Other Notes

We formed DMT for the purposes of this contest as I (kiddphunk) have been wanting to do a track with Ark47 for a while now. When I peeped the new contest, I immediately checked in with ArK47 to see if he was down. The collaboration process took all forms as we
electronically exchanged samples, sketches, wavs, ableton live files and met twice to work in person.

The goal set at the beginning was to have a complex track where the collective and mashed up vocal bits would tell a cohesive story, while traveling along a journey with many different scenes in a patchwork stylee.

I sent ArK47 an initial idea ("we're thinking about everything") as a looped-and-mashed wav (the first ~30 seconds of the Atari mix) and he replied the next day with what was essentially the next ~50 seconds of
the Atari mix. Then inspired and with a given beat and feeling, he and I started to "crate dig" through the
interviews, culling interesting bits and soundbites. Over the next week we exchanged the ideas, loops and files, and gradually the shape of the underlying samples grew organically and the story assumed its final structure.

For the final mixdown we were split on how to render it. I was preferring a more collage-y, experimental, early-90s bboy sound which could in turn be sampled and/or cut-up, while ArK47 wanted the clean and cohesive head-banging production sound of today.

Thus, we decided to release two mixes with the same skeleton sample DNA and story.
While the 'Fat-n-Juicy Mix' is the flagship remix, an in-your-face thumper of sonic pleasure, the Atari mix gives a better view of the underlying sampling frameworks and would be an easier track to cut-up for further remixing.

Both tracks were created utilizing Ableton Live 5.



Assorted track construction notes:

kp:

About 3 days after we started kicking around ideas, the update to the contest was announced, bringing much additional ammo to the sonic collage. Armed thusly
with even more funk, a new round of digging ensued and at this point I found myself truly thankful that I was just able to be dragging clips around and looping
the voices of many of my major influences when I started producting tracks with my little Roland sampler back in 1990. Digital Underground got me into
Parliament and P-Funk thanks to their credit-giving on the liner notes to Sex Packets and from that point forward I was enthralled with the production sounds of PE, ATCQ, De La, Tone-Loc, etc.

I was hoping to give a little nod to the early A Tribe Called Quest song 'Ham & Eggs' and its funk/rhythm/funk/funk/rhythm riff at the end while playing with where you think the beat is going until it all converges at the end. The idea of creating the melody and rhythms with just sampled voices, and the breakdown with 30 seconds left is a complex
multi-layered collage with 6-7 parts interspersed. Several different samples with the word 'rhythm' in it were chopped up and interwoven at different points, so it becomes a cohesive and collective statement "spoken" by this group of influential musicians.

The first half of the Atari Mix uses the first beat ArK47 shot back at me while the second half utilizes a beat I constructed using a Live's Impulse, a shaker sound, and samples of a homemade instrument recorded by batchku for The Freesound Project.

The beat was patterned off of a favorite Scissor Sisters rhythm. The strange gurgling/upchuck sound that accompanies many of the video-game coin-collection sounds is a slowed-down chunk from a beat within the track.

The swishing/cutting sounds on both tracks are two different QBert scratching loops we found. Much was made of the various interviews, for percussive sounds/loops and one word stabs.


ArK47:

I took the first vocal sample and chopped it up like a puzzle, then i manipulated that in Ableton's Impulse Sampler.
On the Fat-n-Juicy Mix, the synths were transformed in NI's Absynth 3 and reFX's Claw. The beats and grooves were also massaged with the Impulse. The rest of the track involved lots of layering of samples and running them through about 30 different experiments.