B’Day Deluxe Edition - Recording and Production

Recording and Production

Knowles rented the Sony Music Studios in New York City, and was influenced by her husband Jay-Z's method of collaborating with multiple record producers; she used four recording studios simultaneously. She booked Harrison, Jerkins and Garrett, each with a room to work in. During the sessions, Knowles would move from studio to studio to check her producers' progress, later claiming this fostered "healthy competition" among producers. When Knowles conceived a potential song, she would tell the group who would deliberate, and after three hours the song would be created. While Knowles and the team brainstormed the lyrics, other collaborators such as the Neptunes, Jerkins and Swizz Beatz would simultaneously produce the tracks. They would sometimes begin working at eleven o'clock, spending up to fourteen hours a day in the studios during the recording process. Knowles arranged, co-wrote and co-produced all the songs. Makeba Riddick, in an interview with MTV News, recounted her experience in the production:

had multiple producers in Sony Studios. She booked out the whole studio and she had the biggest and best producers in there. She would have us in one room, we would start collaborating with one producer, then she would go and start something else with another producer. We would bounce around to the different rooms and work with the different producers. It was definitely a factory type of process.

B'Day, which is titled as a reference to Knowles' birthday, was completed in three weeks, ahead of the originally scheduled six weeks. Swizz Beatz co-produced four songs for the album, the most from a single producer in the team. Knowles recorded three songs a day, finishing recording within two weeks. Twenty-five songs were produced for the album; ten of the tracks were selected for the track list, and mastered in early July by Brian "Big Bass" Gardner in Los Angeles.