Old School Hiphop

Anyone smacking out them beats?

After years and years of working on very technical projects with 100+ tracks, nothing relaxes me like just chilling out making old school rap tunes. The simplicity of it all makes you feel so free, and the ways you can do the classic techniques in Logic are actually fun enough for me to use it over my mpc.

Not zooming in, cutting up audio files in arrangement and just putting stuff where it sounds good and having your joint "full" at 3 audio tracks... now that's heaven. Stretching breaks, emulating them with other drum sounds, bouncing it all together and smacking on compression just sounds so authentic.

Some genres are just way fun, what genres do you take a stab at when you're just making sound for the fun of it? I find it funny how that genre is always something you don't listen to normally, which kinda makes it a "this is how it's supposed to sound"-deal.

Hey Kraze.

Pimping my own ass for adwork certainly leaves me with the will to kick it old school on my free time. Though, I tend to go MPC on it, as it allows me to relax without looking at a computer.

I've actually been really into writing noise freakouts lately. You know those Bull$^#$ audio projects your friends at artschool were doing that just sounded bad?. Well... I'm kinda going there. It's fun to just make noise that isn't intended for anyone to hear. Sometimes, I actually sample it and work it into tracks. But there's something gratifying about seeing how much you can screw up a sound, yet still make it interesting, or musical. Or how many synths/delays/fuzzboxes you can run a sound through.

A few months ago, I actually started making tape loops, and running them through an effectron and an Octave Cat. Recording them, and re-tape looping them. It was great fun. And a good way to forget about the stupid hot dog commercial you just spent the last 3 days working on.

-PP

Man, are we lost twins at birth?

I do one-of-a-kind soundtracks and often use mpc's (looove the 500 for its portability right now), but noise freakouts are pretty much the best thing to do, ever.

I love making those crazy collages and then recording them back through walkmans (while shaking, of course), horrible effect boxes, a modular synth, my sk-1 or anything, really. Then i splice the different recordings together and just do whatever, it's awesome to just disregard every "rule" ever and just destroy.

Ha! That's awesome.

As you've undoubtedly found however, Once you're done, playing it for your friends generally rewards you with raised eyebrows, and confused looks.

They just don't get it man.

I haven't gone into the 500. I'm a bit turned off of the small screen. I'm a 2k classic guy. I bud of mine actually designed a chunk of the new 5000. He keeps promising me his loaner!

A friend of mine just showed me something fantastic. He just got a reverse DI "reamping" box by Radial that lets you essentially use all of your stomp boxes as outboard effects by turning a line signal into a guitar signal. He does pretty big ad projects, and on a regular basis, mixes his projects with these ridiculous guitar pedal effect chains, and it sounds AWESOME! I makes you feel stupid for spending so much on fancy rack gear.

Yeah, i feel a bit lame for not using the classic mpc's, my main one is a jap modded 1000 and i'm actually way too satisfied with it to get anything other than the 5000 (which is just bound to happen). But the 500 definently gets the most use for me now, it's a different way of working, i prepare more, but banging out beats on flights, trains etc is just plain awesome.

Well, that kinda makes me glad i come from a noisy rock band background, my mates are mostly into that stuff and when we couldn't afford high-end stuff we used to sit upp all night to solder the cables for using our guitar effects when mixing.

But yeah, alot of people neglect the awesomeness of pedals. It's coming back a bit with people lik Metasonix offering amazing (but expensive) boxes, but most can be used if you sort out the di-issues.

The Metasonix stuff really is awesome though, but i still feel guilty for spending so much on it.. Conscience go away!