Sometimes you have to back away from this blog stuff and actually do the stuff you write about afterwards. I write for more blogs than this one and the whole purpose of this one was listed eloquently in the first blog that I wrote. You can still read it at the bottom of the archive…. That being said, I’m in the lab working on lots besides S.H.A.R.K. BAIT and I’m back to blog a bit about a topic that is interesting to me and while I have touched on it, I haven’t really spoke about it…..
J-Zone (who has the funniest rapper twitter account besides Joe Budden. the only difference is that J-Zone breaks down all sorts of “real shit” without clowning dudes by name. almost.) said some funny but true shit the other day on twitter. He basically summed up in a few tweets the studio recording experience of most underground rappers in the last 16 years. He talked about how the conventional recording studio was a kick it spot that was paid hourly and because of this, dudes invested in home recording studios. Too bad that these dudes weren’t already engineers, was what he summed it up with. While I think that statement is true, I very much enjoy the rash outbreak of records that dropped before everyone could buy a “studio” for 200.00 USD. I think the most creative shit was made on 4 to 16 tracks and people have tried to replicate that sound and I guess zeitgeist for the last however many years. What the home recording dudes were doing was making songs that they liked that sounded like something they could more or less listen to next to the commercially available stuff that they liked. In most cases, these home recording pioneers weren’t mixing their records in big studios. They may not have even had studio monitors. When I went to a mix down session for the first Global Phlowtations tape “Phlowtation Devices”, J-Sumbi (knownots need but google) was running a Tascam 4-track (probably one of those grey 828 something-somehtings) into the mixing board like a summing board and totally flipping the mix. Upon later reflection, it was some genius shit that would have saved many a tape if it was done more often. Of course that release banged, but so did every Phlowtation related release after that. If you heard a old CDP tape (Madlib’s old crew that had basically everyone in Oxnard in it), the hiss factor would almost add to the mix like resonance on a low pass filter. The stripped down literal rawness of the songs just gave you the image of some dudes making sick bangers in some undercover room piled to the ceiling with vinyl and musical equipment. When I went to visit the old Lootpack lab in Ventura, it was basically what I just described. I was intimidated by the sheer rap levels that were going on in this room at the time, this must have been 1994-1995…..
This brings me to the whole subject of the current edition, the engineer. Lots of dope engineers were quietly responsible for many (lets say all) of the HITS you currently hold dear. Commercial studios are important because their sound is the product of a mathematical equation made up of waves, hardware combinations, geometric placement in relation to monitoring and the sound itself and electrical power. All of these things unite to make a song that is then flipped to a further finite numeral by the mastering engineer and their own preference of room, geometric sound monitoring placement, hardware chain and even sound preference. These things and more make up the finished product, which is a song mastered for mass marketed retail environments. When you get to the undercover stuff, it turns back into theoretical physics. The stranger the chain, the odder (read: better) end result. As long as you considered some sort of final mix and rough mastering process, you were pretty okay. This meant that all sorts of people who would normally invest their hard earned money into a studio session with someone who just had some equipment in a back room next to their garage, invested in home recording equipment that met their needs to as much of approximate degree as monetarily possible for them. This also meant that some dudes got equipment at a early age, went to school for audio engineering versus some junior college, finished school on some high level and took their technical know-how back to the block, thus further fortifying their local (read: underground) sound. You also had the random that bought equipment and just ended up an engineer. Thru trial and error, the dude looked up and found out that they mixed 400-500 records and by divine right and providence they become the proprietor of the town studio. Then the dudes who are looking to record a demo end up there and do some record that sounds like it was mixed by the logo for Whitesnake….
