I have a few items of information that may be of interest to those following our illustrious music career. I’ve been up all night working on a tune, just churning out a bunch of synths until I found myself with a few quite different sounding textures that still worked when played together. I didn’t notice the time until the sun started coming in from my window that, hey, it’s the morning. It was well worth it, I think this is the most addictive beat I’ve made yet. Mostly it’s a the bassline, and how dirty the drums sound with such a hot bassline. Definitely some more experimental sounds in there as well, but definitely not a dark song at all. I’ve gotta run this by Hype, but I think this could be the beat we’ll use for Layin Shit Down.

Hype and I are going to be recording today, we’ll more than likely be doing some scratch vocals to a few songs, and we’ll also be finishing up a very minor part in Tha Chambers. We’ve finished Murderous Intent, and this evening after fix Tha Chambers, it gets sent out to a very exclusive preview network (don’t worry, you’re on it this time Nate - my bad). If you want to be on the network, just message us on this site or facebook. I’ll open 9 extra spots, which will probably take a few months to fill. Once we get feedback on the track, we’ll see which one our peoples want us to release, and which one to keep back. We can’t give all the tracks away, but we think giving between 1/3 - 1/2 of them out on the web is good, and keeping the rest as 30 second previews, that hopefully you people can buy.

So Hype came over on Wednesday to record a few tracks, which, in the past few weeks, we haven’t been able to do because of conflicting schedules. It feels good to get back to work though. We’d recorded the final sets of vocals for two songs: Murderous Intent and Tha Chambers. Murderous Intent will take a while, as the beat needs some touching up with another layer or two, as well as some work on the drums. The beat for Tha Chambers is done, as far as I’m aware, unless Peter wants to make anymore changes. He recently switched up the piano, which suits the song a lot better. The beat is smoother now, if that makes sense. Even though our lyrics are aggressive in this one, they really work a lot better on the new version. So, all I have to really do is mix the lyrics, link up a few effects with the backing vocals, get a wav version of the beat for re-encoding, and it’s pretty much a wrap - or rap.

We’ve also done the scratch vocals (again) to Thru Time and Space. We’ve done scratch vocals… I think twice before for this song, but it’s not a song we often rehearse, so the scratch vocals initially didn’t serve their intended purpose of hearing the flow of the song. We nailed it this time, obviously a good thing for us, but the backing is a far ways away from being completed.

So, In spite of the lack of significant progress within the last year or so, we’re finally catching up. I’d say around six of the months wasn’t our fault. There was about half a year of time where we had no choice in the matter. The computer wasn’t recording properly, or the computer was being sent in for repairs, or our schedules were conflicting. The other part of that year, I have to honestly look back and say it’s my fault. Looking back, there’s no way that I can look at the slower than desired progress we’ve made, and come up with any other answer. Hype’s always been doing his part, when he’s here, he’s ready. Admittedly, for this album, I do have the bigger share of the work, but that’s not an excuse at all. Hype comes over once or twice a week for recording. I have the entire week to “catch up”, but I generally didn’t. I’d play TF2, or I’d go on youtube, or post on forums. The forums one I’ve already gotten a lot better at, I’d be posting 2-3 hours a day, getting into these huge discussions, and although they were very entertaining for me, they weren’t doing anything for our common goal.

I’ve given up quite a few vices in the past year. I use to be addicted to MSN messenger, now I rarely ever use it, maybe once every few months or so. I don’t watch a lot of TV, mostly just MMA and a DVD series with my girl. I’ve also recently stopped playing TF2 (for the most part, an hour every few weeks is all I allow myself), and really cut down on youtube. The only thing I really have left is google reader, which I still consider an essential. I keep up on lots of music blogs, and a lot of personal ones as well. The difference between a month ago and now is that I’m a lot more selective in what I read. I skim for a bit and if it’s interesting I’ll read the rest. I’ve realized that I don’t have to read everything.

The biggest change I’ve made - which was very recent, probably within the last few weeks - is that now I meditate. I know mediation is supposed to be spiritual and yadda yadda yadda, but my version just means I concentrate on my goals. I think of things that will help me reach my goals, and any thought that conflicts with that, I “throw it away”. It’s a nice exercise that helps me realize my desires and to go after them. I don’t burn candles or hum or anything like that, I just think. I do it in public even. Waiting for a bus, maybe I’ll take two to three minutes to think about things I can do to reach my goals, again just throwing the other thoughts away. All I can say is that it works. When it comes time at home to make a choice on what to do, I know what choice I’m making, because I’ve already done the work earlier in the day. I’ve already made the choice to work on a goal, all I have to do is follow through. Every time I’m faced with a choice between a goal and something that distracts me from a goal, from sheer repetition, I now choose the goal.

