the first DJ to 'screw' / speed up records in public?

[Immryr]

im pretty sure he means dramatically altering the pitch of records in the ilk of dj screw rather than just mixing by making small adjustments to the pitch.

 

[Guybrush]

I am reading the relevant parts in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life now. On Terry Noel they write, ‘Noel mixed records, too. On a primitive set-up – he just had a volume dial for each deck – he would take elements from a track and tease and taunt the crowd with them [...] then he would slam the whole song through the mincer.’ The following text does not explain in detail why the book’s authors consider him the first DJ to mix records, but from what I gather the DJs before him had silent gaps between the songs they played. They do quote him saying he mixed ‘without losing the beat’, though, but that is a highly ambiguous statement (any two songs can be mixed ‘on the beat’, that does not mean that the DJ is ‘beat-matching’—ha ha, sounding all grumpy here, he is a lovely chap I am sure ).

In a subsequent passage on Francis Grosso, they write, ‘Frank claims he was able to beat-mix – that is to overlap the ending of one record with the beginning of a second so that their drum beats are synchronised – almost as soon as he started. [...] Whether he really did have this ability straight away, Francis was certainly the DJ who made beat-mixing a required skill. He was not the very first to mix [here, I assume, they are thinking of Noel] but he certainly took it to a whole new level, and could hold a blend – two songs playing simultaneously with the beats synchronised – for two minutes or more. [...] “Back then, you couldn’t adjust the speeds,” he [Francis] remembers. “You had to catch it at the right moment. There was no room for error. And you couldn’t play catch up. You couldn’t touch the turntables. I had Thorens at the Haven, and you couldn’t do that on Thorens. All you had to do was start at the right moment.” ’

Since Technics’ SL-1200 turntable, with a rotary pitch control, was released in 1972 it seems likely that someone, somewhere, tinkered with modern-style pitch-changing, but it would be nice to get it from a horse’s mouth.

 

[Guybrush]

I want to point out that what I wrote earlier ‘Terry Noel did not “beatmix”, he merely “beat-matched” (playing tunes that are close to each other in tempo)’ is wrong, he did not ‘beat-match’. What differed him from his precursors merely was that he played a continuous stream of music.

 

[mms]

okay - if you can wait until later this evening...

any chance of this
check this btw. another cosmic afro dude
cheers ed
http://www.tropicalcomputersystem.com/music.html

 

[bunnnnnn]

couldn't find the best of the mixes i downloaded, but this one's pretty good:

http://download.yousendit.com/EFAFDAF0109D3716

baldelli mixtape #49 from 1981

 

[Logan Sama]

Explain to me the difference between just playing tunes way too slow and "screwing them"?

 

[stelfox]

come on logan, you've been to houston, right?!

screwed music was created by dj screw back in the early 90s, by accident, then developed over this period into a very specific regional remix style.

yes, it involves playing records slow (often not "way too slow", but just slow enough), but there's quite a bit more to it than that.

it also incorporates overlaid, double-time beats, scratches and repeated phases; sections that sound like two identical records being played simultaneously, but a beat or two out of sync.

this technique, known as "chopping" — hence the joint name of "screwed (ie slowed down) and chopped (ie fucked about with)" — gives the music a hypnotic, twitchy, jerky quality.

all put together the overall sound also mirrors the drowsy, itchy, twitchy feeling of a codeine high - the syrup people drink there and that screw was a big fan of.

if you want to hear stuff, go here and you can find a bunch of mp3s used to accompany the texan hip-hop primer i did last month for the wire.

hope this helps.

 

[gumdrops]

chopped and screwed is basically just like when you hear a good DJ cutting up two of the same records, but much much slower. id reccomend the lil jon crunk juice C&S version for a good display of how good it can be.

 

[stelfox]

hmmm, it's a little bit different to that, because there's the echo effect that doesn't come from juggling but from straight overlaying, and a lot of it's done on computers now, rather than manually, too, but that gives a pretty decent idea, either way.

 

[gumdrops]

well you can get that same phasing/flanging effect just by syncing two copies of the same record. but yeah, there are effects you can only get by mixing it via a mixing desk or computer. ive always thought C&S is kinda like the southern hip hop version of dub.

 

[MankyFiver]

have to admit ive found some of those 'screwed' cds sounding like v/vm's stuff where they slowed down barry white etc, of course with completely different aims, and what was that portishead track from the 1st album that had a slowed down record all the way through? is that screwed?

 

[Logan Sama]

You described why screwed AND chopped is something different.

I said how is Screwing something any different to someone just playing a record too slow?

I don't see it as being that innovative in the DJing department. It just turned into a popular regional thing.

And no, I haven't been to Houston.

The only place in the states I've ever been is Disney in Orlando.

 

[spotrusha]

pitching a record down is obviously not groundbreaking, but what dj screw & company did in the 90's was actually open up the turntable and change the pitch range so the -8/+8 range was much lower. he would then make full mixes of slowed (screwed) hiphop while cutting them heavily (chopped). they eventually started recording whole freestyle sessions and doing the same thing (which is what you would hear if you were to buy a dj screw cd now). so you'd have a 90 minute tape where you don't hear one voice that doesn't sound like the cookie monster on drugs. that is a whole scene, it's different from when bambatta or anyone else mentioned here might have put a record on 45 and pitched it with a latin record or whatever they were doing in the 70's. that's just a dj technique, chopped and screwed is an entire scene. so you can't really just ask who "the first dj to screw/speed up records in public" was without getting a bit technical.

 

[stelfox]

well you can get that same phasing/flanging effect just by syncing two copies of the same record. but yeah, there are effects you can only get by mixing it via a mixing desk or computer. ive always thought C&S is kinda like the southern hip hop version of dub.

yeah, pretty much everything that's done on computers and mixing desks (michael watts is they key player for this, og ron c, big baby et al are much more purist in their approach) can be done with records, but it's worth remembering that a lot of this stuff isn't available on vinyl.
serato is an interesting tool here, because you can slow the tunes right down in the first instance and mix slow, rather than mixing at regular speed and then slowing the master down later, which was what screw did in the beginning.
re the dub parallel, did you see my wire primer? this was addressed quite well in the paragraph below. funnily enough, this point actually came from a conversation i was having with my girlfriend about this very subject. she was totally right about how screwed music is quite oppositional to dub in terms of its methodology and that the actual end result is the point where you get some kind of commonality between the genres. anyway, i nicked the idea off her because it wasright on the money.

"Much like the dub to rap’s reggae, Screw had unwittingly created a singular brand of ghetto psychedelia, a reimagining of hiphop that would change the face of urban music. It’s a reminder that sometimes the barest of resources are enough to push musical boundaries: all he needed were two slabs of vinyl and a happy accident. However, unlike dub, which creates space via the subtraction and reduction of elements, Screwed music takes whole records and adds even more to them in the form of cuts, scratches and out-of-sync repeated phrases, otherwise known as ‘chops’. The airy, hypnotic qualities all come from the simple act of pitching the music down, opening out the sound and increasing its sonic surface area by elongating the distance between the beats."

 

[martin]

John Peel

 

[gumdrops]

xpost - no, not read the wire houston rap primer yet (havent seen the last few issues of the wire actually but ill try and find it). i think i remember reading a mention of dub/C&S in some HHC review a couple of years back.