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.