“My favourite, secret plugin on the planet… it just adds more snap and clarity”: Kanye West and Jay-Z producer Anthony Kilhoffer on the budget bitcrusher he used on In Paris

Anthony Kilhoffer Producing, Mixing & Mastering 'Ni**as In Paris' by JAY-Z and Kanye West | Trailer - YouTube

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If there’s one thing we’ve learned from hearing pro producers talk about their favourite music software, it’s that it’s not always the latest and most expensive plugins that they prize the most.

Anthony Kilhoffer is the latest person to illustrate this point. Alongside Hit-Boy, Kanye West and Mike Dean, he produced West and Jay-Z’s In Paris, one of the standout tracks from the duo’s 2011 album, Watch The Throne.

Kilhoffer has been breaking down his work on the track in a new video for Mix With The Masters and, in the trailer, he describes D16’s Decimort 2 as “my favourite, secret plugin on the planet,” adding that “it just adds more snap and clarity.”

Decimort 2 was released back in 2016, and MusicRadar’s five-star review crowned it as “the definitive bitcrusher and sample rate reducer. Given that it’s designed to emulate the sound of classic hardware samplers, its popularity in the hip-hop community is understandable. It can be used subtly or as a more extreme, creative effect.

“You might not need it, but you should certainly want it,” our review concluded, and that recommendation still stands today.

Elsewhere in Kilhoffer’s video, we learn that In Paris was produced in three New York hotel rooms, and that the repeated ‘ball so hard’ line is a sample of Jay-Z that was triggered from an Akai MPC. The producer also reveals that the outro was cooked-up by Mike Dean on an iPad while he was waiting to catch a flight.

Subscribers can watch all five parts of the video on the Mix With The Masters website. Decimort 2, meanwhile, is available from the D16 website, and currently down to just €29 in the company’s Halloween sale (regular price is €49).