WingsOfAnAngel
Banned
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 3
“Notes on Hip-Hop Production” by Mike Daley
York University, May 7, 1999
In the spring of 1998, I undertook a “performance option” course which consisted of weekly one-hour lessons in hip-hop studio production. My teacher was Derek San Vicente, a Caribbean-Canadian DJ/producer who goes by the name “Power”. As well as being a member of the Toronto hip-hop group UBAD, Power creates tracks for a number of area rappers and has also contributed remixes to several compilation releases. He also works as a DJ for local dance events and teaches workshops in hip-hop production at community centres. Our lessons consisted of a combination of demonstration, interviews and Power guiding me through my own hands-on attempts at rhythm track creation. In the process, I learned something about Power’s hip-hop aesthetic as well as some of the rarely studied details of hip-hop musical creation. In this paper, I will detail some of the processes involved in Power’s hip-hop production style, with a focus on his solutions to various sonic problems. As well, I will discuss some of the difficulties that I experienced in trying to learn about these skills as a musical-cultural insider/outsider.
Power’s productions take place over two stages: the first involves the creation, manipulation and assembly of samples into a MIDI-sequenced rhythm track, while the second deals with final recording and mixing to tape in the studio, including the addition of vocal tracks. My work with Power concentrated on the first stage, which is completely MIDI controlled. His studio is simple, but it is effective for getting this pre-production work done. More than recording or MIDI equipment, the room is dominated by records. Stacking units run along one long wall, while smaller piles reside between the studio components. In a way, these records are the heart of Power’s studio, as they are the sonic wellspring from which his productions take shape. I will describe here each of the production stages in turn, beginning with the selection of source material, to the sampling process, to the manipulation of samples, to the assemblage of samples into a rhythm track.
Even before this, the very first stage of production is Power’s mental conceptualization of what the track might sound like. At times, he may have a set of rhyming verses that have been provided for him by his brother, rapper Rugged (Ramon San Vicente) or by Ebony, another rapper and member of UBAD. A fair bit of Power’s production work is freelance as well, and in those cases he is usually supplied with an idea of the rhymes before he begins. Other times, Power creates a beat with no preconception about rap verses, and the track can later be matched to a set of lyrics that fit, or a new set can be composed to fit the track. In one instance that I observed, Power created a track as a replacement for one of Ebony’s raw backing tracks (Ebony, who is incarcerated in Kingston, creates rough backing tracks for his rapping using a Roland VS-880 digital multitrack unit, and then sends the masters to Power). I will describe this process in some detail later in this paper.
No matter how Power comes to create a beat or backing track, he tends to have some mood or emotional feeling in mind from the beginning. The mood of a track, usually suggested by the lyrics, will determine the tempo, as well as the timbral qualities of the samples. Power tends to associate certain recorded sounds, his sampling source material, with certain moods. As his samples generally come from old records, the perceived lyric theme of the source song will often guide Power towards using a sampled portion in a track. For example, Power told me that he associates the sounds in James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black And I’m Proud)” with serious political messages, and he often finds himself gravitating towards that track when he is trying to create that mood.
He starts by programming a short drum pattern on an E-Mu SP-12 sampling drum machine. He usually uses the preset sounds of the machine for these early stages, but he almost never uses them on final tracks. The exception to this rule is the hi-hat. Hi-hats are difficult to sample from records, and Power doesn’t have much of a preference for different versions. Thus, often uses factory preset sounds for the hi-hats. The kick and snare are a different story, however. When Power feels that he has the beginnings of a suitable groove, he begins to think about which records to use for the kick and snare samples. First, though, he must select a tempo.
He says:
I find the tempo by feel, though I know what BPMs each tempo is. I usually come between 85 and 95 BPM. Before in hip-hop it was around 116. The dance music now comes in around 116, 110. It depends on what kind of mood I want to create in people. Sometimes I want to do a song that's really contemplative, that tells a story. That type of song is usually more spaced out as far as the rhymes, so it'll be a little slow. Sometimes I want to do a song that's more hyped, that gets people to want to party, and that's more upbeat. The rhythm is more bouncy, the tempo is faster. Certain types of sounds will be different, too, like maybe a high horn will be used in an upbeat song. Different pianos and guitars will have different moods too. When you hear just a beat, you imagine the types of rhymes that could go on top, and that will show you how to shape the song. (Vicente 1998)
Power has a large collection of vinyl LPs, including quite a bit of 60s, 70s and 80s pop in addition to hundreds of R&B, soul, reggae and jazz albums. He draws mostly from 60s and 70s soul and funk for his samples. He notes that most records after 1977 or so have a different drum sound than what he likes, so he tends to use older records as a rule, but not too old; he also tends not to go before 1967. He hears in the 1967-77 period a warm, grainy sound that fits in with his sonic aesthetic, and as a result he seldom strays from that window of time. He also observes that in the 1967-77 period, rhythm was the main focus of soul music, because of the influence of James Brown.
