Right Handed Straw pt. 2
I really fell off with the newsletters. I’m happy to see there are new subscribers, so hopefully I’ll get back into the flow of things. I’ve been working on music, doing odds and ends, really trying to finish up an album of my own, and doing some work for other people.
The last newsletter covered the first 9 tracks from RHS, in case you missed that one.
I forgot about some of the promo videos I made for this record, so I will sprinkle them in here.
Loss Angles
For the observant, the title is a play off one of the elements of the song. At just over 3 minutes, this is one of the longer songs on the record. In some ways, it feels a little more straight forward to me. Sometimes I make things and I know they are weird. This one always felt like one that might appeal to people who don’t like my other beats.
I don’t remember a lot about making this. The “now you know” at the end was run through a Roland Space Echo. I had a Space Echo for a few years and it appears a few times on this record. It was a little wonky and would alter the echo at a certain point in the tape loop, which you can kind of hear on this song.
Test #6
Continuing the sequential tests (The numbers run in order from LHS to RHS), this is an interlude. Not a whole lot to say about this one. It is there as a little mood piece that gets you from track to track.
Morning
A lot of this stuff sounds so minimal to my ears now, but I was working primarily on my MPC2000. The reverse stuff at the end would’ve been done in Pro Tools because I was definitely too lazy to line something like that up inside the MPC. I like how the sample evolves after a few bars and then when it gets to the second section the loop kind of comes back to the 1 in a less than perfect way.
Keep Your Lights On
This was originally a remix that I did of Sixtoo’s song “Sidewinder” from his Chewing on Glass album. It came out on a mini cd of remixes that also had a cool Meaty Ogre remix where Meaty sang on it. I always thought that was brave and cool.
here is Meaty’s remix:
Discogs says it came out in 2004. Right Handed Straw came out in 2017. The mini cd was pretty limited and I always liked the remix, so I made it part of RHS. It has a different title here and it is slightly different in the intro. The phone ring is from one of my micro cassettes from college. That’s me saying hello. The “keep your lights on” is from an old TV show. I manipulated the intro to make it sound like you were hearing it muffled from outside of a door. I think I just felt like I needed to make it sound different than the original that appeared on the mini cd.
In the first part of it, that’s me playing some notes from a Fender Rhodes. I didn’t know what I was doing. My friend Matt Chang (aka Matth) had a Fender Rhodes and I went over to his house and sampled each key individually. So, that’s me playing a real Rhodes, but a canned version of it on an MPC. The drums and bass are from the original Sixtoo song.
The second half plays off of a loop of the bassline. I had fun programming those drums. The chime sound is a recording of an actual music box. I bought some random ballerina wind-up music box on eBay and sampled the notes. When the gear was almost out of momentum, the notes would play long and isolated, so I was able to sample them.
It can be hard to remix things that are in a specific key. When it’s a rap song, you can change the whole beat most of the time, but since I was remixing an instrumental song, I couldn’t exactly replace everything. At that point in time, I was working mostly off of vinyl samples, but I used the Rhodes and music box because I had a little bit more control of them, even though I had no idea what I was doing.
A Change of Spirit
I always liked this one. I used to be so good at recalling samples, but I’d probably have to spend a few hours looking through stuff to remember what that guitar is. I’m sure it’s here somewhere.
The dialog sample comes from a movie that I recorded on my micro cassette. After I graduated from college, I was in Europe for 2 weeks and had two days completely alone in Paris. I have never felt so alone in my entire life. I planned on going to every record shop I could find. I ended up getting spit at while walking by the train station. When I got to the first record store, they were open, but wondered why I wanted to come in. They asked what records I wanted, as if I would just say a title and stay outside. I made it to another one that was run by a Japanese guy who was extremely cool. In my hotel room, there was only one channel that had anything in English and it was on a 4 hour loop. I sadly realized this when it repeated. This was 2001, so I had no phone, no connection to anyone. I went to get food and ended up at a place that had pizza. I figured this would be simple and easy. The person working there was not French, but I forget where he was from. He asked me how I liked Paris and I did the polite chit-chat and said I liked it, leaving out all the weird shit that had happened. He told me he hated it and that there were too many dogs. I thought he meant actual dogs, because there are lots of dogs everywhere, but he started saying all kinds of racist shit and I died inside. I took my pizza and hurried back to my room. I felt like I was completely alone on the other side of the planet. Not the experience I expected. I’m sure there’s plenty to love about Paris, but those few days were dismal.
The “change of spirit” dialog is from a movie that played on the tv in the hotel room. For years, I was so confused about this movie, unsure if it was a documentary or fictional. Back then, it wasn’t as easy to figure things out.
Chimes
I remember making this during the days when I frequented the SoulStrut message boards. Listening now, this isn’t a beat that anyone would pick to rap on, but I originally made it when I was trying to do something with Phill Most Chill. Phill was a regular on the boards and I was a fan. It had really been a long time since I’d made a beat from someone to rap on. I am not even sure what I was thinking, because there’s nothing about this that would have worked. I was really in a different space back then and I think I thought about things a lot different when I worked on the MPC.
The drums are two breaks overlapped. I can’t remember what the chimes/bells are, but I know I sampled them and replayed them.
U.F.O.
If you ever find a record and it has orange spray paint along the spine or bottom edge, it was most likely a discard from a record store, at least if you’re from the Bay Area and near an Amoeba. When Amoeba had too much stuff or they did a huge buy and needed to get rid of stuff that wasn’t even cut out for the dollar bins, they’d spray paint the whole crate to mark them so that people wouldn’t try to sell them back. They’d just leave the boxes in front of the store. I worked there, so I had access to lots of records, but of course you’re still going to look through those discards.
This song is based off of something I found in one of those discards. It has a pretty big scuff across a whole side of the record.
The sounds at the beginning are something I recorded on my mini tape recorder. I thought the music had a strange U.F.O. type of wobble to it, so that’s where the name comes from.
Watchdog
I loved these drums so much and definitely sat on them for a while, really wanting to make the most of them. My roommate has/had so many amazing records and I generally only used stuff from my own collection, but I loved these drums and he wasn’t making beats so I sampled it. This was around the time that I was totally overthinking things. I stopped myself from making a lot of music because I put these really high expectations on myself and I can’t say I ever got close to any of those ideas I had. I like this song a lot and those drums are great, especially how blown out they are in the second section.
Nowadays, I’d probably be able to approach it in a more fluid way, but this was all in the box on an MPC. the ending “ohhhhhhh” comes from a somewhat unlikely source.
I’ll hopefully return with pt.3 soon, maybe close out the whole record in that one.
I’d love to cover the albums I’ve done since 2020 and I’ve been trying to do everything in order, so after RHS will be Couch. Couch just had it’s 5th anniversary and I did a listening party on Bandcamp. It was fun to revisit that album.
If you haven’t heard the new PremRock album “Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…?” I produced two songs on there. It’s a great album. I produced “Angel’s Share” and “Receipts.” You can get black vinyl or an exclusive Maui Blue vinyl on the Backwoodz Studioz website:
https://backwoodzstudioz.com/collections/premrock-did-you-enjoy-your-time-here
You can get the black vinyl on Bandcamp. It’s also available through Rhymesayers distribution, so you can most likely get it many places online and you can also ask your local record store to stock it. I think it’s a really solid listen and worth your time. “Receipts” is one my favorite songs I have ever been involved in and it features billy woods, who is one of the best doing it these days.