Fly is Made For Loves

So I get these requests ALL the time; you know the kind. The kind that I figured a Premo or a Madlib or 9th Wonder would get: “…where you do you get your samples from? Can you hook me up with some dope samples…” I feel like sometimes, much of the art form of making beats is not even in the sample. It’s in the pursuit of something else. You ultimately end up either spending a few dollars on vinyl or you download something just to experience it at face value. You end up with something special. Well that’s the fairy tale take of it. Of course you could always (before you ask) try to find something that you can make totally yours. It has no influence, no bias point of views, and won’t make you feel obligated to do anything other than enjoy the experience of real, soulful music. And even with a point of view as strong as that, I also feel that somethings are so good… they are worth sharing. Some people are going to hear what I hear; other will dismiss the mix as something used to fill up blog space. I feel like what you are about to embark on is beautiful; simply put. Whether you just listen to it while cleaning the crib, or try to use it in place of a very old and very scratched “baby making music” CD, or whether you rip the sound waves into seventy-five samples chopped… you will enjoy what Fly is Made. Check for it at the jump.

Fly is For Lovers by Cosmic Souls Collective [via Mediafire]. Enjoy!
…oh, and please leave a comment! Thanks.

know:juander – (re)Painting A Still

Here’s a remix I did to Painting A Still off of know:juander’s latest release, A Kid Love, beta. Make sure you cop that if you haven’t peeped it already. I was just working on this beat and for some reason juander’s lyrics came to mind. And it’s dope. So stream and download the joint below.

EPonym & Esta - UpFromHere

Finally, here is EPonym & Esta‘s album, UpFromHere. They are new editions to the Cosmic Souls Collective and have been working really hard to make this album happen. I’ve been working with this  emcee-producer duo for almost a year now and it is crazy watching them grow as artists. If you want more reasons to peep this album check out the previously posted interview and Esta beat making video. Stream their favorite song from the album below and hit more for the track listing.

EPonym & Esta – Don’t Know feat. Melissa Bitanga

08 Don’t Know Feat Melissa Bitanga

Download UpFromHere (via MediaFire)

The Way It Was (Good)

I was working in the studio a couple days ago and I was going through some records that I’ve had for sooooo long when while on this Lonnie Liston record I came across something that sounded too right to not mess with. So I jumped on it like I do and you can check out what became of the sample below. Please leave a comment if you feeling it (or not). Peace

The Way It Was (Good)

Circa 09

Here is a dope EP Indy Sparks dropped the other day. He also did the artwork on my More Than Music album. Real cool dude.  Make sure you check Indy Sparks out on Twitter, Myspace, & IndySparks.com and peep my favorite track from it below!

Indy Sparks – Expensive Taste

Expensive Taste

Download “Circa ‘09″

Nefarious! - More Than Music

This is the last instrumental album I released called More Than Music. Check it out and leave a comment or hit me on twitter (@NefTheDamaja) and let me know what you think. Thanks to everyone who posted this up or interviewed me and fellow CSC member Mick Digi for doing the artwork. Stream it below via bandcamp player and hit the image on the left to download it.

We bring the site back on the positive tip with a new album from the homie SLik d. Summer Vibes, which dropped today on his 18th birthday. This is probably one of the few times you guys will ever get to here me rap (Sick Of Love), but I also produced a song that was previously posted.

Just check his album out and tell him Nef said what’s up!

Download Summer Vibes (via MediaFire) or Stream it from his MySpace page.

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Originally this was only supposed to be a couple of songs. When I say a couple, I mean like, two. I’ve been calling back and forth talking with Grip H all day, as some more of our old stuff may (or may not) be hitting the Kevin Nottingham site soon. I will let time tell that story. What I present to you right now though, is the latest effort from Grip H and me as The Perfect Median, the group from which most of my body of work comes to date. Go to the jump for the download link.

The way this record is put together is as follows:
Side A is two older tracks that we recorded many moons ago. Not too many moons, though, cause I haven’t been making beats that long.
Side B is new tracks that we’ve recently penned and recorded. All of the beats were handled in house with the exception of the last track which was a 9th Wonder beat. Big ups to 9th Wonder (for not letting us officially use this beat, haha). So here is some more music for the $free.99

Download | Support real hip hop

Another Fresh Sole Beat Season 1, Episode 2

You would not believe how late it is. I’ve been feeling a bit withdrawn. The fact that I’m not getting any sleep or much cut these days (laughs it off) doesn’t help. So I was supposed to “inebriate” away my sorrows tonight… with various alcohols and meaningless conversation. Well I was actually supposed to be at Diamond Head underneath a pitch black Hawaiian sky. FML.

