music video: the dirty rappers "frosting a log"

made a music vid w my homie bleezy: "frosting a log"
first you drop a deuce and then you rub one out .. then you've got a frosted log: NODOUBT.

Hella Hollabration 5

throwing a New Years Eve party.. if you remember the old hollabration it was a good time.  music, good people, some cold drinks, etc... this year will include  an improv show too.  we're getting down at the village theatre.

you know how sometimes you get all hype for new years and then it's kinda a bust?  well hollabration is bust-proof 'cause it doesn't come with a ton of hype and over-blown stuff.  we keep it pretty simple and just have some fun.

bleezy's gonna work out all-you-can-drink champs.  the improv show starts at 10pm, music starts at 11 and we can go pretty much as late as we want.  i'm already working on my playlist to roll with.. what should be the midnight song?  hottest track of 2012?  a remix of a hot track from 2012?

looking forward to it.
see you at the VT.

dano on the artwork...

Composing Music :06 Seconds at a Time...

usually when you think of "making a beat" you think of something clocking in at around 3 min or so... well here's a little project i put together for my homie clabo at the village theatre and the atlanta hawks.

they're doing little :30 comedy videos to promote hawks home games .. 1 for each game.. clabo asked me if i would put together the end tag, which was to consist of the matchup, the day and time and the hawks web address.. then transition to the VT logo.  i put together the end tag and came up with some music.

bonus points if you can guess where the drum beat is sampled from...

DJing the Rep Your Hood booth

this saturday (nov 3rd) is the cabbagetown chomp and stomp.  i'll be there along with the crew, the shirts, a cooler, the turntables and a bunch of other artists spinning music all day long.  if you haven't checked out the rep your hood site you can now do that.

also our friends at the village theatre are going to be there cooking chili right around the corner and we may get a visit from the guys from wasted potential brass band.  this is our third year doing this festival and it's always been a lot of fun..

if you can make it, come by our booth.  we'll be on powell st right at the intersection with wylie street.  get there early for easier parking and check out the new hoodies we're doing.

-jesster

Gerbers: Downtempo House Mix

my relationship with house music has been an interesting one.  Early in my DJing years i kinda avoided it.  At the time house music was strictly for the clubs and too electronic for my taste.  Eventually i landed a gig DJing at a sushi restaurant in midtown called "Cherry" on the weekends.  it was a pseudo-posh spot that got a decent crowd of people who usually made cherry their place to hang before they "went out."  there were some decent places to hang out just down crescent street.

the music i played there was pretty much all "electronica" which in this context means music without guitars, ranging from loungey stuff to house and all in between.  a typical night would start with a relatively slow tempo and a quiet volume... mostly background dinner music.  as the night went on the volume and tempo would pick up.

the cherry crowd really dug all that electronic music.. we'd keep it pretty smoothed out and it kinda fit the scene pretty well.  we called it "gerbers" 'cause it was like feeding the baby.  this was all before serato so we had real-life actual records that you had to buy at a store and bring to gig.

most of these records had pretty non-descript names for songs.  we got around that by taking a sharpie to the label on the vinyl and writing out a little code for what kind of electronic music that records contined..  pretty much went like this:

H = house
DT = downtempo
MT = midtempo
UPT = uptempo


eventually we decided that there were too many different kinds of house to blanket the whole genre with an "H" label... so we got creative:

BBH = broken beat house
DTH = down tempo house

the DTH was kinda always my personal favorite.  all the fun of house music without the overly fast tempo.. i'd say DTH would land you somewhere in the 105-115 bpm area.  although DTH is more of a feel thing than strictly a bpm thing.

over the years the gerbers kinda grew on me.  here's a little mix i put together of DTH gerbers.  the mix is for a dinner party for mercedes that GO! is producing.  this mix was actually made using ableton live.  the old me would've called that 'cheating' but it's how i felt like doing this.  there actually exist some mp3s that i ripped from vinyl because i couldn't find it anywhere else.

come check out my record collection some day and see all the "DTH" labels hand-written on the vinyl.... 
well, in all honesty, now listening to this mix again, it kinda starts MT and makes it's way to DTH and then towards the end is bordering on straight-up H...