Even though I was one of the trial and error dudes who then got his hands on some equipment with the help of many friends, I still hung out with an equal number of engineers. Most of the dudes I learned any sort of early tricks from were the dudes who bought equipment to make beats and then steeped their stuff up to entry level studio equipment. Some even got jobs as engineers at studios, while others wandered in and out of recording schools, learning tricks the whole time. What was dope about this whole movement of musical engineers, was that these dudes actually knew the music from many different facets. If they weren’t writing songs most days, they were making beats on other days, if not every day. Then you had the whole sub-species of do-it all human, the dudes who were actually knowledgeable in the studio on every level. This was the company that I wanted to join and keep myself around and this is also the type of individual that I wanted to mix my next record when the time came. Who I picked is a no-brainer if you listen to anything I regularly say or have said on this blog, but know that his resume is long and storied with a sound that is perfect for what I’ve been doing the last while. Picture it like Ice Cube going back east to work with The Bomb Squad or even better, when Del and EL-P were supposed to crank out a record. But different……….
Eyedea was found dead this past weekend, he died in his sleep. If you are reading this blog, you probably know exactly who he was and the legacy he left behind. The crazy thing is that in his passing, he will be looked at as the poster boy for all things battle rap related and anyone remotely associated with him will be placed under the same microscope as him. People are going to look at every single battle he was in and automatically vote him undisputed champ of everyone and thing in that world. They will probably go to his records and give them the once or twice over and decide that he was the best rapper that ever came out of the 90’s, not just the mid-west. As the surface cools off and people of merit get over their shock, lots of testimonies will be laid down on how much more he had up his sleeve and what the people missed out on, etc. All of this shit sucks.
Why I say that is because it took the dude DYING to wake motherfuckers up on how great he was. This is basically the bar that most people want to set when it comes to the idea of a true legend. Now that we know that a living legend is a crew that originated in northern california, there is NO opportunity for another person to come out of the ether and wow the people if he is over the age of 24. That’s it, show’s over. People are only checking for rap dudes if they came out of the ground directly in front of them or if they are being put into the ground directly in front of them. All the hard work, classic material, indelible personalities and other things that keep you actually involved is the main shit that keeps your favorite rapper somewhere way off the shelves. This is while some random who started doing everything last week makes a song for fun and people just jump on it BECAUSE it’s new. never mind good, just new. Then you got dudes like Eyedea where it took 10 minutes for me to figure out if he really passed away because he reinvented himself so many times, people literally lost count.
It used to be a thing where you worked towards a long career, did the most and people appreciated it enough to keep you running for it. Now it’s the exact opposite, you have to drop stuff hourly to keep your OG existing fans INTERESTED or else they will just wander over to something that is calling their name louder from the shelf, blog, whatever. If the world has turned and left me here, fine. However, how did the world turn and leave a slew of talented motherfuckers by the wayside, only to wake up hooked on drugs, under trains, in foreign countries with no way home, dead, etc…
How the fuck did it turn into THIS?
(easy. look at the dudes making records pop up in front of you. look at the dudes booking shows every week. fuck it, look at the dudes grabbing songs for TV and movies and if you don’t like the look on their face then shoot them. it’s all their fucking fault. when it’s all about building it so s/he will come, who is the one watching the gate and letting the people in? only rock groups can come out of nowhere, play shows in living rooms, get money from strangers on sites like kickstart and turn into millionaires overnight over a song. everyone else has to get in line and wait their turn to be HNIC or HWIC on the microphone. unless you are in some band all of a sudden, then you just do what I said before and before you know it, you will be the apple in the eye of the “old white man on the hill” that I talked about on STREET/CARNAGE.
I just had to vent before the coming hot air storm. Rest In Peace Eyedea.
post008: REDACTION: “internet chess, friends, and strange bedfellows…”
While working on this record, I definitely ran the race in trying to get guests on it. It’s considerably harder to expect verses from folks nowhere in your daily life and in other countries. I mean, I like working with people and I also love to hear tracks that sound like some stuff that is greater iller than the stuff made by the people involved in it’s creation. When I was young, I used to geek off of posse cuts with a gang of rappers on it or even just some randoms that would never normally be in the lab together (according to the listener), working. Some grand examples of this are:
1. Tha Alkaholiks; Coast II Coast// this record was a classic for so many reasons, it’s not even cool. Motherfucking Natas Kaupas did the album cover, for starters. Starting with WLIX (THE song of the record, in my opinion), you had Voodooo! from Western Hemisfear playing the part of radio announcer (that was Ras Kass’s old crew, for those keeping track), Wildchild starting it off, Madlib coming in with a COLD verse/beat and besides proper contributions from the Liks, you had the song book-ended by a young Declaime AKA Dudley Perkins. This was some monster shit and it only went well with 3 guest features by King Tee, and some more with east coast savages Q-Tip and Diamond D! The fun gossip on this record according to “sources” was that there was a song on the record with Aceyalone and p.e.a.c.e. from Freestyle Fellowship that got cut from the final master…….
