If you're easily bored by the technical aspects of music making (as many of my friends tend to get when I drone on for hours about this shit), skip this entry and go listen to the album. Now, onto production...
As my own producer, I'm lucky enough to have the ability to craft my instrumentals exactly (to a degree; the artistic process is a nitpickingly tedious occupational hazard) how I want them to sound under my lyrics, or vice versa depending on how I'm writing the song. The digital age has allowed artists like myself to explore and experiment with all aspects of the song-making process, once a Herculean task divided amongst a legion of producers, song writers, house musicians, engineers and technicians. Of course in the digital micromanaging of production, much of the finesse, the time honored and honed techniques of the old are lost in the jack of all trades (master of none) mentality, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. Just the rise to prominence of a new age of music.
I am a musician and the computer is my instrument. Through it, I command an army of synths and samplers, I wield guitars and microphones, I have at my fingertips an old school arsenal of drum machine and turntables that I mash, trash and chop into new forms of traditional sound. I am the one man band in the age of hip hop and iPods.
Did that sound too pretentious? I kinda envisioned Hans Zimmer's score to Batman Begins in the background as I was typing it. Anyways, all delusions of grandeur super-musician status aside, let's talk about the production behind Grayscale.
For anyone unfamiliar with the majority of my production setup, let this outdated picture do the talking.
Bootleg basement setup, I know. Abbey Road it isn't.
A majority of my music is made using the computer and two MIDI controllers pictured above. One of them, an AKAI MPD24 (the bastardized version of an MPC) serves as my drum pad/loop controller, with definable knobs and faders for tweaking synths/adjusting mixing levels/etc. The other keyboard is my baby, an M-Audio Axiom25 with 8 pads and definable knobs as well. These two tools (as well as FLStudio - I've been on that software since it was Fruity Loops v2) are the basis for my production. Furthermore, I have microphones, guitars and a turntable all running in through my EMU 0404 DAS into FLStudio. I love that program.
On Grayscale, I made sure that every track represented a different aspect of my production (or via collaboration, my influences in production). Tracks such as Soundcheck, Don't Call Me and Grayscale are built around live guitar recordings but sampled, chopped, and padded with other samples to fill out the soundscape. On Grab Bag, I sampled from vinyl and drum machines, mixed with digital synths and samples to create a strange collage of sound. Flametongue, Sameeha, and the Station Break Interluude are my collaborations with producers who utilize the AKAI MPC to craft their music, one of the most traditional mediums of hip hop music. The Swami Interluude is my attempt to digitally recreate what hip hop producers do on the MPC on the computer. This Room and Encore are also pretty much entirely digital sampling while Snakecharmers is all original synth sequencing. With this album I wanted to explore the limits of my production creativity, draw from all aspects of the spectrum.
Most producers have a sound that they stick to, the sound that defines them. I'd like to think that my lack of a defining sound is what makes me unique. Who knows? All I know is that I'm trying to take a genre of music I love and put the art back into it.
And in this age, with this much control of the music, maybe it's possible. Maybe it's a pipe dream in the septic system that is mainstream ultra-polished commercial rap music.
Who knows?
