Time Travelling: My First Long Form

This track, which I lovingly titled "NMJBB/God Is At The Gates" was my first long form piece ever. I'm going to talk about it a bit because it's an old love of mine. I recommend listening to it first and then reading all this junk though.



It is about 4 1/2 years old now, which is crazy when I think about it. There are two sections, the first about 2 1/2 minutes and the second about 4. The first part is NMJBB, which stands for "No More James Brown Beats". I titled it this somewhat ironically, because the opening sample is an extremely popular horn sample from James Brown, but also because I wanted to show that almost anyone can make a track sound good if they're willing to recycle the same, played-out samples. I kept the Amen break for the whole song, I had no concept of how to create my own drum loops at the time, but the second half involves samples from a number of less sampled (if ever) sources. It is titled "God Is At the Gates" because that is the name of the Hatian chant that is filtered in later in the track.

Despite the fact that my whole point was that the second part is much better (because it is more original) than the first, over and over I have been told that people like the first better. I learned an important lesson from this song, which is to not be such an elitist dick all the time. In retrospect, other than the Haitian chants and the video game sample, the track consists of Coltrane, Yo-Yo Ma, Fela Kuti, and Mayfield...harldy original choices. All that aside, I still like both parts of the song very much.