Enters this sample I had been playing around with all day… to chop or not to chop? That was the question. I was planning to go small and massive, but I instead went for a traditional 16 x 4 using different parts of the sample. Since virtually no record of this sample being used has surfaced on the internet, I will choose to kept my mouth shut on this one. This is turning out to be a blog, huh?

So I have to tell this story too; I’ve been teaching myself Music Theory as of late, in an attempt to enlarge the territory that is my beat-making artistry. Half way through the book, like any person not being institutionally trained, I start doubting myself and my ability to take things whole and decompose them creatively in my mind. As a result, yesterday was mundanely productive. I say productive still, because having made it more than half way through the first course book, I accomplished the feat of connecting several principles of playing that before didn’t make sense. What in the world does this have to do with beat-making? I don’t know, however, I would take a stab as feeling that once you’ve understood, at least, bass clef and treble clef… their underlying principles… and their relation to each other and musical notes in general, it should open an array of sounds up for use in your production, but more or most importantly, strengthen what your hears allow you to sensibly hear. [This paragraph pertains to the bass line notes used in the beat. I totally sucked at playing bass lines in the past.]

Back to the beat. Drinking wasn’t working out for me at all… so after being in a room with three random people and knocking a couple back… I respectfully got up and walked back to my end of the barracks and slid my ID card in the door thingy. (Don’t laugh.) From there it was the refrigerator to grab the last Full Throttle and some peanut butter M&M’s. Then it was to my work desk, F3… what are the homie’s doing. Time Travel had just gotten off AIM, so myself, Juno Complex and Nefarious! chalked a few laughs and F-you’s to Twitter seeing as Nefarious! lost about 500 followers and the good admin people were evidently ignoring him, or fixing the problem without notifying him (laughing at the latter actually being a possibility.)

We wrapped up talking out and planning of our Teaser tape and I told my ex-girlfriend peaces and said I would get to making a beat. Works for me, because there was already a sample stretched across the screen on Recycle.

Add a few slices in across the wave form for chop points (92 to be exact) and then we’re moving along. Reason was already prepped since I had been practicing chords previously during the day. So how do you go about making your beats? Some people do drums first. In my personal opinion, I feel like the sample becomes the fine sketch you paint over. So I lay the sample first. (Regardless of how I prepared it in the video. Then I actually laid the bass down next and added some reverb and fold back distortion. Just a note: it brings out the beauty in whatever channel you aux it to; especially samples and bass instruments in the rack. Just drag and drop it underneath the mixer (four max).

After the bass was done and where I wanted it I laid the drums and then added some spice to it… very subtle though. I had actually planned on making a video from another sample I was working on, but it was late, I had nothing to do and I figured why not? So I created the video, threw the footage down in iMovie and added some creative breath to it. The end result is AFSB Episode 2, still Season One. Enjoy.

This is the first edition of my music help series. I will be talking about my workflow and giving some tips on how to make your music sound better. In this post I will show you guys different ways to chop up your samples in Propellerhead’s Recycle and load them into Reason…

The first thing you need to do is either have a loop ready to open up in Recycle or load your song in by clicking File > Open or pressing Ctrl + O on your keyboard. Find and highlight your song and click “Open”.

Once your sample is open in Recycle it should look like this:

You can now begin setting up your chop points. Once loaded into reason each section you chop will be assigned to a pad/key on your midi controller. Some choose to use the Sensitivity bar (the slider thingy with “Sens:” next to it), but I like to take extra time to do it myself using the pencil tool. If you set your own points it will be much more precise and you will have more control over your sample.  Click the pencil and begin clicking on the wave file where you think would make a good slice.

The image above shows an example of what the Sensitivity bar would do. Recycle doesn’t have a brain and can’t tell what sounds good or not. It will just set a point wherever there is a peak in the wave file. This can be useful in looping, though.

You can see that I used the pencil to set my chops in this one. The locks above the lines mean that the line wont dissapear when you adjust the sensitivity. The next step is to load the .rx2 file into Reason’s Dr. Rex Loop Player or NN-XT. I will use the Dr. Rex this time because it is much simpler for sampling.

Now, the question I probably get asked the most is “how to use it like an MPC”. In my videos people see me pressing pads on my Akai MPD32 and wonder how the sample keeps playing after I let the pad go. They also ask how to get the next pad to “interupt” the first one if I press another pad while a sound is playing. The answer is in the polyphony and the release. Polyphony basically is how many sounds or chops can play at one time. The release is how long the sound will play for after you let go of the pad. You must set your Polyphony to 1 and Release to 127 if you want MPC style sample chopping. I will go more in depth with the Dr. Rex loop player and show you how to do this with the NN-XT in the next post.

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