And you know what? It feels good.

The last few weeks have been very productive for me as well. Vince and myself have decided on a estimated date and since then we’ve been working hard to make sure we get it out there when it’s supposed to be out there. In the meantime I’ve been working with reason as I watched my boy Bill N.Y. put together a beat using the program. Also I’ve been working on my rhymes putting together a little EP a small six track album. I’m going to call it awaken and the reason for that is because I feel like I have woken up from a bad dream that was so real. Basically I’ve been writing a lot and I feel that I have stepped up my game and I’m ready to show some of it off to the people. Trust me the EP is coming soon. But that is not the reason for the post, like 5 said before I have been using reason to make beats. I’ve made three so far but my third beat is by far the best one to date. I call this beat “Simplicity” and I call it that because when I was making this beat Saturday night everything that I did when making this beat seemed so right to me. So I’m not going to keep everyone in suspense. Here is my beat a work in progress right now called “Simplicity“, enjoy.

what up peeps, first post on this joint- or any type of blog for that matter. watch me fuck it up >.>
lately I’ve been thinking about getting back into beat making again.. after my halfway attempt bout 8 years ago lmao. anyhow, things have been progressing nicely on that end, better than its ever been imo.
I’m little hyped about this right now as i feel like I’ve hit a ’sweet spot’ in terms of work flow, not necessarily sound but since I’ve made that little change to how i create i feel that improved as well.
enough talk though, I’m going to up load a joint i just did - let y’all see for yourselves.
btw i beez a sample heavy producer hehe.

whoever listens to this, speak on it. lemme know if its hot garbage or bumpin’ in your ipod worthy.

FEEL IT!!

in case your curious, here is the original clip that i sampled from. apparently its Swedish reggae.. go figure

Sample

back to the lab, Peace.

…And I’m having a hard time getting to sleep, so I decided to post. Shane was over today and we recorded the vocals for our track “This Is Total Take Your Soul Music”. This is going to be my most ambitious piece of production yet. It’s going to be the longest hip hop song I”ll have produced, and probably the most experimental beat I’ll have made to date. I’m planning on working on the beat a bit more tomorrow night, and hopefully I can get the instrumentation done on the second verse out of four.

Anyways, that’s a short post, but I’m definitely heading back to bed.

So Hype and I are probably going to abandon “Rhyme So Tight” for now, it’s probably not going on The Demo Tape, but on Friday night we had a writing session and we wrote a verse each, that turned out pretty good. Our faith, or lack of faith to be more accurate, was our topic of choice. It’s been coming up a lot more in my discussions recently, so I decided I had to write something about my views of the world.

…Stick to what’s real, they make up fantasies // A
Romantic view of the world, it’s so sad to see //
People get bitten by these leeches and liars
Some bend over to every preacher’s desire

I think it’s going to have a very stop and go type flow to it, almost mechanical, and I also have a few ideas for a beat that have been rolling around inside my head. I also have a pretty good idea which direction it’s going to go in. We’re probably going to do two verses each, but I’m not sure how it going to affect our track list, or the order, but I think it’s definitely going on the album. Anyways, my break at work is almost over, so I’m saving the post, publishing it, spelling mistakes and all. No firefox to spellcheck for me.

I’ve got quite a few things on my mind, and hopefully this post works, as there are features to the Wordpress.org blogging tool that I’ve yet to try. If everything on this site goes wonky, blame wordpress.

UNKLE

I went to UNKLE’s first show in Canada and I thought it was great. They opened with Chemistry, probably my favourite song from them, and it really lends itself well to being an opening song, as the drums are packed with constant snare rolls to hype everyone up, and the general mayhem near the end of the song… also good at amping a crowd. Gavin Clark was a guest vocalist, and I really like his singing on the album, and he sounds nearly identical live, so that was a nice treat.

My only one complaint about the show is that for the album songs that featured guest vocalists other than Gavin, they all used a sample of the vocal track, which they played along to. I don’t mind that some of them did, but I wish either Gavin or their actual singer would have tried singing at least one of the songs, May Day comes to mind. Even though the vocal styling for May Day is very distinct, I think Gavin could have done a really good job with it. Despite that, I thought they were really fun to watch.

Reason 4 and the Thor Synth

Wow wow wow. Reason 4, from a work flow standpoint alone, is a vast upgrade from Reason 3. I won’t get into the improvements much here, they list them on their website, but basically the way that it works now makes me more excited to try different things, rather than thinking “I hate automating things in Reason”.

