Whatever its final embodiment was to be, the pace of recording was swift. "There was a lot of music going on. When we first started to work on the record, we jumped right in, real fast. I think at the end of probably two months, each of them had, in some skeletal form, upwards of 35 songs. Now by the time we got to really figure out the album, there might have been 120 songs that were very far along. Some of them might not have had lead vocals, but they had overdubs — basses, guitar, congas, strings, background vocals, and so on."
Dre, who often works up ideas on the small Nuendo-based system Frye helped establish for him at his home, has investigated many of the new software synths that eventually found a home in Outkast's current sound palette. It was Frye's job to balance the new programs that Benjamin was drawn to with the older tools that have long been the mainstays of their productions.
"A lot of the time, the brain of the whole system will be the Akai MPC3000, and there will be a lot of sequencing that goes on within that. But there were a lot of interesting new software synths that I would use, whether it be Reason or the FM7, or Absynth. Spectrasonics also make some good products, and a lot of those things came into the new songs. Now certainly other drum machines, other keyboards, or other programs might come into play. Whether it be Nuendo on a laptop, or some other software synths, we will drag out anything at any given time and just go to it. When he comes into work, I try to have as much stuff set up as possible, so we're not just constantly just trying to set things up. I usually have speakers set up right near him, with his drum machine and all kinds of keyboards... whatever I can fit out here, because he's got an incredible amount of equipment. He collects stuff and buys stuff all the time."
