Recording
Who recorded and mixed Eminem's vocals for Love the Way You Lie
Love the Way You Lie
Mike Strange recorded and mixed Eminem's vocals at Effigy Studios in Ferndale, Michigan. The sessions took two days. Strange edited the vocals with D-Verb—a reverberation software—and an Extra Long Delay plug-in. He preferred to make few changes; for "Love the Way You Lie" he almost exclusively used board compression and console equalization. Strange used the Bricasti and Eventide Reverb 2016 mixing tools for "brighter" reverberation. Detroit musician Luis Resto has contributed to the arrangement on many of Eminem's songs, but did not do so for "Love the Way You Lie". According to Strange, "Everything we needed was already in the track, apart from the vocals." Two to three weeks after the sessions, Alex da Kid arrived to help mix and master the track. He wanted to replace the acoustic guitar on the demo, but Eminem chose to keep it. Strange said, "It was simply a matter of trying to match and then to improve on the demo da Kid'd sent us." Strange's brother Joe engineered the track. Rihanna's recording sessions took place at Sun Studios in Dublin, Ireland. Marcos Tovar mixed her vocals, which were engineered by Spike Lindsey and mastered from Detroit over the Internet. The American songwriter Makeba Riddick provided additional vocal production. Strange used equalization, compression and reverberation but left the vocal balance. He assumed that Rihanna was satisfied with her recorded vocals and did not make major changes on her seven stereo vocal tracks.