DTH MIX

TTL Remix Comp: dj jesster "the studio"

over at turntable lab they're having a remix competition.. it basically involves any james brown, tribe called quest or rakim.  i started out with an idea and this is what i came up with.. it's more of an original beat that samples tribe than a "remix" but i'm going with it anyways.

the remix comp is more or less a promotion for a new site called legit mix.  so that's where this remix/orginal is:

What I Do

this is my regular gig.. working on the flame for turner studios.  client number one is turner sports.  i know that "working on a flame" sounds kinda vague and abstract.. maybe this will help:

Persian Wedding Song Remix (in Farsi)

A couple of weekends ago i DJed a wedding party for Sarge and Leyla.  Leyla's mom brought me a couple of CDs with some persian wedding music to play.  I thought one of them was pretty interesting to i kinda worked it into a beat i was working on.

The lyrics are in farsi so i don't know what is being said and i'm not sure that the arrangement is in a way that the lyrics make any sense now.  i do think it sounds kinda cool though.  When i put this together i did it because i like the idea of blending different musical styles together, i sincerely hope this isn't offensive or rude towards anyone.

Some of the tricks i tried to use involved some grouping of effects in a timeline.  Using a simpler in a bassline and warping and cutting in arrangement mode.  there's a couple filter delays in there, oh and i used a corpus effect on the bass drums after i wired them through their own audio channel.. that was a trick i learned in a tutorial from dubspot.

The wedding was great by the way and both Leyla and her mom are adorable.  Thanks for the tracks.....

Big House Pimpin' - dj jesster [jay-z house mix]

here's a house music mix i put together..  the concept was to weave "big pimpin'" throughout it and make it a quick little mix.  it's about 35+ minutes.  i looked for about 6 months for the jay-z acapella but had no luck (even tried to tweet the man himself.)  i gave up and did the mix with the original.  thanks to my main man Kev Goreham for the v.o. work...

It's Time For the Percolator (dj jesster Re-Edit)

always loved the song "percolator" by cajmere.  on the flight back from LGA today i put most of this together.  i finished it off back here in atlanta.   it's short and sweet, clocking in at 2:00 min on the nose.  the breakdown with the high-pitched synth got the auto-pan xformer trick which is one of the tricks i got from abe duque in the dubspot workshop.  unfortunately i didn't get to say "thanks" to him in person after the class, i had my head in the apc when he took off.

Dubspot Ableton Class with Abe Duque

this weekend i took a class in NYC at dubspot... it was dope.  it was a two day ableton workshop specifically addressing the use of the apc-40.  our teacher was abe duque, he did a fantastic job.  i would say the information was split 20/80 between the two days.. after day one i thought "yeah it's pretty cool" but after day two i was pretty much in the "mind has been blown" category.  some of the things we covered were mapping to buttons on the apc, warping, chaining effects, effective ways to use the effects in transitions, using the crossfader on the apc, mapping to macros, beat repeat, a transformer effect using the "auto pan" and general clip triggering (including "follow actions")

it was a lot of information to digest in two short classes.. we even had homework after day one to bring a few warped tracks to the next day's class that we would work with.  i kinda went with the NYC theme on that one.  when the class was done i tried to record my mix but they were closing up shop and i had to cut it off after about 5 and a half minutes.  here's what i did before i had to stop...

some of the effects are a little over the top but we were trying to experiment and i wanted to try and touch on as many of the things we learned in the class as possible.  this is pretty much "straight to tape" with the exception of one or two minor things that i cleaned up after the fact.  far from perfect but much different from what i would've been capable of before taking this workshop.  

i don't have an apc40, we'll see if i end up getting one.  it's a pretty useful tool in the studio and it would be great for performing.. not sure i'll ever give up the two 1200s though.

