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BEAT BATTLE: SAMPLE CHALLENGE - Bob's gonna be pissed!


DJ Rock Well

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OK, here we go.

 

Before I thought about starting this, I felt like making a simple old school uptempo hip hop beat with a bit of a b-boy vibe. But this record is full of stuff that makes me want to go wafty and melodic and not that at all. But then I thought if I can't go old school with Bob, who can I do it with? So, I went all out and pretended I had limited sample time and just used short, tightly truncated sounds and worked with them, keeping it really simple and avoiding melodies. Again the drums were just a couple of different chops from a drum break and I kept the beat patterns simple, for the more old school vibe. Proper nerdy I know, but I really enjoyed the self-imposed restrictions.

 

All sounds came from the LP, except the drum break I got from a different record and the vocal stabs came from the internet.

 

Most importantly though, I can finally listen to everyone else's. I can't wait!

 

 

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Guest Psychedelic Schizophrenic

Some serious dopeness on here, good job guys :8

 

Tuesday the deadline you say Rocky, bob is going to super duper pissed but fuck it I'm in fellas...... best get to work :d

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Cool track Rock,i like the old school feel that youve got going on there with some straight up B-boy goodness

 

I really like your idea of pretending you only had limited sampling time also btw

ive never thought of doing a track that way so i might have to try that approach on one of my own future tunes

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Flexi - Thanks! Any rapping to this is totally encouraged.

 

Dan - Thanks and yeah, it's actually quite fun limiting yourself. It's interesting how adopting the working practices from a certain era can ease you towards that sound. Apart from limiting samples, things like chopping by ear not screen and a little bit of saturation also help get an early sampled beats type sound. The two 'vintage sampler' modes in Maschine also work well, especially when you record LPs in on 45 and pitch back down the box, it emulates the behaviours and inherent sound degradation of the SP-1200 and the MPC60 when you do this to save sample time. They're not 100% accurate, but very close and great tools nonetheless.

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Yeah the sampler modes in Maschine are actually really really close, pull the SR down to 32k and the BR to 12, really pushes the algo nicely.

And the MPC60 mode is awesome in 8 bit.

Edited by Flexinoodle
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Guest Symatic

 

i did this, both the juggles and the scratches are single takes but i edited out one dodgy bar of the juggle near the end....

 

so many great bits to experiment with but i went for the old classic nautilus break because it is so fucking amazing. the first time i heard that i actually shouted out loud cos i was like "so THATS how they make hip hop!" :)

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Thanks to a fried motherboard I wasn't able to contribute to this one so I went back in time to 2004, dragged my 25 year old ass out of bed and got him to make this for me.

 

I left the cuts on there too. Not sure what you're supposed to "think about". If I remember rightly this was a beat I made for an MC that got shelved. I don't know if he even wrote to it in the end.

 

This is the second beat I ever made, using a moody copy of SX3 and seriously patchy knowledge.

 

Please don't laugh and please follow this account. It's my secret beat battle/old tripe account ;)

 

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Guest Symatic

dope joe!

 

well nice chops, smooth as funk.

 

I'm gonna start a meme about how DJ's using timetravel is cheating...... "REAL dj's use linear space-time"......... "if u using time-protals like these.... you trash"............ "all vinyl...... no singularities"

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Flexi - Yep, the way the algorithms respond to other settings in the sampler is what really does it for me too. Definitely pretty accurate. Occasionally I find the SP mode sounds a little contrived to me, so I more often gravitate towards the 60 mode (I've always been more into the Akai 12-Bit sound than the E-MU one though). Although the SP mode does have that SP trait of making low sounds feel as though they've been fractionally delayed which always works well for bass and kicks.

 

Doob - Do it!

 

Si - Razor sharp as always. I know what you mean the 'so this is where hip hop came from' revelation. I can't remember which record did it for me first, but I definitely had a few moments like that.

 

Joe - can't listen at work, but I'm sure your 25 year old self was no slouch. You've also just reminded me of a thread I keep meaning to start on DV too - 'Post the first beat you thought you'd finished/oldest beat you still have'

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Nice track Joe, thats a dope little jam there

Ive been listening to all the mixes from everyone this weekend and made a minidisc recording of the tracks into a sort of EP thingy ,they actually sound really good together that way in my opinion and its a cool little memento for myself of the battle

In fact i might have to burn some limited editon Gold CD versions to follow when all the tracks are posted up hehe. ;)

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Si - Razor sharp as always. I know what you mean the 'so this is where hip hop came from' revelation. I can't remember which record did it for me first, but I definitely had a few moments like that.

