A to the K - the making of a hip-hop album

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug when it comes to audio and record making, and the truth is there really are both pros and cons of “the old days” and where we are today. This applies to everything - to gear, to production techniques, to sonics, to job titles, to technology. Everyone’s a producer now, but hardly ANYONE is a producer if that makes sense.

I just finished a hip hop project, something I don’t get to do many of, and it reminded me of making an album back in the day, and how much of a pain it was, technically. I didn’t actually mind, having said that - it really was a labour of love and every minute of it was great, and even though it didn’t have the best of endings, I love it to this day, but I’ll talk

about that later!

The band was really influenced by a wild swathe of pop culture and classic artists from the time, both members being serious hip hop heads, with “Kode Red G” a sick and twisted horror-core master of an MC (and also very nice chap) and the stupidly talented walking encyclopedia of hip-hop DJ, Diamond Sire, then a recent competitor in the DMC World DJ championships.

In this spirit, this was an almost entirely sample-based record, made on analog tape. The key to this record was a particular sampler - a Casio FZ1 sampling keyboard, probably a far lesser known machine than the AKAI’s were soon to dominate the sampling world. Around that time, there were studios in Italy which had nothing BUT a bank of AKAI’s to make house music. That said about the Casio, if you know, you know, and it was renowned for being quite “hard hitting” by creators of sample-based music.

Here’s Casio’s own press on the beast: “The Casio FZ-1 is an impressive sampler/synthesizer keyboard from 1987. Its offerings at the time were very professional features. In an 8-voice polyphonic full 61-note keyboard synthesizer, you get a 16-bit digital sampler with variable 9kHz to 36kHz sampling rates. 1MB of memory, expandable to 2MB, could provide a maximum time of almost 2 minutes of sample time at 9kHz. Up to 64 samples can be held in memory and placed across the keyboard.”

So, to recap, that’s 2 whole MB of sampling if you expanded it with the super expensive (250 pounds for 1MB lol) expansion, and 30 seconds of time shared between all the samples at the glorious 36k sample rate. Amazing! I’m sure we didn’t use all of that hi-fi luxurious 36k, as the aesthetic was “moldy” - our favorite term for low-grade greasy good sound.

At that point, Cubase had become THE main sequencer that people used. The Atari ST, having built-in MIDI ports, also helped move things forward, so that was fairly standard as well, so the band had Cubase based on an ST, and that’s how they built their tracks.

At the studio, we also had Cubase running on Windows (relatively new at that point) as it allowed us to use some external interfaces and, importantly, sync directly from the computer. This was critical as the studio’s Cubase was locked to tape by using SMPTE code striped (recorded) to the last track of the tape machine. If you ever see pictures of old tape boxes, you might often see “TC” or “SMPTE” on track 24, and this is why.

SMPTE code, or just Time Code, is exactly as it sounds, a signal recorded onto the tape which specifies a time - the start is 0:00 and is continuous through the reel. When you press play, the SMPTE reader, which is connected to the output of the channel the code is recorded in, takes that time position and feeds it to the machine it is controlling, chasing the code the whole time.

In our case, this was the sequencer - Cubase, which had the MIDI data for each song, plus it also controlled the desk to a small degree - in this case, automating mutes.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back then, sometimes you even had a whole computer handling the automation we take for granted on DAW mixer pages - even getting a simple mute right was problematic sometimes!

I’m pretty sure the FZ1 was mono - BUT had 8 individual outs unlike a lot of later samplers, so you could assign different sounds to different outputs. You could then run several passes of the song and record those outputs to the tape machine 8 sounds at a time, which meant we could now spread out the tracks over the mixing desk as they played back from tape, and then pan, EQ, add effects, and all of the things we do to actually mix.

Sampling was still kind of in that grey area, and there’s no way this record would get cleared today; every kick, snare, squeal, dubiously tuned bass note, moldy piano, and sample (off an old VHS copy) from your favorite horror or gangster movie was painstakingly assembled to make something all new from all-old material.

Once everything was recorded back to tape, we tracked the vocals, backing vocals, adlibs, and live scratching all over the record to tape.

At the time, we also had fairly limited effects, at most 2 or 3 reverbs, one of those being a multi-fx which doubled as a delay, an additional dedicated delay, and what else I can’t really remember! So, whereas now we are unlimited with our processing choices - sometimes, on many parts, effects were recorded to tape as they wanted things like reverb-drenched creepy whispers, bone cracks, screams sounding like they are coming from a flanged Stephen King nightmare, and so on, so whatever happened as we recorded with those tracks - stayed. It’s hard to imagine that today, and listening back, I can hear lots of things I’d do differently, but at the time, everything took WORK and commitment as you often had one shot!

The whole record probably took a week to record all of the other stuff and assemble, and despite being a horror record - constant laughter throughout the whole process. What we didn’t realise was such was the commitment to the theme, to us at least generally tongue in cheek, outrageous for effect and the genre - in our youthful exuberance - it was going to be too much for some. Maybe don’t sample the vicar from a funeral next time? I think many people were affected by the events a couple of the songs were about, and in this case the unthinkable happened right in OUR vicinity. Even though it was largely for shock value it really wasn’t a celebration, it was a damn good narrative - like a real life horror movie, and it’s probably sicker to repress than express.

Mixing was totally manual, the only thing automated being the mutes which were used to tweak the arrangements, cut out noise at the start, and drop parts in and out. All of this takes seconds now in a DAW, cutting, muting regions are instant, but then…a different story.

Eventually it was all mixed down to DAT one song at a time, then mastered for vinyl - of course - at a mastering studio in London famous for drum ’n bass, and there it was.

The people who knew the band loved it of course. What about the general pubic? At the time there weren’t many places in the UK media that covered hip-hop, and as it turns out the horror aspect went WAY too far for Hip Hop Connection, who wrote a scathing review as it was too sick and twisted for the sensitive little flowers, but F ‘em - it’s an underground classic. I was devastated for the guys as they deserved recognition and HHC really pussed out.

I always get excited when I hear work by producers who still are hugely influenced by old-school sample-based hip-hop, as many DAW-created cookie-cutter “beats” today sound like some kind of Fisher-Price toy music in comparison. A good example is someone like The Alchemist, who clearly has done his homework. As we head into the era of AI destroying humanity in music so some tech bros can buy a mansion and losers can feel like artists, I’m happy to remember the sketchy timing, dubious note selection, and utterly gross sonics we labored over to make something very real, if not everyone’s cup of tea. You want art, you got it.

If, like me, you like records that have soul and you’re looking for a mixer who’ll follow you right over the cliff, jump in my DMs; you’re always welcome.