2. The Nonce; World Ultimate// I remember buying both of these cassettes on the same day. This was in a golden age of guests on songs and such. Besides delivering a flawless first record, (for real.) they had all sorts of interesting combinations on this record. Aceyalone pops up once again playing the part of announcer on Bus Stops (check the single for the alternate version, he will go down in secret history as having the best outro on a single in rap music) and the song “The West Is…” is another testament to mysterious group cuts. Meen Green (of First Brigade/Western Hemisfear) kicked a spoken word poem at the end of the song! WTF?!?
3. Every other Project Blowed related release// Call me biased and I will say yeah, but Blowed made this shit fun for me. All of the Heavyweights songs, the random group cuts, all that. When they work together, everyone sounds like they have been rapping in a group for decades. When they don’t, you still get quality material from SOMEBODY in the crew. That is more than you can say for Wu-Tang outside of 7 members, or Master P. or even NWA! Tell me with a straight face that you bought Yella’s “One Mo’ Nigga To Go” album and I will shoot you in the face with penetrating pellets from a replica desert eagle that I have put to the side for just this situation and occasion….
4. The starting 8 or whatever from Wu-Tang Clan;// These dudes basically hold the rest of that gang on their backs like atlas. In the 90’s, a Meth, RZA, GZA, Ghostface or Raekwon guest feature was basically money in the bank for everyone involved. When Meth and Redman cliqued up, that was like a fantasy group for lots of different people for different reasons. You could even deal with an Inspector Deck verse or a U-God verse drifting in from the ether, and it was all good….
5. Indelible Emcees; Weight, Fire in which you burn slow, Farewell Fondle Em’// These fucking guys. And girl. I can’t even believe that NYC was churning this stuff out on NewsCorp’s dime at one point! Weight is one of the illest group cuts on 12” and honorable mention goes to the DJX P2 compilation. While I was initially mad as fuck that Murs’s album didn’t sound like the sneak preview track with him and Mr. Lif, I never saw a Dizzee Rascal record produced by EL-P, not did I ever see the fabled Del-P project that backpackers worldwide were nightsweating over…..
I’m here waiting for a G-Pack of verses from some individuals and I genuinely hope that I get them. Not because they will MAKE my album or some shit, it’s already done! It’s more along the lines that it will make my album more interesting to the person not looking for these particular combinations. For this record, it has nothing to do with WHO I do the album with and everything to do with HOW I do the album and who I CHOOSE to do it with…..
post007: monopoly money (oh, I mean “recording budget”)
This one is all about the idea of being paid for your work. While a controversial subject rife with different opinions about who, what and where the money should go to and when, no one seems to remember the last and most important thing here and that is WHY. Steve Albini wrote a very good article on the whole breakdown of your money if you are on a major label circa the mid-late 90’s and that was the realest of talk. Without saying too much (you should google the dude and then find the paper. this makes you 4% smarter than the person who didn’t) about the paper, he basically let you know how labels were basically banks based on the acquisition of intellectual property in the form of works by recording/performance artists, and the monopolistic availability of the recorded works in their respective formats. The whole distribution of wealth in the context of the music industry was never, ever, EVER in the artist’s behalf. The highest someone on a label can expect to be paid is 50% of what ideally amounts to the net earnings of the project. This is after whatever expenses that are recoupable get paid, this means your advance, publicity, recording and mastering budget and ANY and ALL expenses accrued during the making of this record. This means dinners, dates and drugs, ladies and gentlemen. Depending on what label you are on and how much your budget is, you could be paying for the food, drugs and dates of ANOTHER group. You may even be paying for the staples at the label, which equates to label overhead and that shouldn’t come from your budget. Anyway, based on the payment schedule of physical distributors which is twice a year if you sell, barring returns, this determines the whole “six month” rule of getting paid. If the label in question has what is commonly referred to as a “net 90” deal, then the distributor has a finite amount of product for 90 days and at the end of this term they pay you for whatever you net in those 90 days. Not gross, but net. 2 of these terms equate to roughly 6 months and if all of the expenses are paid off in six months or less then you are what is referred to as “in the black” for obvious reasons.
