For the next month or 2 I am taking some time to focus on developing my sound as a funk music artist. I’ve decided to postpone the funk releases I had planned for a couple of months while I work on a more consistent sound. While I’m doing that, I felt it was a good time to release something I’ve been sitting on for a while.
Once upon a time, ya boy was a beatmaker. Back in the 90’s, there wasn’t a market for instrumental beat albums like there is now. So like most beatmakers, I have a bunch of unreleased tracks in my archives. Fyi, that means on DAT’s & CD’s. We didn’t have our beats on hard drives back then.
Anyway, I present the first of at least 2 collections of my sonic musings completed between 1995 & 2003, “Memoirs of a Beatmaker Vol. 1”.
Peep the gear on the album cover. This is what I used to create these beats. No FL Studio or Logic back then. It was a great time to be a producer as the technology evolved. The things we can do today with samples in a DAW almost feels like I’m cheating sometimes. Things have come so far.
About the gear…
All midi sequencing was done on my Roland MC-50 mkII. It had only 8 tracks. Crazy huh? We made it work. The Peavey SP was probably one of the worst samplers ever made, but somehow we chose that one in 1994 and used it for over 10 years. 8mb of sampling. I never did expand it to 32. We made it work. My synth collection consisted of the following: Roland JD-800, Roland JV-880, E-mu Orbit, E-mu Planet Phatt, E-mu Mo’ Phatt. There were NO free synths back then. We made it work. Every track was mixed through the Mackie LM-3204 keyboard mixer. The first 8 channels of the LM-3204 were reserved for an ADAT which we used to record vocals, bass guitar, or sax. At some point we ran out of channels so the sampler was sub-mixed through a Mackie 1202. We made it work. We had 2 compressors, a DBX 1066 and an Alesis 3630. We also had the legendary Aphex Aural Exciter c2 with Big Bottom (the cheapest one). FX came via Digitech Studio 400, Digitech Studio Quad v2 and the Boss RV-70. That was it. We made it work.
I say “we” because I shared the studio with a few other cats. We collaborated on some things and did some stuff separately.
Most of these tracks are rough mixes that have been sitting on a DAT or on CD for over 20 years so I tried to update the sound quality a bit when I did the mastering.
I hope you dig it. Vol. 2 coming soon.