Listening to the two tunes produced two days ago (6/8 Brass Hit and 6/8 Psychedelic—all working titles) following the Americana excursion, I’m noticing again something I have been meaning to note down (I’ll use the latter track as the case in point here…)
There is a discernible ‘edge’ or impact I am perceiving (to the sample-based aesthetic), when programmed and live drums are audible as parallel, synchronised streams. A bit like the ‘je ne sais quoi’ Bill Stephney describes in Tricia Rose’s book (Black Noise), I don’t want to just attribute it to the ‘magic’ of those old recordings. After all, the old recording in this case is me (not a drummer) hitting the drums in the box room that’s documented in the #HipHopTimeMachine vlog: a cheap drum kit and a modest selection of mics (in this case, a C414 as mono overhead, a D112 on the kick, an SM57 on the snare, a U87 as room mic, and two unmatched, cheap and repaired Behringer condensers providing a stereo overhead alternative—I ended up combining them with the C414 here).
So, what is behind this sonic phenomenon that gives it its aesthetic appeal? Listening to the work-in-progress production on repeat, I am focusing on the programmed beats and live/performed drums attentively; now, muting anything but drums and beats to hear their layering in isolation (without the non-percussive instruments); then muting the live drums looping, to acknowledge the reduced appeal of the beats-plus-instrumental-only combination; followed by muting the drum machine playing in parallel to the performed multitrack production—surprised at how low in volume the live drums are in my mix balance and, yet, how important their contribution is; finally, bringing it all back together in the mix focusing again on the interaction of live and programmed drum layers within the overall context.
It would be simplistic to say that it is because they’re live. What does that mean? Some of the single hits I’m using for my programmed drums also come from live recordings (e.g. from funk breaks or isolated—chopped—sounds from previous live recordings). It’s not because of any human looseness in the performance; even if I haven’t finished editing them yet for perfect sync with the beats, I’m focusing on loops that appear ‘seamless’ and rhythmically tight, to the point that they really sound like layers to the programmed beat (in fact, the beat was programmed on top of and inspired by the live drum—and contributing instruments’—groove; this is mirroring the historical boom-bap practice of starting with a funk break, chopping it up and supporting it with programmed/isolated drum hits, be they individual hits from funk breaks or drum machines, live or synthesised).
So, layering aside and by process of elimination, the only characteristic that is unique with regards to what the live drums contribute here is a discernible timbral and spatial (sense of) ‘glue’. The individual drum hits that make up my programmed beat come from many phonographic scenarios: samples from vinyl, samples from libraries, drum samples I have been collecting during the past 22 years… Despite enforced commonalities infused via shared reverberation, compression and equalisation (even emulation of signal flow colourations) they do feel like ‘gated’ instances. But the live drums playing underneath, on the other hand, share the captured ambience contributed by the room mics, the ‘bleed’ captured by adjacent mics and the purposeful colourations committed during recording (preamps and emulations used). The room they were recorded in is imprinted upon the recording. And so are the sonic resonances of the drum kit, repeated upon every mic that was on during the performance. The looped part therefore provides a sonic and textural continuum, or common denominator, which I believe even the untrained listener can perceive, if not pinpoint. This is another case of the manifestation of the three-dimensional phonographic object. When synchronised under a beat made out of isolated (gated, in essence) hits it provides an extension of the beat, temporally locked, but spatially (and timbrally) claiming a unique space on the depth axis. Even if chopped to a degree (and especially prominent if the chops mute each other as a result of the one-shot/monophonic MPC programming mode), the continuum they provide is retained. The three dimensional layering may sound like a new observation, or a fresh analysis of an old-school phenomenon, but it is part and parcel of the sample-based hip-hop (boom-bap) aesthetic. The 3D phonographic object used to be the funk break, and the beat on top of it developed from minimal sub (boom) and snare (bap) support—mirroring the evolution from disco to house and techno—to a full parallel beat entity. But Hip Hop without that underlying layer sounds more synthetic (some would say—me included—less authentic). I remember Young Guru testifying to this with regard to his own beat-making during his Unmasterclass (London, 2016): he always starts with the break, that makes it Hip Hop.
Listening to the last few days’ experiments (and having had to construct the drum breaks myself), I can now pinpoint what their contribution is, from the perspective of their staging implication to sample-based hip-hop musicking.