Part of progressing as a producer or as a musician means learning new styles, digesting them and deciding what to keep and what to throw away. Maybe you went on a serious trip hop phase for 5 minutes in the 90s or maybe when you started you were all about some Public Enemy “wall of noise” approach. Go ahead. Talk about you most “Cringe worthy” production phase. In retrospect what did it teach you? Things to do? Things to NOT do?

For me, it is probably a few years ago I tried to dabble in a few so-call dance styles, e.g. DnB, jungle, IDM. I studied some and programmed a lot of double time break beats…and tried (in vain) to work them into 4 minute hip hop songs. It can be done….but I never really made it happen. I cringe because I my beats from that era show no respect for the feel of hip hop rhythms and at the same time do NO justice to the complexity of the dance styles.  It is kind of like by trying to combine two good styles I made a really bad one. I think I learned that if I am going to incorporate a new style that I should really immerse myself in it…and understand it from the inside out….rather than doing a caricature…all in all….i still like some things about what I did…I can hear some of what I was going for….in the end it lead to more focus on feel and so for that it was a nice detour..

sean

www.seanmaru.com

A local reggae keyboardist who heard I was into audio stuff asked me to restore the audio on his demo tape and burn a few copies to CD. When he came to pick up the package he ended up listening to my music and asked me to make some tracks for him to play and eventually sing over.

The results were so bad I never even told him I tried. I spent forever trying to get that low dub tone- never mind struggling to get the damn delay/echo sound right. My little producer arrogance kicks in and I’m saying to myself I should be able to make anything.

So there I am on the internet using Google to look into what gear and techniques are used and then it dawns on me: If you have to use a search engine to get started…maybe this genre isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing.

I remember my first R&B track and how..the girl was like...where's the hook?

I said it was after the drum change up. Thinkin I thought this chick did a lot of songs before...

She said no, for the first verse.

She said we don't sing straight for 16 bars..

So I put the hook in every 8 bars like she asked me to.

Then she's goes where's the bridge?

So I started studying arrangements after that.

Griff, what you needed was the end-all-be-all of Reggae/Dub echo boxes, the Roland RE-201 Space Echo, that is THE signature echo box for anything Reggae/Dub related (if you're lucky, you can find a really good used one for about $300 these days):

http://www.vintagesynth.com/index2.html

L-ROX
Redsecta Mixing & Mastering
Los Angeles
www.redsecta.com

www.vintagesynth.com/roland/re201.shtml

 

L-ROX
Redsecta Mixing & Mastering
Los Angeles
www.redsecta.com