In my time with Power, I saw him draw from Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Jungle Brothers, Perez Prado, Mongo Santamaria, Santana, James Brown, the Meters, Barry White, Bob Marley and Eric B. and Rakim.
Power listens through the records for drum breaks when he is looking for drum samples. Once he finds a suitably isolated section of drums, he will listen to the break over and over again to find the best example of the drum that he is looking for. That means a loud, clear, dry, isolated drum, preferably with a clean decay (though if a clean decay is impossible, Power will use a shorter sample and add reverb later to recreate the decay). Quite often I observed him using kick drum samples that also had closed hi-hats sharing the attack. He doesn’t seem to mind this, and he often filters out the treble anyway, obscuring the hi-hat.
Most of his records Power knows quite well, and there is little trial and error in finding the right records. He imagines his sounds, then matches them with sounds in his memory. Sometimes, as noted above, Power will associate a sound bite with a particular mood. Other times, Power thinks in terms of isolated timbres, remembering the snare from this song, the kick from that. His knowledge of James Brown and the Meters is particularly encyclopedic. At the same time, he is not completely rigid about choosing samples. On more than one occasion, he solicited me for ideas and openmindedly incorporated my suggestions into his own tracks.
This stage of the production was one that I found very difficult when working on my own tracks. I am accustomed to listening to songs and even albums as wholes, with transient sounds rarely pondered over or remembered. Power, I suspected, is attuned to another mode of listening, one that hears songs holistically as well as in fragments. Clearly he sometimes listens to records as potential sample sources, taking note of interesting, isolated sonic gestalts and storing their location and character away mentally. When I tried to create my own beats, I was often at a loss as to where to get a decent snare, kick, bass guitar or other sound. Part of this would have to be attributed to the fact that I was drawing on someone else’s record collection. But I was quite familiar with a number of records in Power’s collection. I just could not remember where a clean isolated snare occurred, let alone having a number to choose from based on the desired mood of the track. On one occasion, I decided to use the opening snare shot from Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”, a sound that had struck me in the past as an exciting, timbrally rich, isolated snare drum sound. But when I sampled it (Power did have a copy of Highway 61 Revisited, though he had never listened to it), we found that the decay was cut off too soon and the drum was too heavily reverbed to be of much use. When we truncated the sample to the proper length, it sounded like a gated snare from an 80s pop record! For this reason, it became clear to me why so many producers rely on prepared sample CDs as source material. Sifting out useful sounds for sampling from records is more difficult than it seems at first.
Once a kick drum is selected, it is assigned to a pad on the drum machine, usually replacing the preset kick drum. Samples are always auditioned both in isolation and in the context of the programmed groove. A snare drum is selected in the same manner. Next is bass, but this is sampled to the Ensoniq EPS-16 keyboard instead of the drum machine. This is so that Power can use the keyboard to create a bass line. Again, he will have sequenced a bass line using a dummy sound, to be replaced with a record sample.
Power does not have formal musical training, so he crafts bass lines by ear and through the use of simple keyboard shapes. Often his lines are quite odd to my ear, avoiding the usual funk and R&B cliches. They tend to work both ‘with’ and ‘around’ the kick drum line. Isolated bass sounds for sampling purposes are hard to come by on records, so Power often uses the same sample, stored on floppy disk, for several different tracks.
Unlike some other hip-hop producers, Power rarely uses a sampled phrase or groove. When he does, he gives credit in the liner notes for the original source material. Most of the time, though, he samples by the single note or sound. In other words, Power relies on “musematic” rather than “discursive” sampling (to paraphrase Middleton 1990: 267-293). He does not give credit for these samples, as he believes that he is not stealing intellectual property when he appropriates a single note or timbral quality.
