010: engineering….

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……….