Since 2004 inventor Thierry Alari has been working to turn the DJ world upside down by creating a portable all-in-one scratch instrument capable of being played while walking, standing, or sitting. At first glance, the Scratchophone looks like a cross between a hand drum and turntable, but upon further inspection it’s quickly revealed to be … Read more
During an interview at WKCR’s Squeeze Radio, Damu and Insight of Y Society talk about their releases Travel At Your Own Pace and the free instrumental download Sparetime. Insight goes on to speak about previous work, meeting Damu (who handed him 4 CD’s of beats!), completing both Y Society albums in a matter of weeks, … Read more
Self learning producers & engineers attempting to train their ears from home now have additional options. Auricula Software has developed a set of 5 plugins designed to help develop and train ears in concepts of EQ, time delay, gain change, and stereo field. Unlike other traditional audio courses, rather than have users access a library … Read more
Polow Da Don and Bangladesh discuss motivation and getting involved in production at a T-Pain party in Beverly Hills. Also features a cameo appearance by David Banner.
Before being a master of the boards, he was a beast behind the turntables! Here’s early 1990’s footage of T.I. producer DJ Toomp at an Earwax Records DJ battle where he ended up being one of the co-winners. Notice the skills while juggling doubles of Jeru The Damaga’s "Come Clean" and Afrika Bambaataa’s "Planet Rock".
Atlanta producer DJ Toomp speaks on the benefits of working with one artist, working with Kanye West on Graduation, and being honored at Sha Money XL’s One Stop Shop Producers Conference. He also addresses the rise of southern Hip-Hop and working with T.I..
Ski Beatz sounds off on the Ice-T vs. Soulja Boy situation, most lyrically creative mc’s, and the current state of Hip-Hop. Respect to Nah Right.
JD lets us take a look into the scoring of the Tag Records commercial using an Akai MPC 60II sampler/sequencer and live choir. Along the way he gives insight into the philosophy behind making a commercial, footage of interactions with the studio engineer, and even a plug for the soon to be released Beats by … Read more
As told to JNOTA of Redefinition Records
On the SSL mix board, on getting started, and the equipment he used prior to making the switch to computers:
At the House Of Hits; Marley would stick me in there on the SSL. Mind you, he was the only cat that had one at the time… Well, Dre had one, Diddy had one in his house, but Marley was the first to have the SSL in his house. So, there was a lot of stuff in there, on the SSL, that you usually went to school for. I never went to school for it, so there was, like… pressure. The Lords were there, all these different artists. I remember Keith Murray was there and we were doing a song, the "What I’m After" remix. Keith Murray was rhyming real real LOUD, and I’m like, ‘yo, Keith, why you so loud?" and he said, "cause I wanna be heard, Def! I wanna be heard." Now, you’re not supposed to be able to record with all this distortion, so I had to find another compressor to limit him down with his yelling an all that stuff, so there was a lot of pressure.
Continuing the recent flood of mobile music applications is the yet to be released Mixtikl created by Intermorphic. Although we only have screenshots at the moment, Mixtikl promises to not only be a robust mobile music application, but also a full plugin and standalone desktop app for both Windows and Mac OS X. At launch … Read more