STBB949: Soundtracks

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Up to my old tricks again... and by that, I mean spending 4-5 days consciously heading in an interesting, experimental direction with a pile of samples I chopped and pitched and abused only to turn around the day before the beat battle deadline and go, "Oh, no! I hate it!" and then flip the source material into something relatively "safe" and conventional.

Without wanting to spend too much time on the "failed experiment" portion of this flip, we were provided with 3 movie soundtrack joints. One from Taxi Driver (which had some fun, jazzy shit goin on), one from Eyes Wide Shut (which had some cool, creepy male vocals that I think were reversed to make it sound more demonic, considering the movie it was for), and a pretty well-known, heavily-sampled Quincy Jones joint called Aftermath from a film called The Slender Thread. The latter is possibly best known for being used for a Pharaoh Monche track called Behind Closed Doors (a classic banger, tbh).

I usually try to avoid source material that's been heavily sampled mainly because its already been done, and often likely much better than I could do it. Considering there are like 10 tracks listed on WhoSampled that have used the Quincy Jones track, I originally decided to sidestep it. I zeroed in on a very short low brass hit in the Taxi Driver joint that I liked, but wished it was a little longer so I chopped it in the SP-404 MKII, flipped it to Ensemble mode (which allows you to change pitch and tempo independently), and slowed it down to about 65% of its original tempo. Sometimes in this scenario, the sample comes out sounding... bad. Metallic, artifacty, and very obviously slowed down. Because this sample was so short, that was thankfully not the case. I then copied it to several other pads and pitched the copies around so that I could maybe make a core melody out of it. Another potential pitfall that I've come across is when you've copied the same sample multiple times and pitched the copies, sometimes it very obviously sounds like its just the same sample pitched up or down from the original... and another stroke of luck: it didn't! This was also probably due to the short length of the sample. Satisfied with my insane luck so far, I got to arranging the hits over a few bars to get some structure down.

At this point, the short little brass hit by itself sounded OK, but I wanted it to have some force, so I pulled up Sub Factory on the MPC and started flipping through the 808 presets. I knew that I didn't necessarily want the pitch envelope to be too tight because I wanted an actual kick drum with a bit of thump to it keeping the rhythm for me, so I auditioned a bunch of presets with and without their pitch envs enabled and landed on one that I liked. At this point, I've got several hits of this brass sample giving me a bouncy melody, with a short 808 burst under it to give it some authority. From the very start to this moment - that's digging through the source tracks and finding the sample I wanted to use, chopping it out, sculpting it, arranging it into a melody and fine tuning the 808 how I wanted it, etc - I'm about 4 days in (I work slow, and in short bursts: sue me). I start looking around the source tracks to see if there's anything I can pair it with and I'm getting increasingly discouraged. I also realize that the whole joint, overall, is sounding a little too close to Mobb Deep's Put Em In Their Place. I step back and give it a couple hours to kinda slow cook in the back of my head and come back with the decision that I fuckin hate it, it's terrible, and I need to dramatically change directions.

This is where I started looking at that Quincy Jones track a lot harder. I originally avoided it out of habit, but goddamn it its no wonder it's been sampled so many times... it captures some of what I love most about Hip Hop: it's gritty, it sounds old and dusty, it sounds mean and sinister. Even the original, which is a very slow-moving and tense track... I wanna go outside and fight random strangers while it plays in the background. I throw caution and habit to the wind and say, "fuck it - we're doin this shit," and start pulling pieces out of it.

The main goal from here on out was to come up with a compelling, gritty Hip Hop joint (a la that neo Boom Bap shit you expect from Griselda), using Quincy Jones's Aftermath, and to not make it sound like anything else that previously sampled it. The excitement instantly returned to my creative process and I got to it. I slapped one of my favorite gritty Croup snare samples onto a pad on the MPC and copied it over to another pad. On the first pad, I put a fairly aggressive decay on it to shorten it and take some of the air out of it - almost like it was a rimshot with the same characteristics as the original. I found two nice kick samples - one that was a little flat, and one with a little thump to it. I also went looking for a couple of closed hi hats, one slightly more open and rattly than the other. I wanted to alternate between each of the drum shots - so like, the lightened up snare on the 2, the original gritty snare on the 4. A double kick hit after each snare hit, but the flatter kick immediately followed by the thump. One hi hat hit on each quarter note, but alternating between the two. This sort of thing gives a track some subtle variation and kind of an extra groove/bounce and I've used the technique successfully before.

Now that I've got these drum samples figured out and tweaked properly, it's time to get to the really fun shit: chopping the sample and deciding how I'm going to birth this monster. I take the obvious pieces - the discordant piano chord that kicks off the whole track, the shimmery chimes, the multiple hit of the... I think its an oboe? Its low, and gritty. Those are the pieces that end up forming what I consider the verse sequence. I pitch the piano chord down a good bit (and include a good bit of the pad-like string sound that tails it), then move on to the chimes (and, naturally, some of the pad-like string sound that tails it) which I pitch down, but keep a couple semitones higher than than the piano chop so that it sounds grimy and dissonant against it, and arrange them in the piano roll. Once I'm satisfied, I double it up to be 8 bars. For the chorus, or B sequence, I found a kind of bleak, depressing string sequence which sounds even more grim when it's pitched down. The whole B sequence is just the 4 bar loop, mostly untouched (except for the FX that made it filthy). I double this up to 8 bars as well.

Going back to the verse sequence, I knew that I wanted it to play 16 bars at a time, and that this was a beat more suited to have vocals over it, so I wanted to strike a balance between "repetitive and boring" and "too busy for vocals" so I recorded my 8 bar sequence back into the 404 (disabling busses 3 and 4 - this is super important for resampling if you want to preserve the original sound). I landed on using the Scatter FX module on the 404 just to kind of break up the monotony - which is a cheap and easy way to mangle up a sample in pleasant ways. I only triggered it around when the chimes hit and it ended up being subtle, but helped a good bit with giving a bit of sonic variation.

From here, I laid down the drums (which came out great, as far as I'm concerned, with that alternating sample technique I mentioned earlier), went back to Sub Factory and found (and slightly tweaked) one of the 808 presets I liked (Spinneresque was the one, I think?), laid down the 808 pattern for both sequences, slapped one instance of Air Flavor Pro on the master output (I think I used one of the presets labeled VHS, but I disabled the pitch wobble because that shit is often way too much on an entire track) and took down the vinyl noise by a lot, a VCA compressor on the end of the master chain to level things out and make it nice and loud, and et voila.

A grimy, gritty, Buffalo-style joint to ride around on a cold winter day with the ratchet in your lap and maybe a body in the trunk.

This track scored me the win for this week on STBB, which is pretty dope. I was up against 11 other entries and while the turnout for STBB is apparently fairly quiet lately compared to past battles, the submissions were broadly pretty damn decent as you should expect from that crowd. I'll happily take the win - and I fully expect it to be a rare case, so I'm happy just to have one under my belt.

Since I was this week's winner, next week's challenge becomes my problem so I, like any man, did the only thing I know... IT'S GIALLO TIME, BABY. I picked 4 nice, old source tracks (3 from Italy, 1 from Mexico) and tried to come up with some decent rules without boxing any of the entrants in too hard. Looking forward to the submissions for #950.