BS1215 - Loose Lips by Seiji ft Lyric L!!!! One of the biggest tunes of the Broken Beat era, the instrumental of which was written & produced by Seiji & I in 2001 back at my mum & dads house in Oxford - Id had to go back and stay there temporarily when the house in Ealing that Kaidi & I were living in was sold (we got to live there rent-free for a few months at the end so cant really complain!), and Seiji came down on the train from London for a couple of days so that he & I could work on some new stuff. The results of this were Loose Lips and another track called Ice, that appeared on Degos 2000black compilation The Good Good vol.2. Seiji & I had always got on and worked really well together with a lot in common e.g. both of us had a preference at the time for E-mu samplers - the first mixdown I did for him was his remix of PTaah The Crossing, where we had his E-mu 64, my 6400 ultra and Daz-I-Kues all hooked up to the desk running a total of 40 individual outputs - this was insane luxury at the time(!!) and the mix came out really well - I had recently read some tips from an interview with mix engineer Tony Maserati where he talked about parallel compression/doubling up channels and playing with phase/EQ to really make drums smack you in the face, and having all those outputs available allowed me to spread the main break across 2-3 channels, and deal with different frequency ranges on each, eg compress the mids hard without clamping down on the bass end…stuff like that.. common practice nowadays but at the time were closely-guarded industry secrets - it was the key to getting towards how Bob Power got the drums sounding so huge on his ATCQ mixdowns etc… The drums on Loose Lips were a break that my friend Ben Thomas and I had recorded on a 4-track tape machine a few years before - we had this old Tascam 244 portastudio that had the wickedest tape compression, and with Bens drumming and smashed-up vintage drum kit, this combined to make a hard, raw sound that fit perfectly with all the classic breaks we were using at the time, eg Lyn Collins Think, Bobby Byrd Hot Pants, James Brown Soul Pride… Seiji was on a tip of trying to simplify his production as much as possible and using the minimum of elements to create maximum impact, and I had been going on to him for months that we should do a 303-based tune, as I hadnt heard one used on a broken beat track before… We loaded up the drum break, tweaked the rhythm a little bit and layered it with claps, extra kicks & a little blip sound, then created a bassline pattern on Alison Davids Roland TB-303 which was residing at mine at the time for some reason…. sampled this into the Emu and the track was pretty much done!!!! Maximum impact thru simplicity!!! Seiji immediately got on the phone to Daz and booked a session with him and the incredible Lyric L to record vocals the following day - she absolutely smashed it to pieces and in the process created one of the all-time broken beat anthems!!! Big up Lyric L to the max!!!!! One last thing - the day after we made the instrumental (when Seiji left mine to go back to record the vocal) was 11th September 2001…….. and it was while he was travelling back on the train that the news started to come in… when he got back to the Bugz studio we spoke on the phone both in complete and utter disbelief…there wasnt much you could say… Somehow in spite of all this the vocals got done and the track finished.. Other tracks I produced with Seiji during this era were the Bugz remix of Rain by Gaelle (Naked Music), Lake of Perseverence (Opaque Remix) by Dom um Romao, Mwela Mwela (Bugz Remix) (with Scott 1200), Amp Fiddler I Believe In You (Bugz Remix), Opaque Ice, Amy Winehouse In My Bed (Bugz Remix), a few tracks from the Homecookin LP (Bring Some/Baked), and later on tracks such as Dont Joke with a Hungry Man (Seiji Remix) by Quantic and Yin Yang with the mighty Spoonface on vocals - plus a few other big tunes that Ill talk about next, (that is if anyones still interested and as long as these posts dont come across that I like the sound of my own voice too much..!) Big up Seiji, Lyric L, Darren Benjamin and all the other Bugz Mark Force, Kaidi Kat, Orin Afronaut, Alex Phountzi, Scott 1200) and all the incredibly talented and positive people who made that whole era such a special time - Dego Ranks, IG Culture, Domu, Phil Asher, Bunny Bread, Adam Rockers Moses, Jason Motet Hicks, Gus Modeste, Top Rock & all Uprock Crew, Modaji, Vanessa Freeman, Zsa Zsar, and lastly Mike & Spence at Goya Distribution, whose efforts can never be over-stated!!!
Posted on: Fri, 09 May 2014 14:18:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015