An important thing to talk about is actually two things and they are:
1. ship vs. sell: this is the thing that makes everyone hate record labels and call them liars for no apparent reason. basically, the numbers that a distributor and store order haven’t a damned thing to do with the numbers you actually sell as a recording artist. this is, until you sell all those numbers. an easy way to say it is like your distributor or whatever ships out 500 CDs to retailers and they sell out in a week. the distributor orders 500 more for stores and then 250 sell one week and 250 more sell over the course of the next month. on paper, you just sold 1,000 CDs in a month or two, but then people return a total of 150 to stores and don’t forget about the 43 that got broken on the way to so and so. so…. after 90 days, you may get paid for 807 CDs. or maybe not since some distributors hold up to 30% of the label’s net until the end of the year (which is way longer than 6 months) to cover things like those 43 CDs being broken. if a label tells you that they shipped 10,000 of something in the attempts of trying to impress you, ask them how much did the record actually SELL. or if it is a new record, tell them to come back in 1 year and give them updated analytics then. you will sound like a badass.
2. net vs. gross: this is easier to explain, but still something to wrap your head around if you aren’t familiar. the gross is the total income and the net is what the artist or label gets. usually the net term is used in a artist perspective because the gross number is what is used to determine how much the product actually made. if a project grosses 1000.00 and your percentage is 75% then you probably net 750.00. I say probably because numbers change when they want. when it comes to getting broke off with money, just worry about your net and arrange it to where you aren’t getting gouged to death in your mind. your net drops when more people are involved, BTW. when you pay folks in percentages, then everyone’s hand is in the gross and your quickly dwindling net comes last. compare it to a freefall of paying people back and your net is at the absolute bottom of the hole or chute or whatever.
What this has to do with recording budgets is tricky because if you get an advance, sometimes a label uses that to basically pay you for the right to OWN your master works. Other labels use whatever they spend on recording the record as justification to them owning the master. I’m all about home recording, so that makes it a bit harder than me going into someone’s studio and then leaving them with a record. I have done that in the past and it is an interesting thing. if you deal with a producer who has studio access, a label of some sort and maybe a couple of other resources, then you are completely at their mercy. You pick some backing tracks/instrumentals and drop vox to them and that is that. If you are lucky then they pay you for your time as well as give you a percentage of the sales. The last one rarely happens though. I am thinking of this because of having to do the total budget for s.h.a.r.k. bait and this encompasses:
1. Recording/Mixing/Mastering- I gotta have a spot to record along with stuff to record it on, someone better than me with different ears to mix it and another person to master it who actually does it for a living.
2. Manufacturing- This means CDs, Vinyl and maybe even another format capitalizing on the whole USB key thing. not to mention potential merchandise like shirts or whatever if some other clothes company doesn’t do it before me.
3. PR Budget- This pays for publicity and college radio play. it also gets the record out to magazines and ideally music supervisors and other industry folks that can put it in a good, visible, contextually rational place.
I have the right solutions for 1 and 3 but 2 is the one that is the trick because it is obligated to pay back all of the money spent for 1 and 3. If something like a licensing deal pops up and you hear a track on a pepsi commercial, then all of this becomes null and void.