NYC Mix (Dubspot Homework) - dj jesster

funny story to add: at the beginning of the class we were going around talking about what brought us to the workshop.  after i had mentioned that i got started working with an ensoniq mirage, sp 1200, eps 16+ and mpc, abe asked "what are you, 60 years old?"

Edie Brickell vs Sadat X - What I Am (jesster re-edit)

Edie Brickell vs Sadat X - What I Am (jesster re-edit)

been going through some ableton tutorials thanks to the good people at dubspot.  used as much as i could from what i've learned.. they did a 30 lesson in 30 day thing.  there's some track warping, some sidechaining in compression, a impulse in a drum rack trick, there's some effect envelopes, recording midi as audio and reversing the track and some others thrown in there.  i'm going up to NYC in a few weeks for their APC workshop so this was kinda a boot-camp thing...

i am kinda nostalgic about the "what i am" track since it was pretty dope way back in the day when i was a camp counselor at mt ida, plus i always loved the brand nubians.  i know this is borderline cheesy and the warping is a little loose but i still dig it.  hope you do too...

peace,
jesster

Wasted Potential Brass Band at Shorty's Pizza - Tucker

If you like good music, good food, nice people and cold beers all in one place then you'll probably dig shortys' tucker.  On saturday july 7th the music will be provided by the Wasted Potential Brass Band.  You should go and check it out.

Bill Withers "Grandma's Hands" dj jesster Re-Edit

Spent a little more time last night with warping tracks.  hooked up a new toy... an MPK-25.  It's a small keyboard controller made by the same people who made the MPC-2000.  It's got the pads for tapping out a drum beat and everything.  The beat room is shaping up a little bit.. here's what we came up with:

Now i'm taking note of the fact that we're doing a "grandma's hands" re-edit just after we did a post about no-diggity.  total coincidence, but pretty cool i think.

Busta Rhymes - Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See (jesster remix)

Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See (jesster remix)

more ableton messin' around..
took a busta acapella and put a beat to it.  prob could use more experience warping the track, hopefully that will come.

The TR-808 Is Coming ... bunch of 808 drum sounds in a .zip file...

Hip-Hop music has come a pretty long way.. still, there are certain events in the relatively short timeline of the genre that can be considered significant... a few of them based on equipment.  Where would Hip-Hop be without the invention of the Technics 1200 turntable?  Where would Hip-Hop be without the innovation of a crossfader in a mixer?  .... and what would hip hop sound like today if the good people at Roland had never come out with the Rhythm Composer TR-808?  

These sounds are as much a part of popular music today as ever.  Part nostalgia and part perfecting an electronic drum sound the 808 is everywhere.  Here's a bunch of .wav files in a folder in a .zip file of 808 sounds.. put 'em in reason, ableton, garage band, acid or whatever your program of choice..  it you're really old school you'll put 'em on cassette and make a "pause-rewind" loop.  that's gangsta.

808 ZIP FILE HERE

MF What?

MF What?

was working off a tutorial in ableton live with drum rack and this is something i came up with tonight.. kinda threw it together but still some deep bass beat to roll with...

all i need is the love of my crew.

60 minutes of ROTO

Click here to buy this CD.

this is the album "60 Minutes Of Roto" .. a compilation of original music for the yingwu fantasy baseball league.  It's the best fantasy baseball league in the world.  Some of the contributing artists on this album include: Johnny Whit, Travesty Lee, Oh Chris Snyder, Dirt-Dogg LeRoux, Joe The Imperial, Mike D, Mike Nice, Hambone Wenham and DJ Jesster...

Quite the bargain at $3 + shipping.

Holla-Que 2012

It's been a while but we're back.  Holla-Que June 23rd..  we'll get it going early so there'll be some wiffleball to go along with the BBQ and brews.. the guys from Wasted Potential Brass Band will be coming by to hang so there'll no doubt be some funky music playing.

Hopefully the house will be setup and there won't be too many boxes lying around.  As always, dope flyer design by dano.

Holllaaaaaaaaa.....