By this point Power has a basic groove looping on the sequencer. In my time with him, I noticed a propensity towards four-measure phrases. He tends towards a rather minimalist approach overall. In attempting to make my own tracks, I found that I consistently used too many notes. Power seems to be able to predict the density of the finished track, and thus keeps the basic tracks sparse. Once the groove is composed and the basic tracks are done, Power will sometimes manipulate the samples. By far the most fretted-over sound is the kick drum. For the most part, it is soul or funk kick drums that are being sampled, and as a rule those kicks (in their original forms) lack the sub-bass frequencies that Power associates with hip-hop. So he will “detune” the kick using the pitch control on the sampler (literally lowering the pitch of the sample) and/or add low end with the EQ controls on his mixer. The EQ solution is only a temporary one, as he will have to add the low end again in the studio when committing the tracks to tape. But this allows him to check if the kick can be sufficiently “lowered” with EQ - if not, he may have to detune the sample or even re-sample the kick. Alternately, Power will layer the detuned sample over the original sample for an even bigger sound.
For a studio monitor, Power uses a single, large Cerwin-Vega PA speaker. He explained to me that his other speaker was blown, but that it didn’t matter as he didn’t work in stereo at this point in the production process. What was important was the sub-bass response of the speaker. Power often reiterated to me the importance of “feeling the kick in your chest”. The medium to high volumes that Power works at help to reinforce this.
When doing final mixes in the studio, Power is careful to “match” the bass with the kick drum. This means placing the frequencies of the bass so that they don’t mask the kick or sound below it in the frequency range. He says “the bass has to ride the kick. Not really around the same frequency, there has to be a difference between the two, for separation; they have to be matching”. As well, he will sometimes put compression on the kick for extra punch, though he notes that the SP12 drum machine adds a little bit of compression already.
After the basic groove is down, Power will begin looking for additional sounds. These may be drawn from any source and may be any sound. This is one of the rare situations where he will sample an entire musical phrase, though the phrase rarely survives in any recognizable form after Power’s cutting and pasting. I saw him use horn shots, guitar fills, organ chords, noise, bits of rap, and other sounds. On one occasion, he sampled a guitar lick from “Stand!” by Sly and the Family Stone. He then mapped three copies of the sample to three different keys on the keyboard. Each sample was then truncated differently - one was complete and started on a pickup beat, one was clipped to begin on the down beat, and another was truncated to only sound the last note of the phrase. Power then played around with different combinations of the sample to come up with a phrase that was interesting to him. The resulting highly syncopated phrase was a sequence of the three truncations in the order 1+3+2+2.
On another project, Power sampled the phrases “come on now” and “all right” from the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There”, as well as an “uh huh huh huh huh” from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and mapped them over the keyboard to try out combinations at various points in the groove. He is quite meticulous at this stage, carefully testing different keystrokes and timings for the desired articulation. When he feels that the track is good, he will play a cappella rap remixes along with it to hear how well they work with a vocal. This requires a fair bit of cueing and turntable speed manipulation, skills at which Power is adept because of his DJ experience.
Sometimes he will conclude that the track is too empty or too dense, and will start adding and removing things. If he feels satisfied. he will simply save his samples and sequences to disk until it is time to bring his equipment into the recording studio for mixdown.
I observed Power tackling one particular production problem that was unique in my experience. Ebony, a Jamaican-Canadian rapper, has been an associate of Power’s for several years and a member of UBAD. Unfortunately, he has also been an inmate at Collins Bay Institution in Kingston, Ontario, for seven years. Nonetheless Power and Ebony continue to collaborate. Both men own Roland VS-880 digital multitrack recorders, which allow them to record multitrack digital audio and transfer it to a JAZ disk, which can then be sent through the mail. The multitrack master can be altered ad infinitum until the desired result is achieved.
Most usually, Power begins the process of collaboration. He creates an instrumental production on the VS-880, complete with a MIDI synchronization channel, saves it to a JAZ disk, and mails to disk to Ebony. Ebony then overdubs his vocals and returns the disk to Power for further production and final mixdown. In the session which I will describe, however, Power was working with a production that had already been more or less completed by Ebony.
Ebony’s production contained five separate tracks:
1. drum machine
2. bass line
3. piano sample
4. Bob Marley sample (see footnote 1)
5. Ebony’s vocal
Ebony’s studio setup is described by Power as “primitive”: other than the VS-880 and JAZ drive, he uses a “really old” Alesis drum machine, an unidentified small sampling keyboard and a Shure SM-58 dynamic mic. As a result, the sounds on Ebony’s recording were very raw, with uneven levels, low timbral fidelity and a great deal of noise. Power’s main task was to “clean up” Ebony’s recording, while remaining faithful to the basic arrangement. While talking with Power and his brother Rugged, I became aware of how reverential they are towards Ebony; he is older than both and represents truly raw and real rapping to them. Power’s interest in preserving the integrity of Ebony’s vision on this track, even to the point of finding the original sources for his samples and re-sampling them with higher fidelity, is further evidence of his respect.