 

 

 

yeah when i was a kid and i head funky drummer and amen that made a massive fuckin lightbulb go off in my head....... I had this shitty drum sequencer program on our PC called Hammerhead (i think) and it had loops from Funky Drummer and Think and me and my mate were like "oh thats the sound they use" and you could speed it up and get jungle tunes.... and we could never figure out what the guys saying in Think ("she bad, aint she?" was what we figured it was) and then when I heard the whole funky drummer tune it was like "yes! all the sounds come from SOMEWHERE" cos it was like theres a big puzzle out there to figure out

 

haha here's the old website i must have got it off, download doesnt seem to work anymore tho. 1998 - damn

 

http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/

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when hip hop was first starting to incorporate drum breaks and samples into its recordings there was a music paper called Sounds ( ask your Dad ) and they used to tell you what the breaks were when they reviewed the new releases

 

I remember getting original copies of Nautilus ,Funky Drummer,Apache etc because of those reviews which then led me into a world of music i was mostly unaware even existed

 

It seems strange looking back as ive got hundreds of records like those now but it really was a revelation at the time to discover those tracks in their original form

 

I also remember about 15 years ago working on some tracks for a crew of local MCs who were all about 10 years younger than me at the time and these kids were obsessed with rappers like 2Pac Dre & Snoop ,Eminem and Coolio and they were telling me what musical genius these dudes were -a quick play of a few original tracks that those rappers had "borrowed" and these kids bubbles had well and truly been blown to bits hehe

 

There was one in particular who was almost in tears after he'd heard "Woman to Woman" by Joe Cocker which as everyone knows was used for the music to California Love

 

It still makes me smile remembering that even now

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For me, I first got into hip hop in the late 80s and didn't really know or care where the sounds came from. Then after a brief flirtation with rave and then early jungle, I gravitated back to hip hop in the early 90s. By then I knew that both hip hop and jungle sampled from other music, but I didn't know how deep it went. I gradually picked up on obvious loops from really well known songs a bit and obviously noticed big movie samples in jungle tunes... "The jungle came alive...", etc. But even as the 90s progressed and I listened through all kinds of indie hip hop, trip hop and similar I knew that they included samples but I guess I thought the samples were less important than they were, or maybe that all sampled tunes had a little loop and were mostly 'original' drums and instruments, or even that only a pretty small percentage of hip hop beats were samples at all. Then in summer of '98 (I think) I had a summer holiday job in the shop I run now before uni started. It was here playing old records in their entirety for the first time I had many moments of shock and awe as samples I knew kept appearing - the real surprise wasn't that they'd been sampled for a beat, but that they were actually all of it.

 

Some of my early "this is the whole beat!" moments were The JB's 'More Peas' for the two 2 bar loops that are buried in the whole 11 min instrumental that were sampled for Soul Clap, Stevie's 'Pastime Paradise' for Coolio, etc. Even though I've learnt a lot since, I'm still sometimes surprised by these big obvious samples. Especially when they turn up on unlikely source records or are samples for tracks I was 'sure' didn't sample... Like hearing Uriah Heep's 'Gypsy' after the Scratch Perverts' 'Come Get it'

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Dj Foly from DV turned me onto a sample just a fortnight ago that the Jedi Knights used on one of their tracks

 

The sample was from a Herbie Hancock record i'd never listened to before and i'd just presumed the Jedi Knights had just played the parts instead of sampling it

 

I actually felt a bit embarrassed not knowing that one

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when hip hop was first starting to incorporate drum breaks and samples into its recordings there was a music paper called Sounds ( ask your Dad ) and they used to tell you what the breaks were when they reviewed the new releases

 

I remember getting original copies of Nautilus ,Funky Drummer,Apache etc because of those reviews which then led me into a world of music i was mostly unaware even existed

 

It seems strange looking back as ive got hundreds of records like those now but it really was a revelation at the time to discover those tracks in their original form

 

I also remember about 15 years ago working on some tracks for a crew of local MCs who were all about 10 years younger than me at the time and these kids were obsessed with rappers like 2Pac Dre & Snoop ,Eminem and Coolio and they were telling me what musical genius these dudes were -a quick play of a few original tracks that those rappers had "borrowed" and these kids bubbles had well and truly been blown to bits hehe

 

There was one in particular who was almost in tears after he'd heard "Woman to Woman" by Joe Cocker which as everyone knows was used for the music to California Love

 

It still makes me smile remembering that even now

 

I remember my dad telling me rap tunes I was listening to were really just a loop of ___ song or ___ song but I was like "OK, sure dad because he never pulled out the old rec or anything." They didn't play much rap on the radio tho so didn't have that many examples... Black Sheep, Vanilla Ice, MC 900 Ft Jesus, Run DMC and Fresh Prince were most all of what I'd heard.

 

The first oooohhhh moment for me was either a NWA/Dre or Too $hort beat. I was (and still am) really into P-Funk and my friends were into rap. I was in my friend's car and like OH MAN THIS IS ____. And then it hit me. That sucked me into west coast rap because they were sampling all the funk music I liked and also the lyrics were just as hardcore as the metal and industrial I liked as a angst youth teen. So perfect marriage.

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My favourite Rap track of all time is probably "By The Time I Get To Arizona " by Public Enemy

 

Finding the samples for that track on Two Sisters Of Mystery by Mandrill which id bought just because I liked the look of the cover of the lp was one of the best moments of my entire experiences of digging and even though ive got some much more desirable recordings ( my drum records that have like 10 tracks of 5 minutes of open beats for example) that one moment really stuck out for me at the time

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