(I didn’t even get into cross collateralization which is how labels muddy the waters of royalties and use this to pay for that or using your digital royalties to pay for physical expenses and licensing money to pay for something else, etc…)
While working on drums for the new ish, I get whipped over the head with all these tempo combos based on math and such. I trip out because in my time of rapping over other folks production, I have ripped every tempo between 56 and 145, This is to the nearest decimal place that you can come up with. And while hip-hop/rap is a linguistically viral medium, (meaning that, while you can use any instrument on any manner of genre based on the instrument’s interpretation of the genre’s theme, if you incorporate elements that are commonly found in hip-hop, it then becomes a genre based in the macro-file of hip-hop based musics and judged as such.) if a person (i.e. me) engages in rapping over instrumental styles not common in rap (e.g. songs with no percussion or rhythm section, songs incorporating instruments normally filed in ethnic sections of music stores, uptempo music not normally used for hip-hop, etc), then they find themselves subject to the supposition of “muddying the water” or mixing up genres in a foolhardy attempt to commodify and ultimately trivialize hip-hop and it’s standing, yet another time in it’s long and storied history.
We can use the recent wave of people crossing genres and rhyming over dance music, for an example. More than one experienced and technically sound emcee went over to the dance set in the great purge of 2006-2009. The first and most celebrated were those who may have played a minor (if not unseen) role in the avant garde smash and grab of 2002-2005, as well as those who already had cred for rapping over electronic influenced music. Following hot on the heels of those dudes were a bunch of people who never really rapped, but figured that it could be done. These individuals were inexplicably joined by rappers that occupied an entirely different history and fanbase 10 years prior. For some, the new synth based sounds and metronome programming made rapping at double and triple times even easier and at the same time, more challenging. This made the whole early grime invasion all the more rewarding because lots of those dudes were just making hit after hit and none of the stuff was below 130 BPM. Unfortunately for those in the American contingent of the fast rap movement, this paradigm shift did not happen and in order to express their creative streak and still remain commercially relevant, they switched it up. While this shouldn’t be a big thing simply because hip-hop’s roots are on the dancefloor, it’s most sacred exploits were conducted at a 97 beats per minute average. Therefore, the first paradigm shift of the early 90’s started at a slow burn and didn’t fully kick off until 2003, when all the independent labels (or crews disguised as labels) started to sell significant units and penetrate the media at large. The labels acted as sub-genre filters of good taste and eventually became descriptions under which to classify the onslaught of music being released as a whole. Things became described under label genres not unlike Motown and Blue Note, with the Def Jux/Stones Throw/Anticon labels being the capstone on the pyramid. Labels that were previously unrelated to hip-hop, found artists that they could relate to and upon releasing their records faced derision and exclusion by not only the genre that they were marketing the record to, but their own primary ingrained fanbase. The consumers of products by THESE brands felt cheated because they bought into the whole initial brand ID and thought that they were being abandoned in favor of money coming from the other side of the tracks. These folks who were against these unholy reunions weren’t just fans, they occupied large amounts of the industry as a whole and sometimes were the reason why records wouldn’t get the just exposure they deserved.
I still find all of this crazy because if you listen to Edan’s mix entitled “Fast Rap” then you will hear all sorts of raw uptempo styles during hip-hop’s tweenager (assume it ages in dog years) period of development. People were dancing in videos up until 1988, and then signs of the first shift started showing. The white-hot liquid surface of hip-hop started cooling off and this translated in tempo and subject matter. People still had stage shows and at times even dancers, but that was on the way out and the big budget performances of MC Hammer signaled the end of an era steeped in showbiz. Once rap dropped to the point of people gathering in circles and rapping while smoking weed on street corners, the pace of the music was stunted to a crawl. Clever producers in both hip-hop and electronic concentrations mixed and matched tempo and came up with all sorts of mathematical equations that in turn begat drum and bass, downtempo and whatever else the U.K., U.S. and France came up with in the early to mid 90’s. I just remember hearing Boards of Canada in 2001 and wondering where I was in 1998 when their record “Music has a right to children” first dropped upon unsuspecting society. MIx that with whatever Timbaland was concocting and any new Autechre record or release on Schematic/Merck and I was definitely hooked into the different timed way of style. With me, in a genre that existed partly on individuality and innovation, show me WHO was rapping over these beats? If you want to get into style specifics, that was a whole other thing. Fast forward to now and people want to basically put a chokehold on music by way of tempo and arrangement. I figure that once I become notorious for doing whatever in regards to rap and it’s building blocks, I can show off all sorts of variations on the formula of constructing a “hip-hop banger” in the present day/age.
