“Meta-Four-on-the-Floor” by Sisko: #01 — Curb Your Perfectionism
Welcome to Meta-Four-on-the-Floor, a monthly source of musical insight from NYC-based Producer, Remixer, Writer & Engineer David Sisko of Disco Pusher. Visit him at sisko.com / discopusher.com.
The track "Billion Quid" from Ninjasonik's new mixtape "No Swords or Masks" came from a creatively imperfect place.
Metaphor:
A literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea.
Meta-Four-On-The Floor:
A literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea referencing the creation and production of music.
Track 01: “BILLION QUID” by NINJASONIK featuring Mr. Star City
Listen to an excerpt: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/no-swords-or-masks/id504626789
Things never seem to go as planned. Especially when it comes to making music.
We can all attempt to sketch out our pompous aural visions, set-up DAW sessions with every plug-in mapped to external controllers and expect the artist to arrive on time (and subsequently, love the tracks we prepared for them).
But making an excellent (or even a listenable) piece of music? It’s just not as simple as that.
This was certainly the case with the track “Billion Quid” I co-wrote & Produced for the Brooklyn-based MCs/Ruffians Ninjasonik on their outstanding “No Swords or Masks” mixtape (which is being re-released by Decon on March 6th, 2012).
Telli & Jah Jah (both from Ninjasonik) and I had all talked about “hybridizing” styles of music = In this case we wanted to mix electro, hip-hop & punk.
We went through a large selection of well-produced-slick beats on my hard drive: None were resonating with them.
I was getting a bit nervous so I brought up an “undercooked” beat (something that I thought was about 50% of the way done), nowhere near my definition of “perfect.” They happened to like it so we started from there.
The beat itself was made of stock drum sounds and synth loops generated by randomizing parameters in Native Instruments Massive. I had literally made it a few days before while doing some experiments in Massive.
Totally random -- the unpredictable elements of Massive made the track take off.
When making the beat, I purposely allowed the chaotic randomized sound to take over (both in pitch and time) – then I chopped up the best bits and placed them in the sequence. In fact, most of the pulsing, arpeggiator-like synths in the song were made this way.
I wrote all of the “melodic” keyboard parts keying off of all the initial randomized sounds (i.e. the electric pianos and the square wave lead in the verses).
Telli thought the beat had a British feel to it so they keyed off lyrically on “I feel like a million bucks” and translated it to “I feel like a billion quid” (hey, inflation).
We took a few sessions to record vocals, re-arranged verses/choruses several times and Mr. Star City added the finishing touch with the sung chorus.
I eventually replaced the drums, added some additional elements and never removed the “chaotic” parts from the initial beat.
The track came out extremely well considering the lack of ingredients and perfectionism (or at least what I perceived) that we started with.
The lessons learned?
• Curb your ideas of “perfectionism”
• Many special moments in music are the result of chaos & random events.
• Don’t get too uptight with trying to predict what someone will like or dislike.
So many elements of making music are absolutely out of your control. Closely observe the reaction of the artists you are working with. Keep your ego in check.
— Sisko!
Ninjasonik’s “No Swords Or Masks” was released on Decon Records March 6th, 2012.
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