and that sounds good. I can do R&B with my template, or rap, or pop, heavily effected or vocals with very few effects, and so on. It’s very versatile.

“On the inserts of my vocal record track template I have a Waves SSL G‑EQ, Waves C4 multiband compressor, FabFilter Pro‑Q 3, and a Waves Pultec EQP‑1A to add high end. My aux tracks have the Waves Manny Marroquin Reverb, the Waves Renaissance Reverb, though I have been using the FabFilter Pro‑R recently, Valhalla Vintage Verb, Waves H‑Delay and Waves Doubler. On the master bus I have the Waves SSL E‑Channel Strip, another Pultec EQ and a FabFilter Pro‑L 2.

Essentially, what I’m doing when mixing is trying to beat my rough mix. I’m trying to make it hit a little harder, but also not to over‑embellish things.

“Essentially, what I’m doing when mixing is trying to beat my rough mix. I’m trying to make it hit a little harder, but also not to over‑embellish things. There were a couple of songs on the album for which my mixes got very involved, and Polo just said, ‘It sound different.’ So I had to go back and pull things back a little bit again. He has an ear for what he likes!

“The other thing is that the guest vocals I was sent were also often pre‑mixed, for example those of Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Young Thug, Roddy Ricch. This is why there are co‑mix credits on a few of the songs. And often they came in at the last minute! Many artists are very particular about their vocals, so I can’t touch the vocal production.

“I now do the same thing when I send out Polo’s vocals when he is featured on somebody else’s song. In the past I’d send dry vocals with effects tracks, but he did not like what was done in some case, so I now send them out fully produced. When I mixed in the guest vocals on Polo’s tracks, it was a matter of matching things level‑wise, and then trying to make everybody feel like they’re in the same place, using reverb.”

Beat Focus

“During recording and rough mixing my focus will very much have been on Polo’s vocal. My natural tendency when doing final mixes would be to focus strongly on the vocal, but a few years ago I assisted Tillie Mann on some sessions (Mann featured in Inside Track in SOS une 2020 issue: www.soundonsound.com/techniques/inside-track-lil-baby-sum-2-prove), and he said: ‘I’ll work on the beat before doing the vocal. You have to make the beat hit hard and then make the vocal fit in with that.’ So now, before I get to the vocals, I get the beat knocking.

The very first thing I do when I start a mix is something I learned from Juro ‘Mez’ Davis, which is to bring everything down to ‑18dBFS. I do this with a plug‑in called HoRNet AutoGain 2.

“The very first thing I do when I start a mix is something I learned from Juro ‘Mez’ Davis, J Cole’s mixer (Mez featured in Inside Track in SOS September 2013 issue: www.soundonsound.com/people/j-cole-juro-mez-davis), which is to bring everything down to ‑18dBFS. I do this with a plug‑in called HoRNet AutoGain 2. Often the 808s are so crushed, and I don’t want clipping hi‑hats! So I bring everything down, and that gives me more headroom to work with. Also, most plug‑ins work best at ‑18dBFS.

“Also, as I mentioned earlier, I only got the stems for ‘Rapstar’ very late. Getting the stems of a two‑track often is an issue, and because the demos mean so much to Polo, when I do get the stems, I first spend time making them sound exactly like the two‑track, and then I look at what I can improve. If I had put a low‑filter or something like that on the two‑track in a certain section, I’ll have to recreate that, or more often than not, I just use the two‑track for that section, so it sounds exactly the same. Polo liked the two‑track mix of ‘Rapstar’ before I got the stems, so I by and large kept it as it was.”

Download a detailed, enlarged view of Todd Hurtt's Pro Tools screenshot:  polo-g-rapstar-protools-screenshot.zip

Hurtt’s Pro Tools mix session of ‘Rapstar’ is fairly small by modern standards, with only 16 beat audio tracks (eight drum tracks, and another eight music tracks with the ukulele and Omnisphere synths and so on), five vocal tracks, and a mix print track at the bottom. This adds up to only 22 audio tracks in total. Add another 15 bus, aux and master tracks, and the grand total of tracks is a modest 37.

“When I finally got the stems of the beat in, it sounded essentially the same as the two‑track. So, aware that Polo doesn’t like big changes, I only did a few things, like add an iZotope Neutron to the 808, and a few plug‑ins to the music tracks, like the Neutron again, and I did some EQ with the FabFilter Pro‑Q 3 and the [Brainworx] bx_solo for stereo width on the ukulele. Other than that it was just level adjustments. All the beat tracks go to the ‘Beat Sub’ [aux] track, on which I have the iZotope Ozone 9, doing pretty much the same as I had done on the two‑track. I’m using the Exciter and the Spreader, but most of all it’s about the low end.”

Todd Hurtt: It’s actually tough to work with just one fairly dry voice and make that sound great!

Vocals

“The vocals are spread over five tracks, with two tracks being the verse, two for the hook, and the last the brief ad lib at the end of the song. It’s how we record his vocals, and the takes slightly overlap each other. All vocal audio tracks have the same plug‑in chain on the inserts: Antares Auto‑Tune EFX+, Oeksound Soothe 2, FabFilter Pro‑DS, FabFilter Pro‑C 2, FabFilter Pro‑Q 3, another Pro‑DS, and the Focusrite [Sound Radix] SurferEQ 2. I do the more subtractive stuff on the individual audio tracks, and then use the vocal bus to embellish things.

“We used a fairly basic version of Auto‑Tune because I set it to the sound Polo wants, and then we forget about it. Because Polo wants a particular sound, I don’t change it. The signal then goes to the Soothe 2, which takes out some harshness. I love that plug‑in. It’s so good for taking out very specific frequencies, and still being very transparent, and not affecting the sound. The FabFilter de‑essers and EQ cut more unwanted frequencies, and I love the Surfer, which is great for riding frequencies. I use it a lot on Polo’s vocals, because I normally only have one vocal to work with.

“All vocals go to the ‘Vox Sub’ [aux], on which I do most of the heavy lifting for the vocal effects. There’s the Waves SSL E‑Channel Strip, taking out some muddiness, Waves H‑Compressor, Ozone 9 Dynamic EQ, Waves C4, Waves CLA Vocals, Oxford Inflator and another de‑esser. There also are sends to the aux tracks. I used all of them, and they’re mostly the same as in my recording template. So it’s a hall from the Vintage Verb, a plate from the Renaissance Verb, a chamber from the Pro‑R, and a quarter‑note delay from the H‑Delay.

“I have to be careful how much I add, because Polo is not a fan of too many effects on his voice. It’s actually tough to work with just one fairly dry voice and make that sound great! Finally, just above the vocal audio tracks is a track called ‘Szechuan’, which is named after the sauce, and which is a parallel compression vocal track, with the Waves CLA‑2A.

“Everything ends up being sent to the ‘Sub Mix’ track, which again has the C4 — I could do an entire mix with just that and the SSL E‑Channel Strip plug‑in — a Pro‑Q 3, the Black Box Analog Design HG‑2, and again the Ozone 9. The Black Box is great for low end. It will beef up anything!

“The Master track had three plug‑ins for metering: the Mastering The Mix Levels, the Tonal Balance Control 2, and the Loudness Penalty. The Levels plug‑in is every single meter rolled into one, giving details of the stereo field, the bass space, the dynamic range, and so on. When your ears get tired, it tells you where you’re at. The MeterPlugs Loudness Penalty is extremely helpful because it tells you how your mix will be compressed on different platforms, like YouTube, Spotify, and so on!”