I always wondered why there was some sort of an industry standard in the recording of pop-music quality rap vocals. One time I remember Brother Jay from X-Clan told me that he wanted to hear me on a 10,000 dollar mic and then see what I came up with. I didn’t think that was a diss and I still don’t, I felt like he was on a thing where we all needed to be on some pro level shit in order to actually succeed and make a mark. I didn’t want to tell him how many thousands of dollars went into NOT recording on a 10,000 dollar mic because that wouldn’t make sense. However, I did keep that with me for apparently 5 years. When I did all the Weekend Science Experiment stuff, the whole twist was that it was done in “a studio” versus in a cardboard box. I hated that whole process because MTW was trying to whip me into shape to be a pro and I thought he was trying to whip me into shape to be a poor man’s Murs. I was way stupid, but I always retain information so I learned from my mistakes. When I got enough money to invest in a decent pro tools rig and cool mic back in 03-04, I was just trying to mix the best of both worlds. I figured that if I had the editing power and high bit rate of pro tools mixed with a condenser mic and a belligerent attitude when it came to home recording, I could make some shit. I did that and lots of it, made some money, sold the equipment 40 times and traveled around the world recording half-assed songs ever since then.
I like the “fuck-around song” attitude when it is pulled off by certified vets. I don’t like the same attitude when its someone not as skilled or someone PRETENDING to be on 100 xanax pills like Lil’ Wayne or whoever. On the other side of that, I also hate the dudes who make every song in their catalog a struggle. I like the people who make good songs in the moment, where all you need is a verse from them and that’s that. I also like songs that make you feel good even though they aren’t supposed to. To me, these are certified hits and they don’t need a plaque to show you so. With home recording techniques, I always subscribe to the “make it sound like something you would listen to” rule. You look around your room and do all the fundamental shit that someone in a recording studio would do (walk around looking for sound traps, weird reverb areas, whatever) and then you figure out how to make all that work in your advantage. An engineer who will remain nameless showed me the most useless piece of equipment on earth and he was STOKED to have the bitch. This rack wreck is basically an acoustic modeler and it works off the idea that it will model certain environments thru your speakers so you can hear some shit that doesn’t matter if your room is a basement in your apartment building. Not to mention that your “sound dead” mic booth is directly outside of a bathroom?!?
WHAT THE FUCK IS A SOUND DEAD ROOM GOING TO DO AGAINST LOUD PIPES THAT ARE IN THE SAME ROOM???
Not to mention when you are in the middle of a take and you stop just in time for some moron to go and take a shit in the bathroom while you are trying to record. Exactly…
Basically, if you (the engineer/producer/vocalist kind of dude) are comfortable with your sound and know how to get the best results from whatever, then you can record in anything. I hated and still hate the double standard that says that you can record an album anywhere on earth if you are in a band, but you have to record in Dr. Dre’s bathroom if you are a rapper. You would obviously think it to be the other way around since it still comes down to a dude rapping over a beat, according to the general populace. I think that since rap is still insanely racist and classist, you need all these false trappings and “emperor’s new clothes” ways of recording so it can justify and validate something that was looked at not that long ago as “niggers talking” for lack of a better term. To further prove that Hip-Hop (and in turn all of the sub-genres that spun off from it in a radically short time) is an actual music and not a game, people had to deconstruct it and run it thru a billion dollar blender in order to come with results.
If you listen to most old recordings (meaning the 80’s), the total decibel level is significantly lower than the music that came after it. This was due to all sorts of really interesting reasons, but the number one is as always, TECHNOLOGY. Tape was, is and always will be the line drawn in the sand for music. When you have a bunch of low level stuff going into it (tape) mixed by a dude that has probably never dealt with bass as a individual thing in their life, then you have to start plotting. When the bass tube in the back of the car came into play, all this shit changed overnight. Dudes were testing out their mixes in systems that didn’t even catch the higher registers on a wish or dare. Now you had cities all over the map that were just subbing out of control levels simply because that was the new thing! Mix that with people actually turning that into a genre and you had an entirely new way to engineer.
