LA Magazine - Exclusive Audio Edition Release

so what type of music do you generally listen to?

I listen to a bit of everything, wasn't always like that tho. I listened to hip hop/r&b exclusively until I was about 13-14. Now I enjoy such a wide range of music but I feel like if I had to take five albums on a deserted island - itd be three hip hop albums and two r&b albums.

how long have you been rapping for?

just in general, since about fifth grade. myself and a friend of mine used to "freestyle" into this playskool "PA System" thing like from Toy Story. It would drive folks nuts but we didnt care. I started "recording" on a karaoke machine in like sixth or seventh grade. it's been on since then

what go you into rapping?

friends mostly, some of my boys thought I was raw, so I just kinda did it really. I never set out to be a "rapper" but a good friend of mine who was super talented thought I should take things a little more seriously. now a days its just for relaxation like watching tv or reading a book.

do you remember your first rhymes?

can't say that I do, but I can assure you it was about murder. I listened to alot of Spice 1 and Celly Cell at the time so im like 97.634% certain I was doing the same sort of content.

who would you say are your biggest influences?

in music? Christopher Wallace and Shawn Carter. in life? my kids.

well, we know you do both text and audio, lets talk about your audio a bit

when did you get your first mic? and please tell me you still got your first track?!

my first mic was probably off that karaoke machine. some crackhead broke into storage units where I lived and wanted 40 bucks for it. so it was just some random ass dynamic mic likely built in china. my first condensor was a russian one, nothing fancy but it was night and day compared to my dynamic. and sadly, over the years ive lost most of my music that wasnt "officially" released. I have stuff I did when I was 14/15 tho. folks have come through with shit I thought id never hear again. a friend of mine sent me a zip of about 600 songs from 2004-2005 and Renegades setup a dropbox and uploaded all the shit they had on random harddrives and ipods lol.. but im very weird with most of my music - I dislike pretty much all of it so ill just scrap shit. ive been in that mood lately ive been thinking to just junk everything ive done from 09 til present.

so do you do everything on your track solo (the mixing and master)?

no, I never master.. most guys that do just run some random plug in and absolutely destroy all of the dynamics and frequencies. besides, if youre serious about a project - you can get a decent master job done for around 500-1000 bucks. but I miss the days of being spoiled with an engineer lol.

howd you get into the mixing and mastering aspect of everything, i mean, you werent just blessed with the knowledge from birth.... were you?

just fucking with shit mostly. its how I learned how to do everything in life. I got more into it seriously when id go to a studio and the guy would mix me "clean".. I preferred a "muddy" mix. so it was hard to translate when you dont know how to communicate what youre looking for. so id sit down with em and tell em what I liked/didnt and then id learn why he did what he did and use the practice on my own. I used to do three or four mixes a song. I dont have the time anymore, hell I rarely do more than one take anymore but when I was learning I wanted as much practice as possible. I even used to mix other people because I learned you cant apply YOUR mix to someone else. so it taught me different techniques as well.

who are your personal top 5 artists on LA (text or audio, doesnt matter)?

all time text? Orion, Jehu, Cuba, BSD and Stalin.

all time audio? Phatal, Chin, Omerta, Briggzy and iLLa.

recently in audio? Doom, Ch3kk, Haze, Elite and ShadowMK/LP (tie)

recently in text? Self, Sammy, LAW, Exo and Endeeze/Nigma (tie)

What are you top 5 tracks you've ever heard?

all time? shit man, thats a wild ass question. im not sure if this is LA or in life?

on LA I couldn't really tell you, theres been some really dope shit. Life? I am not sure I have time to do the mathematical breakdown to get to a numeric equation lol. Maybe cats can post up their fav illest LA songs and we'll create some sort of list. I think thatd actually be more interesting than me attempting to come up with a small sample of all the raw shit.

Who would you like to see yourself doing an audio collab with next?

Self and Sammy for sure. I'd like to do some shit just me and Doom. I'd also like to get something down with just Ch3kk. Elite and I were supposed to do a track over a Chain beat but he never finished his part lol. I'd like to maybe get just one more down with Haze..I think our other two came out real cool. Naturally Cubes owes me another collab now that he outchurr bodying shit. I have something in the works with Nigma and I owe Endeeze like seven collabs. I've been lucky enough to collab with the best my friend - yourself included. Any of those will do for an ideal "next" tho.

well thanks for that neek, we appreciate you taking the time to tell us a little bit about yourself!

School of Rhyme – Audio

Ok, lets just go over a couple brief quick tips I can throw out here.

First things first, no amount of mixing can make a bad recording sound better. But an amazing recording can sound good even with a bad mix (unless they just fucked it all up). Always try to get the best possible recording to start with; doing so will make mixing faster and easier, no doubt.

When recording you want to find that sweet spot when it comes to volume. You don’t want it to be recorded too low or too hot. You want to leave some head room on the vocal for mixing purposes.

We all love bopping our heads when we listen to rap or just when we rap… don’t do this while recording, you want to try to remain the same distance from the mic through tout your verse (for the most part).

If you find yourself getting too many “POPS” in your audio and you have a pop filter, don’t rap straight into the mic, try spitting to the side of it, this is something I have come to do.

Play with mic positioning. Some songs will be better to spit very close to the mic, sometimes you may want to take a step back to get a better recording. Depends on your delivery/volume/tone/ and mood you are going for.

When it comes to what sounds good on the mic, you will notice certain rhymes just grab the listeners attention more. In my experience it is the sounds/stress of vowels: a, e, I, o, u for any dumb motherfucker who doesn’t know. If those are the stressed letters in the word, they will typically sound nicer audibly

Break up your recordings, think of everything as different ingredients to make a dish

If you are recording in segments, lets say 4 lines at a time, spit and record one extra line at that start and one at the very end. That sounds confusing, let me set some examples.

Lets say you are recording 16 lines… that is 4 quatrains (a quatrain is a set for 4 lines)

Start be recording lines 1-5

Then record lines 4-9

Then we go 8-13

And lastly 12-16

There are a couple reasons I do this:

1. If you start rapping in the same spot you are punching in, it will be WAY more noticeable that it is not one smooth take.

2. When it comes to peiceing it all together you will be happy as fuuuuckkkkk. Use that extra line at the end and the start of each segment to line up your tracks perfectly. Once they are lined up trim up your segments to where they should be and just do a small quick fade in and out of them

Your final product should be recorded in these sets of lines: 1-4. 5-8, 9-12, 13-16 and will have smooth transitions in the recordings.

And that's it Folks! hope ya enjoyed! if not, suck it!