Takes On "No Diggity" by Blackstreet

I can remember DJing parties when "No Diggity" was considered a new song.. yes i'm old and yes i've been DJing for a while.  I had the 12" with the version with Dre rhyming at the beginning.  The song was pretty popular back then but it's funny to me how it's kinda gaining steam again.  Remixes and covers are floating around all over the place..  I just DJed a wedding a couple of weeks ago for Tristan and Christie and "No Diggity" was one of the songs on her list that I had to play.

Calling this song "a classic" may be a little bit of a stretch.  I personally like to reserve that tag for things that had more of an impact on my life .. I would say something like "Rock Box" is a classic..  but i would say that "No Diggity" is significant ... maybe a mini-classic?

So I thought it might be interesting to put some of these covers and remixes in the same place here for you to play through and get an idea for how it has influenced pop culture probably forever... no diggity, no doubt.

• the original
• the brass band version
• the funky indie version
• a remix by wick-it
• drum and bass remix

For good measure let's throw in the acapella so you could do your own remix.. maybe one of these day's i'll get around to one of those and post it here.

 

new voicemail greeting

i've said it before and i will reiterate.. your voicemail greeting has to be dope.  here's the new one for 2012.. special thanks to my homie kevin goreham for the help with the VO work...  i put it in ableton live and tried to "make it funky"

jesster vmail 2012

Remix attempt

this was an attempt a remix competition that i never got around to submitting.  it's a short ableton thing that i put together..  hope you dig it...
REMIX

Album Cover artwork for Dirty Rappers track "Buttaface"

here's the artwork for the forthcoming single by The Dirty Rappers entitled "butta face" which is a song about girls. before you stop me and say "that's mean" there's actually a funny story behind it.. so we're in dublin for the King wedding. our camera at the time didn't have the biggest memory card and we had just spent the past few days exploring the extremely photogenic west coast of ireland.. so i had to get some stuff off of there to make room for the rest of the trip.. at the time i had not brought my laptop so my big plan was to use the hotel's computer in the business center and dump the pictures to that and then burn them to disk. since the hotel's computer was a shared computer i also was planning on deleting our pictures off there when i was done. you would think that most other people would think along the same lines as me.. and for the most part they did.

the hotel had a PC and the obvious place to put pictures on a PC (even if temporarily) would be in the folder called "my pictures" .. well before i even got the pictures transferred from my camera i noticed that the "my pictures" folder had exactly one picture in it. so i checked it out and it turned out to be the photo that was used for the "Buttaface" artwork. i would go so far as to venture that the person who left that picture on the hotel computer did it on purpose. i'll even take that a step further and say that the person who purposefully left their self-portrait on the hotel's computer would have wanted me to copy that file to disk and use it for some kind of album artwork..

now, whether or not she had intended it to be a Dirty Rappers album cover that she graced is up for debate. sometimes you just get more than you bargain for though. bleezy had always wanted to do a song called "Buttaface" so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. we never did get around to recording that song but, boy, when we do there is an album cover just waiting to be pressed...

The Artistry of J-Dilla

James Dewitt Yancey (February 7, 1974 – February 10, 2006)

on the birthday and three days before the anniversary of the death of J-Dilla i thought i would bring up the artistry of the music that he made.  as a person with experience "making beats" i would say i am authorized to put my two cents in as to what is and what is not good quality production.  true, all music is subjective to the taste of the listener, but there's a difference between knowing something is catchy and something that has had time and expertise put into it.  the way that dilla chopped beats was pretty far ahead of it's time... from listening you can tell that there is some complicated arranging of samples going on there.  artistry is all about the details...

the album donuts is dilla's opus.  it is the album that best exemplifies what dilla was all about.. what's the expression? "often imitated never duplicated" right?  check out this track for an example of how dilla manipulates a sample to take it from a loop into its own completely new thing:

workinonit

j-dilla rest in peace.

you were and still are an inspiration to a whole generation of beat makers, and provided us with some dope music.