THE ROOTS OUTTAKES
?uest Love on…
The Digital Divide…
By the time Phrenology came around, that’s when I started noticing that a lot of the sonic textures that we were looking for, you can sort of do some trial and error stuff on Pro Tools. Phrenology is when we started using Pro Tools to the fullest. We were doing analog tape on every album before Phrenology-and using the best engineers; between Bob Power and Russ Alabato, studios charging you a whole gang of shit to record. Now Pro Tools sort of has them on their back because everybody is doing their work at home so now some of the top studio that previously maybe have charged you 4000 dollars a day, they might cut you a side deal for $900 a day. The economic drought factor of Pro Tools and do it yourself, that whole do it yourself method has taken studios under.
My sponsor Yamaha has been trying to get me to play their new electronic drums. And after the almost crash and burn of the Tipping Point I didn’t want to go that far with it. I still have the set, I meant it’s nice. Basically it’s a device that lets me, you remember the triggering device I told you about…
Yeah…
Alright, I’ll give you an example of the triggering device, it’s funny you mentiones Clones, what you do is, like for “Clones”, I will put the snare in…the thing is you have to be meticulous and put every noise in each pad, so it’s almost like half a second for each pad and it has to spread throughout 32 of them. And then this device, the triggering device, lets me, even though the sound of it is going to be the drum break that was Clones, I’m still controlling it. Does that make sense…
Yeah…
In other word, if I hit the snare, if I hit my natural snare, I have a pad device on the snare that reads it write to the MPC60 and that will activate the snare inside there. Basically this new device that Yamaha has cuts to the chase. You basically sample the drum break, say I had “Impeach the President”, I could pick the kick, snare, the hi-hat and the open hi-hat and assign them to each drum pad then play it that way. I would do that if I want to flip the break.
So it takes out the middleman of the MPC?
Yeah, but still using it but, ya know. The reason why I want to control the Clones break as opposed to just playing it, as opposed to sampling it outright was on the break of the song there’s much more of a lag in the beat. I wanted to overexaggerate that more coming into the song. What’s the word-I wanted to fluctuate, or retard, that’s the proper term, retard the beat even more. Meaning to slowww it down then speed it back up to rhythm even more.