Somehow, I pocketed a win for #949... ok, "somehow." Even I have to take a break from my self-abuse and recognize when I drop the occasional banger. Proud of that one, especially because the source material has been flipped multiple times by Actual Producers(tm) and I still managed to pull pieces of it together into something new.
For #950, I decided to force everyone to use some track I like for a change: some dusty, crusty, musty old Giallo shit - and one track from Mexico, that was suggested to me by someone that fits the general vibe/character and sounded really nice. I tried to pay some extra attention to make sure of two things:
1. The sample sources were as drumless as possible to make things easier. Stem separation is nice, but you know what's nicer? Not taking chunks out of the fuckin surrounding elements that you actually wanna use.
2. There was a decent variety of moods/vibes so folks who took up the challenge could zero in on the kinda shit they like.
I also allowed all outside samples with the stipulation that content from the source tracks absolutely must be the backbone of the track - beyond that, creative freedom in regards to sample use.
Consulted with JoaGymshoe for some special rule ideas and I can't remember if it was my idea or his (99% sure it was his, but I liked it), and ended up also requesting that competitors add some kind of unusual element to their track that the listener wasn't expecting. Same level of freedom for this, though - all that mattered is that the listener didn't see it coming. Jarring vocal shot? Massive tempo transition? A layer of tortured screams? Make it half a bar? One, two, eight bars; idgaf - just surprise me.
I was actually drawn to the Mexican track because I'm a sucker for a nice saxophone progression and a nice saxophone progression is the entire core of the joint. What can I say? The spirit is willing, but the flesh (mainly the ears) do be weak. The Epic Sax Guy era wasn't just my era, it was all of ours. Forever and ever. Anyway, I got to chopping on the 404MKII and once I was done, moved on to tapping around to see how I could glue the pieces back together. Satisfied with the main progression for Sequence A, I recorded the individual chops to the MPC and once I had them there, arranged them in the piano roll. I thought it felt a little dry and boring on repeat like that, so I slapped a nice, subtle delay on it to give it a little extra rhythm and movement and it ended up sounding kinda dreamy.
I spent some time looking through drums and found some nice choices - one of those kicks that's short and punchy, with a transient/top end that kinda sounds like a basketball or something to cut through the mix, a nice moderately hard-but-short snare hit so it's present but not overwhelming or taking focus away from the other elements, and a decent loosely closed hi hat. The beat is simple, maybe you could describe it as a relaxed, cruising down the highway but not in the passing lane type of deal. I especially like how the jazzy hat pattern came out - it's just the one sample, played with 16-levels turned on to give it some feeling and extra rhythm.
Because the original is so pleasant and because my cookup of it was turning out to be really chill and smooth (what? sometimes I'm easily influenced), I didn't wanna sully it up with some obvious synth bassline. I went digging through my collection of MPC keygroups for a nice, realistic bass and found one in the F9 Instruments expansion. I'm pretty sure it was the Jazz Bass. At this point, I've got a 4-bar loop that's comin together nicely so I let it loop another 30 or 40 times while I noodle around looking for an equally smooth bassline that stood out to me. I kept the notes near the bottom of the register for this keygroup, but not too low - maybe an octave above where it starts to sound like ass. I usually sit at the octave right before that for bass because I like the rumble and the added presence of a deep and imposing bass sound, but I wanted the "real instrument" aspect to shine through here and... mission accomplished, if I do say so myself.