Most of Ebony’s recording collection in prison is in the form of cassette tapes, a notoriously low-fi and noisy medium. Thus, his samples are often too muffled and hissy to be used on a final product. Where possible on this track, Power attempted to ascertain the original source for a sample, resample it from a record, and replace the old sample in the track. I observed this process with a short Bob Marley vocal sample, the line “Do you know what it means to have a revolution”1. Power had simply re-sampled the line and replaced Ebony’s original, flawed sample. This is a very difficult and time-intensive process, as the sample must be truncated and filtered and then placed at precisely the right spot in the track.
When Power was unable to re-sample the original source, he sampled Ebony’s samples and attempts to clean them up digitally by compressing them, filtering out high-end noise, or truncating out unwanted sounds. Power did this with Ebony’s noisy bass track, filtering out tape hiss with a lowpass filter, but he was unable to do much with the higher frequencies of the piano sample.
My experience in Power’s studio was a valuable one for working towards understanding the ways that sampling and sequencing are used in hip-hop production. He is something of a sonic archivist, using his vast record collection and his knowledge of 60s and 70s funk, soul, reggae and rap to construct new music. In this way he is an examplar of the hip-hopper as black cultural historian, a trope that runs through much of the existing work on rap and hip-hop music (see, for example, Rose 1994 and Potter 1995).
There were some difficulties that I encountered, though, in the process of taking lessons with Power. I have mentioned some of them in the above paragraphs, but I would like to expand on them here and suggest some reasons for these problems.
Hip-hop production, by its very nature, is a highly technologized practice. This means that a great deal of time is expended in the studio, dealing with patch connections, knobs, switches and dry numerical values. A large part of the learning process is spent reading manuals, playing with the equipment, and making time-consuming mistakes. In other words, I spent much of my time with Power ( a series of one-hour sessions conducted on a weekly basis over the winter 1998 term) bogged down in what I considered to be mundane technological work. Just in terms of time management, this meant that I could not delve very deeply into Power’s music, as we would just be getting going when the time would run out. I feel that a weekly lesson simply does not do justice to the complexity of hip-hop production because of the particular emphasis on technology.
This is not to imply that the manipulation of technology is not loaded with specific cultural practices and aesthetic values. Clearly, a drum machine or a sampler (or even a tape recorder or mixer) can be used (or abused) in a number of ways. Tricia Rose (1994) has documented the emphasis on distorted, raw timbres, for example, in some hip-hop production. I myself noted that Power relied on an old, conventionally obsolete drum machine because of its “raw” sound. Levels can be maxed, samples can be truncated to sound slightly “late2 ”, and low end can be boosted to body-shaking levels. But the musicking process is less transparent when observing a producer pushing buttons than with the more obviously kinesic processes of singing or playing an instrument. I would attribute this partly to a common visual bias in observation - we often hear and feel with our eyes, and if nothing is going on visually, we tend to think nothing is going on at all. Cynthia Fuchs, in a paper given at IASPM-US in Pittsburgh in October 1997, noted this problem with audiences at concerts by DJ-performers like Tricky - how does a live audience deal with a performer who is barely moving and is not playing an instrument?
In any case, the problem in observing a visually “quiet” musical practice becomes one of not noticing things when they happen. In other words, Power looks just like I do when he is manipulating a sampler or mixer. How do I note significant differences in our respective practices? This brings up the issue of cultural distance in learning of this kind.
In regards to my own cultural position and set of skills and experiences, my relation to Power was insider/outsider, and this is a particularly difficult position because the commonalities sometimes obscure the differences. In an abstract way, I have done everything over the years that I saw Power do, in a variety of recording settings from four-track cassette to twenty-four track two-inch tape. I “know” how to program a drum machine, I “know” what a sampler does. Yet Power and I achieve vastly different end products. In some ways, I believe that Power wanted to obscure the differences between us as musicians. He does not want to be seen as a cultural artifact, he wants to be seen as a musician and producer. Power’s desire to be seen as a producer who specializes in hip-hop, not a hip-hop producer, is clearly to be respected, but this makes it difficult to analyze and synthesize his approach to production.
If anything, I would advise future students of hip-hop production to eschew a lesson-based approach in favour of ongoing “live-in” observation if possible. Obviously, this is the ideal learning situation for a number of unfamiliar cultural practices, but the highly technologized practice of hip-hop production is, in my opinion, particularly ill-suited to the hour-long lesson model.
*
References:
Middleton, Richard 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular vernaculars: hip-hop and the politics of postmodernism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Rose, Tricia 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
San Vicente, Derek. 1998. Interview with the author. February 7, 1998.
