WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Tribal had its moments, a few from that bracket have been dropped in here and there, Monie Love’s Never Give Up, the Junior Dub is still apex House groove (and craft), such a subtle monster

There’s a 10minute + Tribal track included here last few pages that my old brain can’t recall and pushed for time on lunch break

Will report back, in the meantime there’s a short Frankie Knuckles mix from Universe (groan) with the first 2 tracks by Oakenfolden (double groan) but he nails a few timeless selections from what @Leo and @pattycakes_ are riffing on in the last few posts. Check the gear change when you know gets on the decks

 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
@Leo found it, more wild-pitch Pierre 2am behemoth


An ex was a Zanzibar head from NJ on a student exchange thingy had masses of tapes that I wish had survived. Lost to time and bong spills. It’s tricky weaving your way through the provenance of east coast names and labels due to the sheer volume of music, producers, jocks and labels in the blend, especially if your memory is shot and you’re using YT to re-find releases. The visual cue is different to an actual sleeve, different memory systems working

Think Tenaglia and Vasquez got/get overlooked due to their commercial success, but they had it behind the decks. Heard Tenaglia play a pile of guff over here 92-ish, left feeling what was the fuss all about, then a 2nd night a year or so later he clearly went further into his collection because it was like night&day in terms of difference. Divine madness

A lot of US producers/spinners tended to play sets here made up of majority % of their own productions, which could get a tad samey. Exceptions were Larry Heard (in one of the epitomes of a drug den) and Jovonn. And the surviving mix archives are pretty poor here too, as in was no-one thinking of slipping a line into the soundboard or was there an unspoken agreement that no recordings were made? Commercial, big name events were all over it, then you’d find Hot-97 tapes in various record stores, so it balanced out overall
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
With the eternal proviso 'beauty in the eye of the beholder', there's a lot of tunes like this I'm finding going through this playlist which are sort of nice but basically incredibly boring and generic and have no reason for existing at all as far as I can tell

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Perhaps with this style in particular there's a need to appreciate subtleties that distinguish the merely generic from the yes, generic but superior.

A track like this:


The chord sequence is one you'd probably find on a million other deep house tracks. So what sets it apart?

The use of filtered, pitch-bended vocals on top is what sticks out to me. But there's got to be something else, too, something more subtle - the way it's structured, the way it's engineered, the subtlety of the way it progresses.

So that the longer you listen to it the more you like it.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Perhaps with this style in particular there's a need to appreciate subtleties that distinguish the merely generic from the yes, generic but superior.

A track like this:


The chord sequence is one you'd probably find on a million other deep house tracks. So what sets it apart?

The use of filtered, pitch-bended vocals on top is what sticks out to me. But there's got to be something else, too, something more subtle - the way it's structured, the way it's engineered, the subtlety of the way it progresses.

So that the longer you listen to it the more you like it.

The lightly crunched out and overdriven drums with just the right amount of swing. Those lower chords enveloping you with a loving but subtly spooky edge. Those occasionally layered with the higher freq ever so slightly jarring chords evoking much more tension and then that subterranean bassline loping and snaking in between it all. The tuff love thing I mentioned a few posts back. A love track, but framed in dank basement darkness. Opposing forces creating the tension that takes you into the zone.

The NY2UK track is much cleaner. It's only strength being that long chord pushing, diving underwater for a second and then the shorter offbeat swung chord snapping you back out for some tension and resolution interplay. Nothing remarkable at all, but in a set you could get away with it for 3 mins or so.

Can't really compare to anything Kelley ever touched.

But yeah, just to beat the horse a little more. A prolific house guy I was talking to on a production forum was telling me that back in the 90s, the key was to make the drums bang. The toughness needs to be there for the energy one way or another. Once you get that sorted, you can get away with more or less anything. There's a time and a place for clean and reserved too, but what really gets people going is the overdriven inputs of older gear flashing their little red LED and breaking up the signal a little bit. Saturation. Harmonic distortion. Lots of work to get the same feeling in a DAW. And it'll still never match the simplicity of an akai sampler through a mackie desk with physical electrons smashing together as they exit through the stereo master out.
 

woops

is not like other people
Lots of work to get the same feeling in a DAW. And it'll still never match the simplicity of an akai sampler through a mackie desk with physical electrons smashing together as they exit through the stereo master out.
Well maybe, you could always run your laptop through an analog mixer though, but the experts will still detect the difference, no doubt
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Well maybe, you could always run your laptop through an analog mixer though, but the experts will still detect the difference, no doubt

That's the way to do it. I love software, but to really put some life in there the quickest way is running some stems out of the interface, through a piece or two of hw and back in. Cheap old samplers, mixers you can get for 100 quid. Works wonders
 
Top