Slow Jam City/Screet 2013

czzle's homegirl nelly's birthday was this past weekend.  she's been into the slow jams lately so i made her a mix cd..  her other homegirl screet's birthday was the night before.. she gets a mix cd of the gutter stuff.. basically once she told me she liked 50cent and i kinda latched onto that.  now every year i make her a 'thug life' mix cd.

the lost art of the mixtape is not dead.. it's just gone digital like everything else...

Radio Spot for WABE

i like to support public radio.  it's what i listen to in the morning on the way to work.  get in some news, weather, traffic, current events, no commercials and no annoying "drive-time" DJ yelling about this and that.

at the end of the year i donated to WABE which is the local NPR station in atlanta.  felt like since i'm always listening it's only fair.. (plus i got a dope eco-friendly bag, oooh.)  and on the donation page online there's a little comment section.. so in the comment section i said something nice about the station.

about a month later i got an email from Eric Durban who works at WABE asking if he could record me answering a few questions for a promo spot.  i was cool with it so we set up a little phone interview.  i was a little nervous at the time (i kinda think you can tell..) but whatever.

here it is.

Made a new beat: "KRS Floss" dj jesster

new beat posted on soundcloud.  i feel like this one's arranged a little better than the last one.. maybe could've used some more layers but i like it to not be too cluttered, so it is what it is at least for now.

started with the drum beat, layered a bunch to give it a phat low end.  then added the bassline and synth.  the "think" part was kinda some icing.  actually, the icing was the krs and "pony" stuff.

REMIX COMP: Cazzette "Weapon" DJ Jesster Remix

put together a remix of "weapon" by cazzette.  layered up a bunch of drums and filtered some sounds.. added a simple little bassline and BAM.  this is a remix...

The Funk Hunt

Now that i've got the studio more or less set up i can go back to my ways of enjoying vinyl and diggin' through the crates.  one of the things i want to do though is rip some of these records to mp3.

One record in the vaults is called "the funk hunt" .. it's a weird three song EP from a short film that someone did about a record and how it starts out being recorded with this band and then over the years the album gets used in a club, sampled, passed around etc..

i was looking around recently for digital copies of those three songs on the internets but wasn't having much luck.. so i decided to just rip it off our vinyl.  it's sounds ok.. not preferable to a clean .wav file but it's better than nada.

• the funk hunt
• it's like that
• bring that beat back

New Year's Resolution: make more beats...

one of my new year's resolutions for 2013 is to be more prolific with making beats.  i used to make beats like two-a-day way back when.  now i'm a full-blown adult and time is a lot harder to come by for that kinda thing so i'm going to temper my expectations.  i don't want to put a concrete number on the number of beats i have to make per week or anything like that, but i've got a nice new little setup in the basement at the house and i figure i should put it to use.. if for no other reason than i enjoy it.

so here's beat #1 of 2013.  it's a few hours worth of work and it's not a polished gem by any means.  it's a rough, semi-finished thing with some lame freestyle on it that could probably stand to be replaced with something written and the levels are for sure not right.  but, it is what it is: first beat of the year.

i found some pretty dope records at the highland row antique shop right around the holidays '12.  for three bucks each there was a special ed "i got it made" single, a LL cool j "i need a beat" 12" that had an instrumental, there was a nu shooz album that had "i can't wait" on there and even the 12" single to "white horse"  .. not a bad score.

this beat's got some elements sampled from those records and a little bit of ableton instruments sprinkled in.

here's to a strong 2013 with mad beats.

highland row records beat