With only 4 bars down, I decided I needed to direct some much-needed attention to varying it up a bit . It was feeling to m like you were kinda endlessly waiting for it to resolve and it just never did. For this, I did a couple things. First, I went diving for more sax samples and found the perfect way to resolve the end of the loop in one of the longer chops I had on the 404. I tweaked the start and end points of that pad and recorded it to a pad in the MPC. Back on the MPC, I copied over the 4-bar sequence and fixed up the copy to use the newly added sax chop. Playing them back together in order was... well... music to my fuckin ears. I never made any promises to not use cliches. While listening back to the now 8-bar loop (two 4-bar sequences), some of the drum placement made my eye twitch. I picked up the habit of recording drums without quantization on a while back and while it does lead to more human feeling drum sequences, it also leads to some really awful placement sometimes. I popped back into the original sequence to shift the drum hits around a bit in the last of the 4 bars and while listening back, I was tapping 4.1. After a few rounds of this, I was like "goddamn i like how this sounds on repeat). The MPC has a nice feature where you can copy events between tracks or sequences. It's a versatile little option where you can basically say "I want to copy bar 3 to this sequence starting at bar 1, and I want to make 4 copies of it." Makes things super easy sometimes in this kind of context. I went ahead and did this once for the original 4-bar sequence and once more for the second one that resolves the loop, except for the latter sequence, I used the other 4th bar for bars 1-3, then copied the bar that resolves the whole loop for the end. That sax sequence 5 times in a row would be way too much. One thing I don't love is in the original sequence, you get the last bar, and then you get that same bar 4 more times. If you're not paying attention, it almost feels like you're just stuck and the song will never progress any further. Annoying, but whatever. I left it.
This first smooth jazz sequence felt like ti was missing something. Not something big, but just like... a dusting of powdered sugar over the top. What could be more appropriate than a nice electric piano - a family of instruments that has a stronger hold on me than even a nice sax sequence. I pulled up Electric on the MPC, found a preset I like, tweaked it up a bit, and this was probably the single most time consuming process for this track because I am absolutely not a piano or keyboard player by any means. I do a lot of poking and messing around when it comes to stuff like this and while I have a decent understanding of basic music theory (and I mean basic), I certainly don't know enough to be able to just belt out a beautiful chord or note progression without putting a whole lot really awful sounding shit through the speakers first. I started with chords that fit the key and when I had those placed on the piano roll, I got to jazzing it up by breaking some of the chords up into note progressions that played an alternate but fitting rhythm to the beat as it was. I kept the electric piano low and panned it off to the right so it was just there, accenting the melody as a supporting character. It came together really pleasantly - especially in those 4-bar loops where that one bar repeats 4 times.
While listening to the second 4-bar loop, with that sax chop that resolves the whole 8 bars, I wanted to do something different with the bass, so I pulled the piano roll back up and fixed up the bassline so that it follows the sax melodically. This took the bass itself a little high, but it fit like a glove. Good shit! I also doubled back to the two repeating loops and alternated the bass pattern for both to give it a little more variation.
Until now, I had designs on one of the source tracks that has a lot of dark, kind of sinister piano progressions in it. Admittedly, I flipped this track a while back into a nice, but kind of uninteresting trap beat. I chopped it up and proceeded to spend several hours trying to make it work in a way I was satisfied, but no luck. No matter how I arranged the chops, or how I pitched em, or what FX I threw on em, it just wasn't happening. Sometimes, you just gotta say "fuck this" and walk away - a lesson I've been begrudgingly learning for years, and will probably continue to learn for the rest of my days. On this day, I acted on it and bitterly ditched the piano loop. I had a whole idea in my head that the unusual element in my track was going to be an incredibly jarring aca/vocal shot of Lil Fame from M.O.P. from one of my favorite songs (What The Fuck) where, all pissed off, he goes, "What the fuck are you lookin for?" and maybe a couple extra Billy Danze shots, and that would transition the track into a +10BPM tempo boost (give or take) and into an aggressive, gritty boom bap joint. Alas... it wasn't meant to be n shit.
Of the 4 source tracks I dropped for the battle, I was familiar with 2 of them. One, as I mentioned, was the piano joint, which I had flipped before, that crashed me out. The other was one with this really overwhelming organ sequence that I love (can you guess that organs are yet another instrument that I'm weak to?). It's not a dark sequence, though - in fact, it sounds kind of triumphant. I considered transitioning into a more positive sounding, but still aggressive vibe, but regardless of what I was going to end up doing vibes-wise, the overarching decision was already made for me: the organ chops were where I would be throwing my attention.
