‘Soul Food’

bonus feature… the making of:

Amused by the list of comrades invited/enlisted, I proceeded to download the cornerstone. I must admit, I felt a little apprehensive as the Funky Drumer – as funky a classic as it is – was played out during my youth thanks to a plethora of rappers and beat makers that sampled the rhythm and used it in hundreds (probably hundreds of thousands) of rap songs, and techno songs, and drum&bass songs, and pop songs, and country songs (and I’d be surprised if Raffi and Fred didn’t mull it over for a tune or two!).

The chopped, mangled, re-arranged and processed version that was to form the foundation of our production sounded exactly like this: Funky Drummer [the remake].

CMX by Schwa →

I began to play with it. Opened my host of choice, the one and only REAPER**, set the tempo to 96BPM and went to work. The first thing I did was slap on a niftly plugin called sonitex (alas! PC only) I was able to age and grease it up a little with this filter-like-distorting-colour-adding beauty. Once I had ripped the snot out of Alexei’s original masterpiece, I then added someCMX - a very cool plugin by a very cool dev named Schwa. This gave the sample a little life back and added some depth to the stereo field. Being a washed-up rapper, I needed some drums with a little mo’phat and weight behind ‘em. So I took license to relegate the original drums to the background – like where the hats would sit.

Transient Monster By Stillwell Audio →

Next I found some groovy kick and snare samples. I layered them to taste, banged out a pattern and aligned it with the original-now-filtered drum madness. For a little extra bite I added a pinch of  Transient Monster (love the way this makes transients pop).

My sampler of choice is Kontakt 4. But since I can’t afford it, and since I have given up using software packaged by teams that say “arrrrrrr!” I opened Kontakt 3.5 and began to browse my sample library. Found a cool little vocal thang with a truncated horn lick at the end. Chopped it up a tad, processed it heavily and played it… yeah nice! Made a variation for what would eventually become the chorus.

Bass! How low can you go? The answer to that is elusive. But for Soul Food I wanted it low and simple – just to accent that vocal horn sample. I was thinking about leaving space that might be filled with other keys… perhaps a rhodes emulation (Lounge Lizzard) or a groovy organ (VB3), or both!

It was nearly 11:00pm when I started. At 3:15, dreading the early start to the fast quickly approaching, I forced myself to go to bed. The next day, in that moment between support calls that define the working existence of an IT pro, I was struck by a breeze of creativity. It started as a joke in the back of my mind, but the more I played with it, the more I liked it… “if you need something funky to embellish the fast…” The lyrical process had begun, and this time there  was no suppressing it. Well at least not until one verse was done. Then it seemed to suppress itself! (this is why have so many songs that are 1/2 done) It used to be my mantra: “Never record a vocal until it’s memorized.” I have had to give that up as it takes much longer now that I am older. Nevertheless I had not planned on recording any vocals that evening. In fact, I was brushing my teeth and double checking that all my gear was turned off in the basement studio, when I stubbed my toe on the case that contains my mic. It had fallen off the (low) shelf it usually sits on. Of course I had to open the box and inspect it. It looked good. I had to be sure. I placed it in the shockmount and powered everything up… 3 minutes later I was satisfied that it still worked and sounded as though no toes had been stubbed on its protective shell. At this point, seeing as how everything was on and set up I thought, “what the heck let’s have a go at it.”

The Rocket by Stillwell Audio →

I recorded every attempt, I always do–even the warm-ups as they may contain cool mistakes worthy of the final performance. I was very surprised to be so pleased with the third attempt in its entirety, that is the take that made the final mix! I was done in 15 minutes. My fun was over for now as the second verse was still not cooperating. So I began to play with the Keys and added a little more. One of the licks sounded like it was singing to me, “Everbody needs some soul food…” Yeah I thought that might work.

I began to play with the chorus – it began as a freestyle, and since 3 was the lucky number that night, I stuck with the 3 version that came out. I layered it many times using my many voices. I applied my default vocal FX chain which stars  my favorite compressor Stillwell Audio’s The Rocket. Son of a gun..! Time flies when you are rockin’ out. I forced myself to quit at 3:25 am — just in time to get 2 1/2 hours sleep before getting up again for the morning Fast meal.

Sometimes lyrics come easily. This was the story several year back when I was in full possession of my youthful vigor. And, sometimes bangin’ out a verse is like pulling out teeth. After writing the second verse I’d need dentures. Perhaps I’d like to think that it was so hard to get out due to weakness induced by a lack of nutrient. It was hard as I wanted to play on the triplet-like feel and maintain the rhyme scheme as long as possible. It was hard, ’cause I got lost mid way through it and lost track of the length — I over wrote and then had to axe bits (which is painful but necessary). I recorded it later the 3rd night and comped this performance from 3 takes…

Well, that is the long story. The short story is this: I am diggin’ this track which has breathe new life into a project I have had on the go for sometime now, masquerading under the working title Kullu Shay’. Hopefully I’ll be posting progress reports and teasers with increased regularity.

Please feel free to download and share this track. It is easy to do, just scroll up and click one or both of the links labeled download and share.

As soon as the other entries in the aforementioned competition have found a home online, I’ll post the links here for kicks and giggles.

Be well

.t

**you should check REAPER out if you are not 100% pleased with your current host, or if you are running a shady version of your current host! I will blah→ǧ about its many attributes later.

Soul Food can be heard and had at these links:
http://tallisman.bandcamp.com/track/soul-food
http://www.reverbnation.com/tallisman
http://soundcloud.com/tallisman/soul-food