New Track: Fading

Another 100% sampled track. It's a very mellow, sad sounding instrumental IMO. Blastphumis seemed to like it a lot when I played it for him, so maybe I'll have a vocal mix with him in the near future =)

boomp3.com

New Tracks! (FINALLY)

Life is rather busy at the moment. However, here are the somewhat meager fruits of my labors from the past several weeks.

First up, is "Sickle" a fairly standard instrumental loop with a few minor change-ups throughout the song. The drums are really more of a placeholder; they give a sense of the drum pattern I want to aim for but I intend to redo them.

boomp3.com

Next, is something I'm calling "Knock Knock". This is essentially a loop with a very short break it down towards the end. My brother recently introduced me to the group/album "Bumps" featuring members of the group Tortoise (a really cool electronic/jazz/a bit of everything group out of Chicago). The album is all drum loops and these drums, though edited a bit, are from it. This track is 100% samples =)

boomp3.com

Finally, an attempt at some drum and bass. Just a short loop.

boomp3.com

Hope you enjoy! More to come soon, just gotta finish my finals.

Time Travelling: 3 Song Special!

Three old tracks! Three old tracks!

Since, for my last Time Traveling post I posted "NMJBB/God Is At The Gates" I thought I would upload my sort of "sequel" to that song: "God Has Closed the Gates (Hard Times)" I call it a sequel because it contains the same Fela Kuti sample as a prominent theme, although the track has a completely different feel. It's yet another example of how different samples sound when placed in different contexts (and thus why sampling is legit). I made this around the same time I made its predecessor.





The other two tracks in this post are only about two months old. First is "Unsent" my weak attempt at an R&B instrumental. I don't know what I think of this song, sometimes it seems like cheesy garbage, other times I kinda enjoy it. The second track is "Uh...Ah...(You Were In Love With Me)" which heavily samples Curtis Mayfield's voice (just as you may have noticed God Has Closed the Gates does). Enjoy!






If the Boomp3 players aren't showing, they've been having a little trouble again or maintenance or something, just scroll to the bottom and all the tracks are in my Soundclick player as always.

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.

Time Travelling

Moving in reverse-chronology, here's some tracks I've made over the past few weeks. You know the deal, instrumental hip hop with mixes of samples and synths.

First up is the track "Bodies" which I am particularly proud of. There's two sections so make sure to listen for the change-up.



"Kill/Save" is up next, this is actually one of my personal favs even though most ppl dont seem to feel that way...



Normally Kill/Save has a very strong bass line but it doesn't seem to be coming through for me. Please let me know if you can hear it on your computer or if I need to redo the file upload...

And let's top it off with "Alive Again" one of my more typical long forms...



That's today's post. Next time you might not get so lucky. MUAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA!