Category Archives: CK The Inner Mind's Eye

Michael Dean recently released a podcast on Freedom Train called “Funkschool” which talks about when he first saw the Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis Video Soul clip we showed here a few days ago, back when it originally ran on BET. He then tells how that TV appearance inspired him at that time to pursue recording his own stuff in a studio. So this got me to thinking about my beginnings as a musician, producer and eventually a sound engineer.

In high school I’d experimented with multiple cassette stereos to make layered pause button loops into full on instrumentals. But my first real piece of equipment was given to me by my cousin and it was a Tascam Porta 01. Once I got this, I went nuts! I was going to Morehouse at the time, which was 1997 and anyone who was there can tell you that the AUC was wild with hip-hop talent. So once I got back to campus, I started taking my four track to the computer lab, downloading a demo of Cool Edit on the PC in the corner and making beats until the lab monitor kicked me out. What’s funny in retrospect is The Profit (of Burntface) had to school me because I was laying my beats from Cool Edit onto one track on the Tascam! He told me to at least lay it to two tracks to get a stereo rendering if I didn’t have enough space to track the whole beat down. Lol, yeah, I definitely learned by trial and error.

Next came the larger Tascam PortaStudio four track, the blue joint. What was dope about this one was it had eq’s with hi, hi mid, lo mid and low controls. This introduced me to applying effects via a mixer to my production. It went from there to using the eight track Portastudio along with a Gemini push button sampler. Jax of Binkis talks about this sampler on the Mass Comm podcast, and true enough it had 24 seconds of sampling time. Two buttons gave 2 seconds each, two buttons gave 4 seconds each and one button gave you 12 WHOLE seconds (lol). Hey, these were the tools of the time and we wore them out.

At the top of 2002, I took a year to just listen to music. And once I absorbed loads and loads of music from lots of different types of artists, I decided that it was time to build my own set up and start recording again. So I saved money from my record store job and bought a custom made desktop PC. I then started researching with Google, which my girlfriend had introduced to me. This is around 2001-2002. I started taking the train and the bus all the way across Atlanta to buy pieces that I needed. I already had a dynamic mic I had bought months before, so I bought a Behringer mic preamp, a mic stand and a Delta 1010LT soundcard. Once I had all of these, we were off and running, meaning me and mc Quote Naj. We started tracking vocals using the closet as the vocal booth and out of that came the Bully Music ep, which we made for the Illfest festival of 2003. All those involved with this festival know that if anything it was controversial, for good and bad reasons.

So then I moved to CA and worked towards my degree in Sound Arts, which I acquired last August. What sticks with me about the time in Atlanta recording in my room is how I put all of the necessary pieces together purely on my own. It took ambition and independent research and I came out with good sounding stuff. It wasn’t the best sounding music on earth but it banged in the whip and played well in the headphones and that’s all that I wanted. It was my first studio setup and I had a lot of fun experimenting with it.

So here are a couple of songs from that Bully Music 2002 period. Turn it up!

Kool Keith “Drugs” Remix
“Don’t Try This @ Home Instrumental”
“I’m The Party Man”
“Bus Stop Bliss”*

*If you remember Alphabeats.com, this was the intro song for mad years. Shout out to Chris Craft and the Shaman Work team, thanks for showing me love. Peace.