York University, May 7, 1999
In the spring of 1998, I undertook a “performance option” course which consisted of weekly one-hour lessons in hip-hop studio production. My teacher was Derek San Vicente, a Caribbean-Canadian DJ/producer who goes by the name “Power”. As well as being a member of the Toronto hip-hop group UBAD, Power creates tracks for a number of area rappers and has also contributed remixes to several compilation releases. He also works as a DJ for local dance events and teaches workshops in hip-hop production at community centres. Our lessons consisted of a combination of demonstration, interviews and Power guiding me through my own hands-on attempts at rhythm track creation. In the process, I learned something about Power’s hip-hop aesthetic as well as some of the rarely studied details of hip-hop musical creation. In this paper, I will detail some of the processes involved in Power’s hip-hop production style, with a focus on his solutions to various sonic problems. As well, I will discuss some of the difficulties that I experienced in trying to learn about these skills as a musical-cultural insider/outsider.
Power’s productions take place over two stages: the first involves the creation, manipulation and assembly of samples into a MIDI-sequenced rhythm track, while the second deals with final recording and mixing to tape in the studio, including the addition of vocal tracks. My work with Power concentrated on the first stage, which is completely MIDI controlled. His studio is simple, but it is effective for getting this pre-production work done. More than recording or MIDI equipment, the room is dominated by records. Stacking units run along one long wall, while smaller piles reside between the studio components. In a way, these records are the heart of Power’s studio, as they are the sonic wellspring from which his productions take shape. I will describe here each of the production stages in turn, beginning with the selection of source material, to the sampling process, to the manipulation of samples, to the assemblage of samples into a rhythm track.
Even before this, the very first stage of production is Power’s mental conceptualization of what the track might sound like. At times, he may have a set of rhyming verses that have been provided for him by his brother, rapper Rugged (Ramon San Vicente) or by Ebony, another rapper and member of UBAD. A fair bit of Power’s production work is freelance as well, and in those cases he is usually supplied with an idea of the rhymes before he begins. Other times, Power creates a beat with no preconception about rap verses, and the track can later be matched to a set of lyrics that fit, or a new set can be composed to fit the track. In one instance that I observed, Power created a track as a replacement for one of Ebony’s raw backing tracks (Ebony, who is incarcerated in Kingston, creates rough backing tracks for his rapping using a Roland VS-880 digital multitrack unit, and then sends the masters to Power). I will describe this process in some detail later in this paper.
No matter how Power comes to create a beat or backing track, he tends to have some mood or emotional feeling in mind from the beginning. The mood of a track, usually suggested by the lyrics, will determine the tempo, as well as the timbral qualities of the samples. Power tends to associate certain recorded sounds, his sampling source material, with certain moods. As his samples generally come from old records, the perceived lyric theme of the source song will often guide Power towards using a sampled portion in a track. For example, Power told me that he associates the sounds in James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black And I’m Proud)” with serious political messages, and he often finds himself gravitating towards that track when he is trying to create that mood.
He starts by programming a short drum pattern on an E-Mu SP-12 sampling drum machine. He usually uses the preset sounds of the machine for these early stages, but he almost never uses them on final tracks. The exception to this rule is the hi-hat. Hi-hats are difficult to sample from records, and Power doesn’t have much of a preference for different versions. Thus, often uses factory preset sounds for the hi-hats. The kick and snare are a different story, however. When Power feels that he has the beginnings of a suitable groove, he begins to think about which records to use for the kick and snare samples. First, though, he must select a tempo.
He says:
I find the tempo by feel, though I know what BPMs each tempo is. I usually come between 85 and 95 BPM. Before in hip-hop it was around 116. The dance music now comes in around 116, 110. It depends on what kind of mood I want to create in people. Sometimes I want to do a song that's really contemplative, that tells a story. That type of song is usually more spaced out as far as the rhymes, so it'll be a little slow. Sometimes I want to do a song that's more hyped, that gets people to want to party, and that's more upbeat. The rhythm is more bouncy, the tempo is faster. Certain types of sounds will be different, too, like maybe a high horn will be used in an upbeat song. Different pianos and guitars will have different moods too. When you hear just a beat, you imagine the types of rhymes that could go on top, and that will show you how to shape the song. (Vicente 1998)
Power has a large collection of vinyl LPs, including quite a bit of 60s, 70s and 80s pop in addition to hundreds of R&B, soul, reggae and jazz albums. He draws mostly from 60s and 70s soul and funk for his samples. He notes that most records after 1977 or so have a different drum sound than what he likes, so he tends to use older records as a rule, but not too old; he also tends not to go before 1967. He hears in the 1967-77 period a warm, grainy sound that fits in with his sonic aesthetic, and as a result he seldom strays from that window of time. He also observes that in the 1967-77 period, rhythm was the main focus of soul music, because of the influence of James Brown.