And when they advertise that “Thor is a very powerful synthesizer”, they’re not just speaking that way for better advertising. There are so many complex routing options are available, it will take me a long time to figure out exactly what it can do. I can run it in it’s most basic form, mimicking what I do with other synths, but the modulation matrix section is a god send. They say on their website that the modulation matrix “gives you complete control over your signal flow, letting you modulate anything within Thor with anything within Thor”. Instead of being stuck in a certain signal flow, where certain things such as an LFO is designed to route to maybe the pitch, volume, mix and other basics, Thor lets you route it to anything else in itself, like maybe the amount of chorus you want, the shaper tool, or a filter knob.

So, in short, I’m having fun.

Sneak Peak ZOMG!

So I was messing around with said synth, and I put a drum loop to what I was doing. Hype came up with the melody, and the rest came up as I was showing him how to automate things, how filters worked, and a bit of the routing options of Thor. So we decided that the tempo was good for one of our songs, called “Feet, Life, and Munchies”. Coming back to my original statement, I’m not sure how I’ll link to the file, so I may have to edit this post a few times.

Okay, so that didn’t work, I’ll link to it the traditional way.

Finally, no hitches in recording a song in our last meet, besides re-installing reason, that is. But after that it was smooth sailing. It was frustrating for the past few times getting together to record, and not being able to. Since we have completely a long awaited task, that means that I get to mix it now. Hopefully I’ll be done in a short while, as there’s not a lot of work left to be done, just to create an effect for the backing vocals, and maybe a bit of EQing to make the vocals pop out a bit more.

We’re also pushing the date of our album back by a month, since there was approximately a month of downtime that we experienced. It makes sense to me, at least. I’m not sure if we’ve stated when the album should be coming out, so if either of us have, you know when to expect it now. If we haven’t, then the seemingly arbitrary and unknown date doesn’t really matter, except that you know it’ll be at least a month.

WeAreTheFounders.com is the new domain that we have forwarded to this place. I’ll probably set it up so that it’s not a forward sometime in the future, but for now, this works. TheFounders.com was taken, even tho there’s no actual website at that address. I’ll buy that shit up too when it’s for sale, but for now, it’s only WeAreTheFounders.com

Fun shirt stuff, I’m in the middle of figuring out the best techniques to print up the shirts that I’ve designed, which is more than likely going to be our album cover as well. I’ve had a few hick ups with the paint so far, one if them is much to thick and it won’t paint properly. The other one is a transparent base which I need to pick up some white ink for. I’ll be busy for the next three day with my brother’s wedding stuff, so I won’t be able to test out the dye until Sunday or Monday. That kinda sucks because I’m anxious to figure this out, but I guess it will just have to wait.

Another sucky thing is that the last two recording sessions I attempted with Hype were for nothing, the program that I love so much started giving me problems again, and I’m not sure of the cause. I was thinking of upgrading, but I don’t want to deal with annoying glitches like the one that I’m dealing with now. I realize that a new version would probably get rid of this glitch, but the one in my face should be gone first, simply as a matter of principal of not being a cruel upgrading trick.

So I was just going over all of the work we’ve done so far while formatting the text and lyrics in our google documents, and it kind of hit me that we’re actually going to finish an album. While going through said documents, I managed to devise a preliminary track order for the album. I’m pretty happy with it, I’ll ask Hype tonight if he likes the order and what changes he’d like to make, if any. He might have a different take on where a few songs should be placed, so I’m looking forward to seeing his input.

I still have to write a single verse, but as soon as I write that, we’re completely done with the writing portion of the album. As well, I’ve completed 8 beats, and I’ve got 3 beats in the works. Combined with Peter’s beat, it brings the total to 12 beats conceptualized, and yes, my spell checker confirms that conceptualized is a real word, not one that I’ve made up, as I tend to do.

Recording the songs shouldn’t be very difficult, not like when we first started. When we initially got back into the whole rapping thing, it took us quite a while to get our flow back. We were having difficulties recording “Rhyme So Tight”, even though we set the song up so we only had four lines maximum to deal with at a time. I figured it’d be like riding a bike, but it’s not. You stop rapping, and your skill diminishes. So for the first few songs we recorded, I think we must’ve recorded and rerecorded them about four times before we were completely satisfied with the takes.

Now, as I have probably mentioned before, we only have to do a single set of scratch vocals, listen to them for any mistakes of in flow that we may not be aware of, and then record the final takes and backing vocals. We’re both much more confident in our abilities, which means we remember the verses faster, pick them up faster, and deliver them in a … faster time frame.

I guess the major hurdle at this point would be the songs that don’t yet have beats in the works. I’ll have to get inspired, somehow, it seems, not that I mind.