this isn’t about my old rap group, although my old deejay put me up on this fun new hobby! in a effort to look for music and stay motivated in this super shifting counter culture, I started exploring various blogs in the hopes of finding some “old-new shit” to flip for these new seasons. not unlike fashion designers trawling second hand/vintage stores and estate sales for inspiration amongst the piles and piles of moth-ridden garments worn by whoever, whenever. SO much amazing music has gone unsung amongst the throngs of titles that have been released in the last 60 years alone. as technology progresses, so does the vast library of music that is both made as a reaction to said, technology and preserved for archival purposes. even though the archival of physical recordings of decades past is often frowned upon and even dismissed due to occupying space, the original recorded works are more than music encoded on a medium. the fabrication of the vinyl medium itself is a time capsule into the technological processes and artistic representation of the particular time. some records had all sorts of wacky and wild “processes” that helped record the material in question, along with preserving the initial “pristine” quality of the live recording situation. the record was supposed to be a substitute for the live show experience, one that could not be easily appreciated by the average listener due to any number of physical, regional or logistical scenarios. what brought the record to the 3-D world was inconsequential, as was the artistic compensation and entitlement that is now boxed with a record. people just wanted to enjoy the music in the most advanced way available to them. this is why the first 7 inch sold over a million copies, everyone WANTED it.
anyway, back to library records. the blogs are doing a great job (with emphasis on a finite amount) keeping everyone up to speed on the more acquired vinyl that haunted bargain bins and collector’s crates over antiquity. with the whole WAV and FLAC/OGG_VORBIS formats, dudes are essentially encoding records with a 65-75% accuracy rate in respect to dynamic range and spectrum. for the modern day sound sampling individual, this is a dream come true. you have to remember that most production equipment in the “golden age” of hip hop was probably 12 to 16 bits with an output of 44.1khz. the SP-1200 had a rate of 26.04khz with 12 bits of resolution! what type of sound were you hoping to get with 12 bits?!? all the shit that MADE the music had to do with outboard gear, the recording source (most likely 2” tape, thanks to SweatsonTake for that old school reminder) and the engineer behind the boards. those dudes were still cutting tape like Teo Macero back then! if you are into sampling source material, you only need to give a care about the source and the signal path. if you have shady wires or a suspect source, your sampler will take a picture of that and crunch it to however many numbers between 8 and 48 that you see yourself dealing with, give or take 44,100 slices every second.
be up on some game and familiarize yourself with the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, if you aren’t already up on it. it helps explain some stuff in a complex (but scientifically analytical way) and if you mix it up with other stuff like time stretching and anti-aliasing and phasing fuck-ups, you can get some odd sounds and that is the WHOLE POINT. I thought sampling was all about sampling, not what you sampled it off of…….
I’m all about noises. I like them very much and can tolerate them at all sorts of frequencies that may be terminal to some animals and creatures of the night. Out of all these divergent frequencies, I favor bass tones above all. I also like the real lizard sounding synth patches that some dude from Central Europe or Legowelt basically DOES at will. I personally think that analog synths are the shizznit, but I think that the people who share this sentiment have to understand why. While there are a couple of companies who are either notorious or down right famous when it comes to the analog modeler/FM synth (moog is the first of course. the dude’s name is synonymous with the sound!) game, only a couple heads keep the motor running in present day synth science. These dudes are oddly enough, Dave Smith and Roger Linn. If those names don’t ring any kind of bell, I’m not going to clown you or whatever. Dave Smith (among other things) had a company in the 80’s called Sequential Circuits and he developed such wonderful machines like the Prophet series keyboard and the oft slept on Six Track, which has some Land O’ Lakes bass attached to it. While Mr. Smith did that, Mr. Linn developed a little gadget with many versions called the Linn Drum. This was before (not after, the Japanese got at him after the fact) he designed the MPC-60, 60 MKII and 3000 sampler drum machines from Akai. There is a funny thing that both these dudes have in common besides their current working relationship, and that is this particular filter chip manufactured by a company called Curtis. While the Prophet 5 used filters designed by Emu, they supposedly had a couple of revisions to either the chip or the hardware itself, which caused them to switch out the chips to something that wasn’t a conflict of interest to use. They supposedly owed Emu royalty rates on all their equipment that carried the SSM-2040 filter, which is the one that was developed by a guy over at Emu, for Emu. This new Curtis filter was not only a better look in regards to administration, but it also had a better rate of WORKING that the SSM chip couldn’t guarantee? Weird. The Curtis chips were also (allegedly) found in the Ensoniq Mirage and EPS series keyboards. I wonder if the Akai rack samplers or the Ensoniq ASR series had Curtis filter chips in them? I have thought so for a minute, but you never know. Oh yeah, of course the SP-12 and 1200 had the Emu chips in them. The Emax probably did too, I think that was the sampler that Ferris Bueller had when he called in sick to school with some kind of terminal SARS cough…..