In my time with Power, I saw him draw from Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Jungle Brothers, Perez Prado, Mongo Santamaria, Santana, James Brown, the Meters, Barry White, Bob Marley and Eric B. and Rakim.
Power listens through the records for drum breaks when he is looking for drum samples. Once he finds a suitably isolated section of drums, he will listen to the break over and over again to find the best example of the drum that he is looking for. That means a loud, clear, dry, isolated drum, preferably with a clean decay (though if a clean decay is impossible, Power will use a shorter sample and add reverb later to recreate the decay). Quite often I observed him using kick drum samples that also had closed hi-hats sharing the attack. He doesn’t seem to mind this, and he often filters out the treble anyway, obscuring the hi-hat.
Most of his records Power knows quite well, and there is little trial and error in finding the right records. He imagines his sounds, then matches them with sounds in his memory. Sometimes, as noted above, Power will associate a sound bite with a particular mood. Other times, Power thinks in terms of isolated timbres, remembering the snare from this song, the kick from that. His knowledge of James Brown and the Meters is particularly encyclopedic. At the same time, he is not completely rigid about choosing samples. On more than one occasion, he solicited me for ideas and openmindedly incorporated my suggestions into his own tracks.
This stage of the production was one that I found very difficult when working on my own tracks. I am accustomed to listening to songs and even albums as wholes, with transient sounds rarely pondered over or remembered. Power, I suspected, is attuned to another mode of listening, one that hears songs holistically as well as in fragments. Clearly he sometimes listens to records as potential sample sources, taking note of interesting, isolated sonic gestalts and storing their location and character away mentally. When I tried to create my own beats, I was often at a loss as to where to get a decent snare, kick, bass guitar or other sound. Part of this would have to be attributed to the fact that I was drawing on someone else’s record collection. But I was quite familiar with a number of records in Power’s collection. I just could not remember where a clean isolated snare occurred, let alone having a number to choose from based on the desired mood of the track. On one occasion, I decided to use the opening snare shot from Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”, a sound that had struck me in the past as an exciting, timbrally rich, isolated snare drum sound. But when I sampled it (Power did have a copy of Highway 61 Revisited, though he had never listened to it), we found that the decay was cut off too soon and the drum was too heavily reverbed to be of much use. When we truncated the sample to the proper length, it sounded like a gated snare from an 80s pop record! For this reason, it became clear to me why so many producers rely on prepared sample CDs as source material. Sifting out useful sounds for sampling from records is more difficult than it seems at first.
Once a kick drum is selected, it is assigned to a pad on the drum machine, usually replacing the preset kick drum. Samples are always auditioned both in isolation and in the context of the programmed groove. A snare drum is selected in the same manner. Next is bass, but this is sampled to the Ensoniq EPS-16 keyboard instead of the drum machine. This is so that Power can use the keyboard to create a bass line. Again, he will have sequenced a bass line using a dummy sound, to be replaced with a record sample.
Power does not have formal musical training, so he crafts bass lines by ear and through the use of simple keyboard shapes. Often his lines are quite odd to my ear, avoiding the usual funk and R&B cliches. They tend to work both ‘with’ and ‘around’ the kick drum line. Isolated bass sounds for sampling purposes are hard to come by on records, so Power often uses the same sample, stored on floppy disk, for several different tracks.
Unlike some other hip-hop producers, Power rarely uses a sampled phrase or groove. When he does, he gives credit in the liner notes for the original source material. Most of the time, though, he samples by the single note or sound. In other words, Power relies on “musematic” rather than “discursive” sampling (to paraphrase Middleton 1990: 267-293). He does not give credit for these samples, as he believes that he is not stealing intellectual property when he appropriates a single note or timbral quality.
By this point Power has a basic groove looping on the sequencer. In my time with him, I noticed a propensity towards four-measure phrases. He tends towards a rather minimalist approach overall. In attempting to make my own tracks, I found that I consistently used too many notes. Power seems to be able to predict the density of the finished track, and thus keeps the basic tracks sparse. Once the groove is composed and the basic tracks are done, Power will sometimes manipulate the samples. By far the most fretted-over sound is the kick drum. For the most part, it is soul or funk kick drums that are being sampled, and as a rule those kicks (in their original forms) lack the sub-bass frequencies that Power associates with hip-hop. So he will “detune” the kick using the pitch control on the sampler (literally lowering the pitch of the sample) and/or add low end with the EQ controls on his mixer. The EQ solution is only a temporary one, as he will have to add the low end again in the studio when committing the tracks to tape. But this allows him to check if the kick can be sufficiently “lowered” with EQ - if not, he may have to detune the sample or even re-sample the kick. Alternately, Power will layer the detuned sample over the original sample for an even bigger sound.
