Young Guru shares his sound wisdom at Drexel

RED-HOT HIP-HOP and R&B recording engineer Young Guru has helped spark the sounds you know and love from Jay-Z (Guru's main man), TI, Beyonce, Rihanna, Ludacris, Ghostface Killah and more.

Come Monday, the tech wizard formerly known as Gimel Androus Keaton will share the knowledge at Drexel University in his first of 13 lecture-tour dates under the sponsorship of the Recording Academy's Grammy U industry-education program.

And where better to start than Philadelphia?

The now 39-year-old Guru has deep roots in the region, he related in a recent chat. "I used to come to Philly to buy records at Sound of Market and Funk-O-Mart. And I fell in with local engineers and DJs, to practice with these guys."

DJ Jazzy Jeff "was a major influence on me," he added. "I always thought he was the star of the show. The Fresh Prince [Will Smith] was just the DJ."

Guru grew up in Wilmington, Del., the son of a schoolteacher mom and accountant dad who worked for Hercules, the other big chemical company in the First State.

Always curious "about how things work," he started playing around with and then making money fixing jammed-up VCRs "when I was nine or 10."

In his early teens, he participated in a Wilmington-based enrichment program tagged FAME - the Forum for the Advancement of Minorites in Engineering. "It could have led me to become a bridge builder," he joked, if the music bug hadn't taken over. Piano lessons also sparked him, and opportunities to DJ on weekends "in gyms and firehouses" lit a fire in his belly.

While Guru got to cut his technical chops in recording studios during the vinyl, cassette and CD eras, the art and input of the engineer has been submerged to a degree in the digital download/streaming age. "That's partly why I've taken on this tour," he said. "A bunch of the old recording studios have closed with the downsizing of the music business. People are making more recordings at home, on their computers.

"With less people buying physical goods, there's less reading of liner notes, less knowledge about who worked on a recording. You have to be more aware and interested to go looking for that information on the Internet. But it's there."

And Guru says there are lots of engineering tricks that even low-budget, self-producing artists can apply in their home-studio setups. "There are better recording programs than GarageBand - like Ableton Live - for professional musicians to use. There are materials you can apply to your walls to get a better sound. And the art of the engineer has always been about the microphones and their placement. That still hasn't changed."

In some ways, engineers are playing a bigger role in today's hip-hop production process than a few years ago because "there's a lot less sampling going on, except for rhythm tracks, because of royalty complications and the awareness that artists can make more doing the music themselves. We're also seeing a turn to using more keyboards and real strings," those deep, pulsing tones dominant in the signature Jay-Z sound.

Young Guru also argues that would-be recording artists and sound-tweaking engineers should stay away from some of the more popular headphones. "I'm not gonna name names, but some of these headphones are designed to create a distinctive but artificial sound - usually with a lot of exaggerated bass - that jumps out but isn't true to what the music sounded like in the studio."

Guru's responding with his own signature headphones, the TMA-1 Young Guru Edition for the Danish maker AIAIAI. "They just didn't send me a contract and slap my name on the product," he said. "I've been extremely hands-on, flying to Copenhagen several times, going through a bunch of different driver designs. The price isn't fixed yet, but they're coming out shortly and sound fantastic."

Young Guru has also landed his own production deal with the London-based XL label. For starters, he's engineering/co-producing the debut album by a Harlem-based threesome ("two DJs and a producer") called the Rat Kings.