Vinyl dying (for DJ's)

Grime is one of the few areas of music where there are very few examples of that kinda thing. Usually when it says a certain guy has made it, it is all them by themselves.

dont some people believe wiley made dizzees early beats? i dont believe it myself. theyre too diff in style. i do believe however what dizzee said that cage gave him all the samples/sounds and he just put them together.

I would have thought that at least a quarter of tracks released on 12's have been done by engineers (though this is just a figure I've pulled from thin air)- aint no shame in it. You don't legally have to list an engineers' name in the credits, and to be fair most of the ideas behind the track have been thought up by the producer.

MJ Cole (who started out as studio gimp with Botchit & Scarper) was initially Ramsey & Fen's engineer, but it got to the stage where his contribution was vital enough to warrant his name on the sticker, which is what happened with Lovebug.
He engineered Weakness, it's hard to imagine Greg Stainer having much input given how MJ Cole sounding it is

The Stanton Warriors were probably Garage's most prolific engineers. It's weird to think how much their style changed when they moved out of the London Garage ghetto into the Breaks side of things

All of Tuff Jam's stuff was engineered by Gavin 'Face' Mills & Brian 'Keys' Tharme. Matt Lamont has stated that this had no small impact on their (Tuff Jam's) success.

rubberdingyrapids said:

dont some people believe wiley made dizzees early beats? i dont believe it myself. theyre too diff in style. i do believe however what dizzee said that cage gave him all the samples/sounds and he just put them together.

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I reckon Dizzee's tunes are very Alias sounding, especially 'Go'. It's always weird when someone makes one or two brilliant tunes then ceases producing entirely.

Was Danny C an engineer in Grime or did he just have the best value rates for studio time? His name pops up a lot, as does Jammer's basement. Of course people question Jammer actually being a producer, it's possible his studio is mainly for recording vocals which I suspect isn't as skilled as engineering.

In the early days of Reinforced records 4hero gave anyone who was signed to the label a DAT of weird sounds that they had created, in order to forge a consistent 'reinforced' sound for all the producers. Remember this was the days of allegedly inventing time stretching for Terminator and 4hero's 'journey to the light'.

i'd heard that Lewi White made all Jammer's tunes but he got pissed off with it and left, and that's when Jammer moved into MCing.

Sectionfive said:

Rob Playford from Moving Shadow did all Goldie's stuff
MJ Cole was similar figure in Garage for years before stepping out himself

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I'd say 4 hero in the early days then Playford, one of the current Metalheadz producers engineers for him these days, can't remember his name though

woah, bunch of crazy inside baseball about being dropped here, I like it

one other important jungle engineer I know was pete parsons at dee jay/lucky spin, all dj crystl's big tunes among other things

wise said:

i'd heard that Lewi White made all Jammer's tunes

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other people will know better than me but I have a hard time believing that. for one I remember hearing Marcus Nasty - who surely has no reason to heap false praise on him - talk about what a great producer Jammer was. it would explain his otherwise unfathomable move into MCing tho I guess.

You have to wonder how Goldie had the skill to develop time stretching through stubbornness & trial & error (though it was in that big Salt & Peppa track so he couldn't claim to invent it) and yet still required Rob Playford to press all the buttons. Perhaps playford was more of an executive producer than engineer. I think 4hero liked time stretching so much they dabbled in it themselves, but rather than ask Goldie how he did it they put the work in and found a different way to programme it.

I believe Davinchi also used to work with Jammer so wouldn't be surprised if he had input into certain tracks

Webstarr said:

I believe Davinchi also used to work with Jammer so wouldn't be surprised if he had input into certain tracks

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yeah Davinche and Jammer did work together. hence the "K Dot" riddim and Davinche doing a remix of Jammer's "Destruction" instrumental.

Sectionfive said:

Rob Playford from Moving Shadow did all Goldie's stuff
MJ Cole was similar figure in Garage for years before stepping out himself

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MJ Cole engineered most of Ramsey & Fen's early stuff as well as most of the releases on the V.I.P label (DB Selective, Alias, Pisces, Greg Stainer, Jason H, Ramsey & Fen) and had the Matlok alias on the Pure Bliss label.

yeah man some deep insider knowledge being dropped here

Yea its easy to suspect anyone thats randomly stops producing or has a drastic change in sound.

Sometimes people just start again though. Look at how Rapid and Dirty Dangers stuff sounds now compared to their old stuff.

With the Garage and Jungle labels its easier because all the credits are on the records... Spookys got a lot of em

Think it's MJ Cole who EL-B alludes to in that computer music video. He doesn't name names buts says after all those years you realise who was doing all the work or something. All the Bug/vip are essentially MJ cole records you would wonder what input others had.