For a studio monitor, Power uses a single, large Cerwin-Vega PA speaker. He explained to me that his other speaker was blown, but that it didn’t matter as he didn’t work in stereo at this point in the production process. What was important was the sub-bass response of the speaker. Power often reiterated to me the importance of “feeling the kick in your chest”. The medium to high volumes that Power works at help to reinforce this.
When doing final mixes in the studio, Power is careful to “match” the bass with the kick drum. This means placing the frequencies of the bass so that they don’t mask the kick or sound below it in the frequency range. He says “the bass has to ride the kick. Not really around the same frequency, there has to be a difference between the two, for separation; they have to be matching”. As well, he will sometimes put compression on the kick for extra punch, though he notes that the SP12 drum machine adds a little bit of compression already.
After the basic groove is down, Power will begin looking for additional sounds. These may be drawn from any source and may be any sound. This is one of the rare situations where he will sample an entire musical phrase, though the phrase rarely survives in any recognizable form after Power’s cutting and pasting. I saw him use horn shots, guitar fills, organ chords, noise, bits of rap, and other sounds. On one occasion, he sampled a guitar lick from “Stand!” by Sly and the Family Stone. He then mapped three copies of the sample to three different keys on the keyboard. Each sample was then truncated differently - one was complete and started on a pickup beat, one was clipped to begin on the down beat, and another was truncated to only sound the last note of the phrase. Power then played around with different combinations of the sample to come up with a phrase that was interesting to him. The resulting highly syncopated phrase was a sequence of the three truncations in the order 1+3+2+2.
On another project, Power sampled the phrases “come on now” and “all right” from the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There”, as well as an “uh huh huh huh huh” from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and mapped them over the keyboard to try out combinations at various points in the groove. He is quite meticulous at this stage, carefully testing different keystrokes and timings for the desired articulation. When he feels that the track is good, he will play a cappella rap remixes along with it to hear how well they work with a vocal. This requires a fair bit of cueing and turntable speed manipulation, skills at which Power is adept because of his DJ experience.
Sometimes he will conclude that the track is too empty or too dense, and will start adding and removing things. If he feels satisfied. he will simply save his samples and sequences to disk until it is time to bring his equipment into the recording studio for mixdown.
I observed Power tackling one particular production problem that was unique in my experience. Ebony, a Jamaican-Canadian rapper, has been an associate of Power’s for several years and a member of UBAD. Unfortunately, he has also been an inmate at Collins Bay Institution in Kingston, Ontario, for seven years. Nonetheless Power and Ebony continue to collaborate. Both men own Roland VS-880 digital multitrack recorders, which allow them to record multitrack digital audio and transfer it to a JAZ disk, which can then be sent through the mail. The multitrack master can be altered ad infinitum until the desired result is achieved.
Most usually, Power begins the process of collaboration. He creates an instrumental production on the VS-880, complete with a MIDI synchronization channel, saves it to a JAZ disk, and mails to disk to Ebony. Ebony then overdubs his vocals and returns the disk to Power for further production and final mixdown. In the session which I will describe, however, Power was working with a production that had already been more or less completed by Ebony.
Ebony’s production contained five separate tracks:
1. drum machine
2. bass line
3. piano sample
4. Bob Marley sample (see footnote 1)
5. Ebony’s vocal
Ebony’s studio setup is described by Power as “primitive”: other than the VS-880 and JAZ drive, he uses a “really old” Alesis drum machine, an unidentified small sampling keyboard and a Shure SM-58 dynamic mic. As a result, the sounds on Ebony’s recording were very raw, with uneven levels, low timbral fidelity and a great deal of noise. Power’s main task was to “clean up” Ebony’s recording, while remaining faithful to the basic arrangement. While talking with Power and his brother Rugged, I became aware of how reverential they are towards Ebony; he is older than both and represents truly raw and real rapping to them. Power’s interest in preserving the integrity of Ebony’s vision on this track, even to the point of finding the original sources for his samples and re-sampling them with higher fidelity, is further evidence of his respect.
