So this post is basically about what’s been going on in the last few months. In November of 2008 I was laid off from my job and I immediately was looking for another one trying to make some income. But with all the free time that I was possibly going to have I decided that the music was the most important thing to me besides working. But having no job and no way to support myself is pretty depressing. I mentioned in a few post before that I was working on an EP called Awaken. I was working on this basically to keep my skills sharp and to try and improve my rhyme skills. With the help of Resin Nate we are trying to finally put this thing together and get it out to the people. I also mentioned before that this EP was going to be seven songs that I wrote; I have made some drastic changes to that. I now only have five songs on there but I’ll have extras and interludes in between tracks.

Anyway, on with the story; In preparation for the release I was also working with J on a little performance at one of his art shows, he thought it would be a good idea for me to get out of the little rut I’ve been in. So what else was there for me to do, I decided that I was going to go full throttle with it and I needed to start recording. I have a USB microphone and from what I read on the net this mic is very good for studio recording and the plan was that I would record in my closet. Now I tried that once and it was figgin’ hot as hell in there. But I still kept going. I listened back to what I recorded and I was not happy with the end result. I felt that I was screaming too much just to be heard and was really concentrating on my flow. At that point I decided that I needed some stuff for the mic. I remembered that for the particular mic that I have it also has a mount that you can attach to your microphone so that I didn’t have to hold it in my hand. Now here comes the annoying part; I saw the mount on Amazon.com and tried to purchase the item off the net and it seems that at Amazon.com you can only get certain things shipped to Canada, like DVD’s, books, Music CD’s which I think is the most dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. So then I went to Amazon.ca thinking that it was the same as Amazon.com and I would be able to get my equipment and it turns out that Amazon.ca doesn’t sell music equipment, which I also think is so fucking retarded. So then I went to various music stores to see if I could get the mount in their stores and this is even more stupid than Amazon.com. It seems that the mount is not sold in any music store in Toronto which I still don’t understand because I was able to buy the mic here in Toronto and If I’m able to get the mic in Toronto why the hell can’t I get the accessories that go with the mic as well? It was really pissing me off and I didn’t know what to do. Then J saved my ass, and he’s been doing a lot of that lately. He found me a music site in Edmonton that sells the mount that I was looking for. I couldn’t believe it. The name of the site is called Axemusic.com. I recommend anyone that is looking for music equipment to go to this site because they have everything. Plus I didn’t have a problem with it being delivered unlike Fed ex (they can suck my big black dick, they fucking suck and don’t know their heads from their asses. Those guys don’t even deserve to be in business as far as I’m concerned).

So now that I have the mount I’m ready to get to work. The EP is coming soon and as for a performance that will be coming soon as well. I’m really looking forward to finally putting this out. I’ve been working on these rhymes since August 2008 and I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. Here are the names of the tracks that are going to be on the EP.

Origins
Black Spider-Man
Insomnia
Battlefield
Random Shit

There will be interludes also on the CD but I’m they’re not that important to tell you about, plus I always like to surprise people. I’m looking to release this in the next upcoming weeks not sure on a date yet that will probably be decided in the next couple of weeks. Hold tight people it’s coming!!!!

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.

Quite a few months ago I posted about being faith-free, and I’d written the first verse, probably in a matter of 20 minutes. My second verse for the song, however, took a lot longer to write. I didn’t have a cohesive message to this verse, every once in a while I’d just pick away at the verse, writing the odd line or concept. A couple of weeks ago, I found a common theme in most of the pieces so I ran with it. The premise of the verse is mostly about the Euthyphro dilemma, which asks, in more modern English “Are ideas moral because they’re commanded by God, or are ideas moral because of God’s reasoning?”

… Laws we abide by, decided by chance
A guide for mankind, constructed by fiat
Or does he put thought behind each selection // a
Design of perfection, we’d be foolish to reject it

Both hype and I have decided that this track will be on The Demo Tape, it’s a very important track to both of us. We’re going to review the track listing once again and see if there are any changes to be made. For example, if you check out our track list, song 14 is listed as “Feet, Life, and Munchies”, but we’ve opted to take this song of, just because it’s no where near as good as most of the other stuff we have to offer. We’ll probably release it for free as a B-Side or something in the future, after everything with the album is completed.

what up yall

had a productive month as far as these beats go. basically managed to get 10 joints done, had set a goal to try to get at least 15 done though but ran into a creativity block of sorts where it felt like nothing was working.. mad frustrating.

anyhow, bout to hit you off with one of my latest. this one is kinda special to me as it really got me thinking about composing joints without samples.

for this beat i used a simple piano sample. thats it. normally id pass on something like that as i prefer more ‘flavor’ in something im looking to sample. but all things considering i think i came out with something in the end, at least more than i had expected to with something as simple.

well here it is: -=Beat=-

and for anyone interested, the original sample: sample

i’m out.

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.

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.

It’s pretty odd, it seems like we’re so far away from being done, but I sometimes forget how much we’ve completed. Hype was at my place writing some stuff. I was supposed to be out of town but I was too exhausted to go because of lack of sleep. So we chilled for a bit and got to writing a new song, and finished it in about 45 minutes. Sometimes the ideas just come to us so easily, those are great writing days.

The track we’ve written is called “Murderous Intent”, and it’s a dark track about, well, intentions of murder. It’s not about having guns and all that, but yeah it’s pretty vivid at parts, more about spirituality than anything. I like writing these “creative thinking” type tracks, as we get to write a lot of metaphoric imagery for them. These are probably my favourite lines that I’ve written for this track…

But it’s not easy, slaughter eases the pain
A crimson river in the path of the slain
A desire so intense that it bends the laws of physics
I dream a sequence, and the spirits get with it

So far we have only 2 songs completed so far, but we also have 5 more beats either ready or very close to it, and 5 songs ready to be recorded. We’ve recorded one of those, actually, but I decided against using that be for that particular song, as I’ve got a better idea for it that is much more suiting. We have 5 full songs memorized for the upcoming party. We’ll probably do a set of 6 or 7 come party time.

I’m really excited about the performance coming in June, I haven’t performed in front of a crowd in at least 7 years, it has to be at least that long ago. This time we’re actually going to be prepared. The last time we tried, we wrote 3 songs within a week and tried memorizing it, it was a bad effort on our part. Yeah, we got cheers but I’m sure we could’ve torn the house down if we’d practised for more than one night.