Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs shows you how to blend hip-hop and rock—the right way.

With cypress hill, we always got played on the K-Rocks, the Power 106s, and the urban crossover stations. There’s always been this thing where rock stations wanted to play more urban music, but they didn’t want to sacrifice their daily format, so I recently started doing mash-up radio. It’s been going on in Europe for a while, but they’re mixing Britney Spears with the Strokes and whatever. We just decided to blend rock and rap. It’s something Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Rick Rubin, and the Beastie Boys did, and Cypress did it on the Judgment Night soundtrack with Pearl Jam—we’ve always blended those two kinds of music. When hip-hop started, rock and rap were together, but along the way people got into jazz and funk and soul, too. When Jay-Z jumped on it recently, people thought it was this new thing, which it wasn’t. We started doing mash-ups with these rare hip-hop a cappellas that no one could find, and mashing them with rock. We got on K-Rock in New York, Sirius [Satellite Radio], and a few more stations. When we do it, it is exclusively rock instrumentals with hip-hop a cappellas. Here’s how we do it.

1 Choose a rock track. I’ll find a rock track that’s hot at the moment. I don’t like to get too obscure or introverted with my music, because people aren’t gonna know what the hell it is. I just put Jet with Joe Buddens. Jet is one of the hottest bands out right now.

2 Find the rock break and loop it. I loop the break in the Pioneer CDJ-1000 CD players, ’cause it’s the easiest way to do it. I got my turntables next to my CD players—I like to work with it live, like I’m DJing. I like to get the feel and the vibe of everything. You know, find my start point and boom, get it started and have it looping. The CDJ has auto-loop and pitch, too, so you can speed it up and keep the pitch of the music the same.

3 Find a hip-hop a cappella. When I grab a cappellas, I wanna use something that’s bangin’ and pretty familiar. The a cappella might fit perfectly time-wise but something about the vocal is just not resonating with the music, so I take it out. Other times, you might have to speed it up or slow it down too much, and that won’t work either. It takes a minute to find the thing that’ll fit on there just right, but once you do, it’s magic. I use analog turntables either with a real record or Rane Serato Scratch. I got like 300 a cappellas in the computer that I can just flip through.

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