A Vibe Called Res

Base FM Live To Air

I’m heading up to Base FM on Thursday to do a little live to air on the Bread & Butta show. Loaded up my 303 with some beats for the occasion. #SideStepsSoloSet

Bread & Butta with Mark Yela and Reggie D

Thursdays 6-8pm

Base FM

For The Nerds

I thought I’d write a bit of shite about the Brew album and my little part in its existence. No idea if people wanna hear it but I figure nerdy little details are the type of stuff that I love to read from other producers so here goes… 

‘Everybody’ started life as a chopped up Wurli sample. I won’t name the actual record, (clearance would be a bitch) but you definitely don’t have to be a super saiyan digger to find it. The original sample has a lot of noise so in parts of the final version of the song its been filtered out. The drums are a bunch of layers, the most obvious being synthetic sub chopped up, probably my favourite break of all time and one that I use a bit. I always layer it though so somehow in my head its not ‘Just another Syn Sub chop’.

I was going for a PR kinda vibe so I tried to make the bass line bouncy and sit under the drums. It was originally a Microkorg sub patch I did at home. The album version though is the badman Brew bassist himself Chip Matthews. Funnily enough at some point when Chip’s recording was looped and put to my beat the loop was out by a bar from what he actually played. It took me a while to get used to the new feel as its ‘out’ when compared to my original line- but it definitely works and after getting used to it I Iike it way more than the original.

The guitar is me playing, although its actually a sample off an HCE song I recorded in 2009. I don’t have a mic at home, so I wrote the simple little guitar line on my guitar, but instead of recording me playing, I chopped a single note off the HCE tune and pitched it in 16 levels in the MP. Originally I envisaged re recording it, but keeping it feeling like a sample felt right so we left it in.

Theres some little horn stabs and chimes that sit under the mix to give it some other spices but all in all its a really simple little beat. Thankfully the boys are such amazing MC’s- Those verses would sound good sitting on static. I really didnt have to do anything. Theres actually a different version of Lance’s verse floating round somewhere. He killed it the first time, but something about the recording didn’t quite fit with the rest of the tune. He later re-wrote, re-recorded and completely killed it as per. Blessed to have my 3 favourite NZ MC’s on a track.

Chris put some pretty tasty scratches on the intro and the end. Originally Tom rapped the intro, but one night at Chris’s house we dug through his records and found the words he needed to put it together as a scratch chorus. Trainspotters could probably name each joint they came from. ‘Like’ ‘Just’ ‘Fuck’ etc are all from individual acapellas. I can’t remember which ones now.

It took ages to get the vocals all recorded and the files collected up and it was actually the night before Tom and Haz mastered that we ended up at Truent’s house doing the final arrangement (sorry Tom). At the time I didn’t have a computer, so while I could make beats and chop up and record stuff, I needed someone to help with the arrangement itself and the mix. Totally trust chris’s ideas so really it was just a case of wacking it all together and structuring it out.

Tom and the rest of the crew worked so damn hard on the album. I feel blessed to have somehow fluked a little joint on what is now a number one record!