Irreplaceable - Writing, Recording and Mixing

Writing, Recording and Mixing

What happens sometimes, is you think about a specific artist and you put them in this box, the song has to be this way or that, and then you're usually confining yourself to the thing they did three years ago.

"Irreplaceable" was written for Chrisette Michele. Production team Stargate and singer-songwriter Ne-Yo had written for Knowles' second album B'Day, but Tor Erik Hermansen of Stargate said that they might not have gone in the direction they did on the song. The tune did not suit Knowles' voice, and Ne-Yo wrote the lyrics from a male perspective, although it was not based upon his personal experiences. Ne-Yo wrote the song in the country style, thinking of country singers Shania Twain and Faith Hill during the sessions. When Ne-Yo heard them playing the song with a guitar, he thought it sounded like country Western music. But when the drums were incorporated into the music, it was brought to an R&B vibe, and Ne-Yo considered making an R&B-country western music song instead.

When the team worked with Ne-Yo, they recorded the song with a male vocalist. However, they thought a female vocalist would be more suitable, and Ne-Yo also thought that it was empowering for a woman to sing it. Eriksen of Stargate said it was an A&R person who suggested that the song would work better when sung by a woman. Two labels wanted the song. While Knowles worked on material for B'Day, she was pleased with the demo of the "Irreplaceable" that was presented to her. However, "Irreplaceable" did not seem to fit on B'Day, which was supposed to be "a hard-hitting club album ". Swizz Beatz, who was working on the album, declared that Knowles would be "crazy" not to include the song on the record. Knowles asked for changes to the song, including the addition of drums, vocal arrangements, and singing in a higher register than the demo. Espen Lind and Amund Bjørklund, from the Norwegian production team Espionage, wrote the chord structure and the guitar part. In an interview with MTV, Ne-Yo said, "Beyoncé had some stuff that she wanted to get off her chest", while aiming to make a record that women could relate to, in keeping with the theme of the album.

The recording was engineered by Jim Caruana and mixed by Jason Goldstein at Sony Music Studios in New York City. Goldstein was hired to mix B'Day. He said: "This song was really simple to mix. It was produced by Stargate and the sounds are really good and they all made sense, and there was lots of room for all the instruments". Goldstein used a board equalizer for the drums' treatment. For the acoustic guitars, he used the analogue flanger of a TC 1210 spatial expander "to sweeten the sound" and to give them "a little bit more spread". Goldstein thought "Irreplaceable" sounded "a bit old-school", an eighth note delay echo was placed on the song's lead vocal at 341ms, using the Echo Farm plug-in software. For the backing vocals, Goldstein used Echo Farm with a quarter note delay at 682ms and Sony's Oxford Dynamics compressor/limiter in dual-mono mode.

The compressor was placed in Classic setting, to emulate the LA-2A leveling amplifier, and the Warmth button used to add harmonics. Oxford Dynamics was used for the bass in a different setting. Goldstein passed the final mix through the Oxford EQ and Inflator plug-ins. Pro Tools software was used to print the aux track into a 44.1kHz/24-bit CD and then into a 24-bit CD master. After the sessions for "Irreplaceable" ended, Hermansen said that "everyone felt they had captured something special and that Beyoncé had done the track justice", but there were still concerns that urban radio might not play the song as it featured acoustic guitars and had more of a pop appeal. "But then it became the biggest urban record ... ever," said.