Let us not forget one of the MOST IMPORTANT and slept on innovations in modern day rap and that is the clock that Roger Linn used for the MPC series drum machines up until the MPC 2000, which he didn’t design. While some say a lower bit rate equals a less precise clock, the Linn designed MPCs have a swing that cannot be duplicated. Mix that with the filters and you have a different beast for beats. I just told you two reasons why rap is the shit, why “real producers” fuck with MPCs but REAL producers fuck with MPC 3000’s, why filters are the shit in relation to certain machines and why other randoms went and bought SP-1200s. I mean, thank Ced Gee for that one. He was the first dude to make a “beat” on the SP…..
post002: the composition of an introduction, according to me.
ever since my first solo cassette tape in 1998, I have always incorporated an introduction on every record that I have ever made. it is almost a mark of approval or completion or something. over the years, I have done many, many records both alone and with friends. not everyone is necessarily into the whole “intro/outro” thing, so you may hear all sorts of things.
now that I am however many projects deep in the new decade, I’m wondering if I should have an introduction at all…. I mean, there are so many ways to explain yourself in real time (versus the whole “once a year” paradigm of yesteryear) that you only need to post an introduction of your descriptive work on twitter and it’s cool. I am also a fan of the “bookend method” and I believe a record should move like a comic book or magazine (complete with commercials and photo spreads) versus a big budget matinee or indie cult film. don’t forget the sit-com or made for T.V. movie, those kinds of records suck.
I always loved the anticipation of whatever it was that the dude was going to get into, the prelude or synopsis of that was on the intro. I also loved the gangster intros of old that always seemed to end in a hail of gunfire, inhaling and exhaling, screeching tires, police sirens or all of the above. The braggadocio intro was always fun too, Hieroglyphics and Gangstarr kind of owned those in the early 90’s. Wu-Tang kind of cracked the whole thing open with the rampant movie sampling and Dre THXed the whole thing into the ground with that weird plane flying by a binaural microphone effect he killed on the chronic 2001. Dre also squandered away perfectly good introduction music on telling you who could eat a fat dick, this kind of set the standard on the value of a high-priced fuck around intro. You couldn’t just have a loop riding for 24 bars unless you were Primo, and he was the golden exception. Biggie and Nas get stars on Hollywood for their intros and Jeru The Damaja gets most honorable mention for his intro on Wrath of the Math. KRS just fucks off intros simply because he knows that he can, it’s almost insane. I’m still wracking my brain trying to figure out what I can propose as the “dopest intro of all time” is, I have heard entirely too many intros in the last 10 years. Interludes and bonus loops will get a separate blog, along with hidden tracks…..
I made this blog to talk about my new record and how I intend to make it. Instead of tripping off of not having enough money to make a record, I’m going to make it with all the resources available to me and present the result as any other record. The only difference is that I’m leaving out the story in the liner notes. I’ll put stuff on here like samples I flip, (both to keep track and to show how I flipped it, as well as giving a minute tutorial on the person in particular) equipment I used on the songs and why, which songs I did live and their effect, all that nonsense. I’ll even put exclusive out-takes and such on here to keep you looking……
(oh yeah, my rules here: no tags, little pics, some video, lots of text and half as much audio. everything has to do with the creative process of the record.)