For this, I just chopped out the entire sequence on the 404, recorded into the MPC, and chopped up there. Once I had the chops down, I started hitting pads looking for a pattern that jumped out at me. While what I had, in its original form, was workable (very workable, tbqh), I was still mad about not being able to take the beat to a grimy place with the piano. I chose a base sample out of the bunch to form a sort of melodic anchor for the new vibe and, out of bitterness alone, I started pitching the organ chops around. A lot of these chops didn't take well to pitch changes, whether melodically (because pitching chord samples is so often just... like... house music-coded? I'm sure there's some music theory way to convey why this happens) or in terms of character/timbre (where the chord sounds fine at its original pitch, but going up or down even a single semitone brings out too much of the top or low end, throwing the whole sample off balance). A couple of the chops, though, took very well to being pitched. They didn't need much moving around, maybe a max of 1-3 semitones up or down - I just wanted other pads to feel more minor-key, sinister, bleak, dark, whatever in relation to the pad I chose as my foundation. That pad, by the way, has kind of this... swell in the middle of it. Its a bit of a volume swell, but it also feels like a bit of a swell in its stereo width. While it fit the beat well in terms of tempo, I hit the pad again in a bit of an irregular spot to where that swell was throwing things off. As soon as I noticed, I copied that pad over and pushed the start point on it up so that on that secondary hit, the swell matched up with the rhythm. Nailed it on the first try, too - no adjusting, here, bitch!
With time running out and me getting bored of the project overall (and me getting tired of recounting the whole fuckin process here, in this post, too), I pushed through, added a higher-up bassline using the same Jazz Bass from before; nothing fancy here, and the bass wasn't even constant. It was just placed periodically to add a tense kind of vibe. I also slapped a couple of FX on the organ mixer insert that really transformed the chops. First, I added a tremolo to it - no sync, I just eyeballed (earballed?) it until it was like... off-rhythm enough to where it was kind of phasing into and out of the rhythm, almost like an irregular rhythm that loops on odd-numbered bars. There's a word for this shit and it's escaping me. Next,I laid it up in a reverb that kind of gave it a shimmer. It really did transform the sound from this like, one big block of organ chord with little to no variation, into this constantly trembling, foreboding deal with a warm, sickly "glow."
To add on to the tension, I wanted to bring that electric piano back in, but this time instead of being buried in the beat with only the tines and a bit extra poking out, I wanted to make its presence very known. Once again, like the bass, I just wanted to pepper the vibe and not overdo it, so I just laid down a few descending notes that fit the overall vibe and melody - it only appears once every 4 bars, panned off to the right a bit and giving an extra bit of tension and foreboding.
At this point, it's 11PM and earlier in the day, I got sidetracked by some take-home case study thing related to a job I had applied for, so I'm just rushing to wrap this bitch up and put a bow on it... but there's one thing missing. The surprise! The "unusual element" - I had given "a jarring vocal shot signaling a mood shift" as an example, but I knew that's what I was going to end up doing when I was writing down the special rule. Since the M.O.P. shot was going to be way too aggressive for this much more laid back, sinister vibe, I started racking my brain for what I could pull in to serve the purpose of a jarring transition, and then it hit me. It's really like it was handed to me from the other side of the veil or whatever. There's a classic Redman (my favorite emcee of all time) joint called Tonight's Da Night. In it, he starts with a few bars of these smooth lyrics before the record scratches and Hurricane G (RIP, she was a fuckin real one) cuts in and goes "Yo, yo, Redman, man. What the fuck, man? Get the fuck off that... punk smooth shit, man. Get with that rough shit, man! You know how we do!" with a bunch of dudes basically echoing her disapproval in the background. Considering Sequence A is textbook "punk smooth shit," how could I have ever landed on a differnet vocal shot for the transition? I found the track on my hard drive, ran it through UVR5 to isolate the vocals, recorded just her interlude, and... Reggie Noble, please forgive me, but I cut out Redman's name since I'm not using one of his acas or anything and it would've been weird leaving it in.
What I forgot about is the fact that the drum track where I assigned her vocal shot(s) to had an instance of Flavor Pro on it and when I first heard the Hurricane G transition in context, it was filthy. Kinda distorted. Like she got right up into the microphone to put a fucking end to this punk smooth shit once and for all. I loved it.
I wrapped it up, recorded the final output, hit ChatGPT to generate the SC cover image, and called it a night. Named it Gemini because there's a Mobb Deep line that has stuck with me for over a decade now where Havoc goes, "I'm a Gemini, bitch, that mean I flip with the weather." A fitting name for a track with two faces like this one.
Another one in the bag! I really gotta get better at not spreading my process out over an entire fuckin week just for a 2 minute track. Maybe next time.
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