Most of Ebony’s recording collection in prison is in the form of cassette tapes, a notoriously low-fi and noisy medium. Thus, his samples are often too muffled and hissy to be used on a final product. Where possible on this track, Power attempted to ascertain the original source for a sample, resample it from a record, and replace the old sample in the track. I observed this process with a short Bob Marley vocal sample, the line “Do you know what it means to have a revolution”1. Power had simply re-sampled the line and replaced Ebony’s original, flawed sample. This is a very difficult and time-intensive process, as the sample must be truncated and filtered and then placed at precisely the right spot in the track.
When Power was unable to re-sample the original source, he sampled Ebony’s samples and attempts to clean them up digitally by compressing them, filtering out high-end noise, or truncating out unwanted sounds. Power did this with Ebony’s noisy bass track, filtering out tape hiss with a lowpass filter, but he was unable to do much with the higher frequencies of the piano sample.
My experience in Power’s studio was a valuable one for working towards understanding the ways that sampling and sequencing are used in hip-hop production. He is something of a sonic archivist, using his vast record collection and his knowledge of 60s and 70s funk, soul, reggae and rap to construct new music. In this way he is an examplar of the hip-hopper as black cultural historian, a trope that runs through much of the existing work on rap and hip-hop music (see, for example, Rose 1994 and Potter 1995).
There were some difficulties that I encountered, though, in the process of taking lessons with Power. I have mentioned some of them in the above paragraphs, but I would like to expand on them here and suggest some reasons for these problems.
Hip-hop production, by its very nature, is a highly technologized practice. This means that a great deal of time is expended in the studio, dealing with patch connections, knobs, switches and dry numerical values. A large part of the learning process is spent reading manuals, playing with the equipment, and making time-consuming mistakes. In other words, I spent much of my time with Power ( a series of one-hour sessions conducted on a weekly basis over the winter 1998 term) bogged down in what I considered to be mundane technological work. Just in terms of time management, this meant that I could not delve very deeply into Power’s music, as we would just be getting going when the time would run out. I feel that a weekly lesson simply does not do justice to the complexity of hip-hop production because of the particular emphasis on technology.
This is not to imply that the manipulation of technology is not loaded with specific cultural practices and aesthetic values. Clearly, a drum machine or a sampler (or even a tape recorder or mixer) can be used (or abused) in a number of ways. Tricia Rose (1994) has documented the emphasis on distorted, raw timbres, for example, in some hip-hop production. I myself noted that Power relied on an old, conventionally obsolete drum machine because of its “raw” sound. Levels can be maxed, samples can be truncated to sound slightly “late2 ”, and low end can be boosted to body-shaking levels. But the musicking process is less transparent when observing a producer pushing buttons than with the more obviously kinesic processes of singing or playing an instrument. I would attribute this partly to a common visual bias in observation - we often hear and feel with our eyes, and if nothing is going on visually, we tend to think nothing is going on at all. Cynthia Fuchs, in a paper given at IASPM-US in Pittsburgh in October 1997, noted this problem with audiences at concerts by DJ-performers like Tricky - how does a live audience deal with a performer who is barely moving and is not playing an instrument?
In any case, the problem in observing a visually “quiet” musical practice becomes one of not noticing things when they happen. In other words, Power looks just like I do when he is manipulating a sampler or mixer. How do I note significant differences in our respective practices? This brings up the issue of cultural distance in learning of this kind.
In regards to my own cultural position and set of skills and experiences, my relation to Power was insider/outsider, and this is a particularly difficult position because the commonalities sometimes obscure the differences. In an abstract way, I have done everything over the years that I saw Power do, in a variety of recording settings from four-track cassette to twenty-four track two-inch tape. I “know” how to program a drum machine, I “know” what a sampler does. Yet Power and I achieve vastly different end products. In some ways, I believe that Power wanted to obscure the differences between us as musicians. He does not want to be seen as a cultural artifact, he wants to be seen as a musician and producer. Power’s desire to be seen as a producer who specializes in hip-hop, not a hip-hop producer, is clearly to be respected, but this makes it difficult to analyze and synthesize his approach to production.
If anything, I would advise future students of hip-hop production to eschew a lesson-based approach in favour of ongoing “live-in” observation if possible. Obviously, this is the ideal learning situation for a number of unfamiliar cultural practices, but the highly technologized practice of hip-hop production is, in my opinion, particularly ill-suited to the hour-long lesson model.
*
References:
Middleton, Richard 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular vernaculars: hip-hop and the politics of postmodernism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Rose, Tricia 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
San Vicente, Derek. 1998. Interview with the author. February 7, 1998.