Jeremy Sylvester's pawprints are in the background of too many to mention likewise the bugz. Probably a lot of guys who had invested before the arse fell out of garage and the remixes dried up.

I've never tried producing myself but I imagine it's close to impossible to learn how to do it off your own bat (before the days of Ableton Live tutorials at least), unless you go down the really minimalist pulse X or Acid House route where if you're naturally gifted and stumble upon the best sounds on the 303 you can just wing it. Everyone else has either learned from their mates or attended music related university degrees or expensive tuition courses which probably only really exist in the big cities. Face facts- anything remotely complex to do with computers is inherently not user friendly. If I was to look at even a beginners section of a production forum it would no doubt include tons of phrases that I'm just expected to know what they mean but of course don't because they're not part of the English language- why should it be expected for me to know what a VST is? It's this type of stuff that makes me instinctively (but perhaps irrationally) wary of these DJ controllers, as if it's based on PC software it's bound to include tons of drop down menus that will never be used and just kill your ability to learn the machine through & through. I know the 1200's have dodgy pitch control when close to zero and I know they could really do with a nudge button- but there's a lot to be said for a physical piece of Hi-Fi with a limited amount of real buttons as opposed to needless techno jargon on a Traktor which only advanced computer programmers will understand.

But I'm getting off topic here. We've agreed it's a bit suspicious when a great producer only churns out three tunes in their lifetime (dizzee et al). But what about technically gifted engineers who work on 1000's of other people's songs but put out virtually nothing by themselves. Is this a common trait, engineering being the next best career choice for people who aren't talented enough to be real producers?

I seem to remember DJ Tubby owning a dub cutting company in the early 2000's. This seemed a bit weird given that you don't expect an early/mid twenty something to own a real business with expensive stock, specially when they're known for their love of beer & draw.

i can believe tubby owned a dub cutters. he is called tubby after all.

how much did dizzee produce on BIDC? cos i seem to remember he did most of it. and then theres tracks on early b-sides etc. so i dont think he stopped producing after those early white labels. there was also that channel4 docu on dizzee that had loads of tracks in the background that must have been made at the same time as go, ho, wheel, etc. i think he just knew or decided early on that he was going to be careful about what he put out. or he just got signed early-ish so there was no need (i cant remember the timeline exactly).

back to ghostproducing though.

wise said:

I'd say 4 hero in the early days then Playford, one of the current Metalheadz producers engineers for him these days, can't remember his name though

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Heist?

There are more tho - Optical, Technical Itch...regardless of who engineered his tracks, they always sound like Goldie anyway

owengriffiths said:

You have to wonder how Goldie had the skill to develop time stretching through stubbornness & trial & error (though it was in that big Salt & Peppa track so he couldn't claim to invent it) and yet still required Rob Playford to press all the buttons. Perhaps playford was more of an executive producer than engineer. I think 4hero liked time stretching so much they dabbled in it themselves, but rather than ask Goldie how he did it they put the work in and found a different way to programme it.

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explained here

whatever studio he was in happened to have the harmoniser machine (designed for guitars), its just no one had thought of running breakbeats through it before. All it took was the idea, then he looks to the engineer - "Let's wire it up!". Would it have occurred to the studio engineer/the guy who actually owned the machine? Probably not.

I gather many many hardcore records that relied on sampling were produced by people who didn't own their own sampler at home, let alone a synth or a computer. They would bring in records to sample and some ideas, then they'd bash it out with the engineer.

examples

http://blogtotheoldskool.com/?p=627

Seduction used to come into Monroe and make beats from 1990 I think, he’d come in with a bunch of records and a lot of ideas on how it would all fit together, and I’d sample everything and map it all out on the keyboard for him, and he’d jam with the samples till we got a groove going. It was always a bit of a joint thing as I’d know what he was trying to achieve, and would offer up suggestions and stuff, but the main vibe and melodies would always come from him.

Then there's Tricky's Maxinquaye
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun07/articles/classictracks_0607.htm

, 'OK, let's sample this record,' and I said, 'Yeah, sure, go ahead.' He said, 'No, no, I don't do any of that stuff.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't know how to do it.'

That Tricky article is amazing, remember reading it a while back. If I remember rightly though, Tricky gave that guy Mark Saunders next to no credits on the album? Very shitty.

(Unrelated point - Tricky's sourcing of those amazing drum loops (having an ex-girlfriend whose mother sent over tapes from India) echoes Pinch's inspiration for Qawwali. Pretty much loops taken wholesale, I think)

Going back a few pages, that EZ Boiler Room set is astonishing. Looking fwd to seeing him and Slimzee next month in Dalston (well, you can't have everything)