(excerpt from site)
“Paulskeee rocks coast to coast with Cros1′s Freestyle Session x Rock The Bells tour in Cali & NYC. Then get your notepad ready as the Legendary BBoy Float drops gems growing up as a BBoy in NYC in the late 70s – 80s.
DJ Matt Kee's Birthday Bash
Featuring:
Urban Assault: Faust & Shortee
Heavy Artillery Recordings | 2x4 turntable set
* As seen on the documentary “SCRATCH”
Triple tag team set by:
Miki Mayhem Miko Franconi - Soundsex
& Matt Kee - KTUH – Birthday Boay
3x4 Turntable Set:
Packo vs Techmarcher Betamorph Recordings / SubMana / BOAY / Pure coalition
Mic Support by:
MC Seph One - KTUH
Solo DJ Sets by:
Toki - Slow & Low
IKON - Special Drumstep Set [illeven:eleven | Future Sound of Breaks | Dirty Fabric | Boogie Monsters | Bassick Soundsystem]
DJ TJ - KTUH
Bass-X - AudioLab
Thursday October 6th 2011 9PM | $15 pre-sale, $20 at the door | 19 & up
The following article was reposted from Kwote Music: http://kwotemusic.com/pitchvariation.html. A great read regarding scratching techniques, and how many DJ’s should really incorporate pitch adjusting in their scratch style:
Scratching is a lot like your emotions. It can be very reserved and almost non expressive, or it can be full of intensity. Imagine if you had an emergency and you had to convey it immediately to the person next to you. It’s safe to assume that if you kind of mumbled the message in a lifeless way, they probably wouldn’t take you seriously. However, that is not the typical way we express ourselves during an emergency situation.
The opposite can also be true. If you were at the dinner table and you were asking the person next to you to pass the salt, you probably wouldn’t act too alarmed about it. However, many times in scratching we tend not to express the right emotions at the right times. Even worse we simply don’t express much at all. Working on pitch variation and the timing of such variations is a great way to pull yourself out of the dark cell you may be currently imprisoning yourself in.
Don’t Throw Away The Key
Speaking of prison, if you were in a jail cell and you had the key you’d most likely open the cell and make a break for it. So why is it that we often place ourselves into boxes we think we can’t get out of? Often times it boils down to focusing too much on the problem and not the solution.
A great way to avoid self imposed limitation is to focus in on pitch variation. Whether you’re a beginner or advanced at scratching, you’ve probably painted yourself into a corner enough times. By taking what you already know and working on expanding the pitch range of it, you can greatly expand your expressive capabilities.
Hey! Look Out!
Various pitches communicate various things. Extremely high pitches communicate tension and intensity. On the other hand, extremely low pitches communicate release or a relaxed state of being. There are times to be intense and there are times not to. Our goal when relying on pitch to express what we want is to use it at the times it is necessary to convey such emotions.
The range of pitch in scratching is immense. For those familiar with turntables that have ultra pitch functions, you realize the pitch can go 50% faster or slower than the original speed of the record. With such a vast amount of octaves to play in the options reach far and wide. The best part is you don’t even need an ultra pitch turntable to access this amazing pitch range. It can all be done manually when executing your techniques.
This is a great attribute for scratching to have because it represents all the different levels of intensity that scratching can have. Some examples of situations that call for certain levels of intensity would have to do with the melodic and rhythmic content of the beat you are scratching over. If the melody of the beat is laid back, you could compliment the beat with some lower, more even tempered pitches. If the beat is fast and the drums are pounding strong, high pitch scratching would be a great way to add to that intensity. Likewise, you may want to subtract from the mood at times when it becomes too intense by scratching in the lower pitch range.
Woah Nelly!
There are times when you may want to cut the variations down and simply stay within a tighter pitch range. Situations like this may include a beat where the overall mood is very static and you want to match that mood throughout the length of the track. Or perhaps the chorus is meant to only express one type of feeling and you want to match that emotion. These examples are by no means all inclusive. The challenge and the fun for you as the artist is to think and discover multitudes of ways to use pitch variation to your advantage.
To The Moon Alice!
As you can see, there’s a myriad of possibilities within the concept of pitch. It is important to realize that for every scratch you can do, there’s a chance to do it in a variety of alternate pitches. It’s truly a multiplier of all your scratch vocabulary. Whether it’s a scratch you’ve been doing for years, or something you just picked up, the concept of pitch expansion can and should be applied.
A good way to get tons out of this concept is to place limitations on yourself. Imagine you’re a painter and you’ve decided to paint a mountainside. However, you only have three colors on your paint palette. You want to paint a brown mountain that has many different cracks, crannies, nooks and shadows. The three colors you’re restricted to using are brown, white and black. While that may seem like an extreme limitation, the reality is anyone with decent painting experience could tell you it’s more than enough.
Floodgates Unleashed
Now that you have a better idea of pitch and its function in the greater world of self expression, it’s an excellent time to start experimenting with it. Even if you just begin using it a little bit, you’ll notice quickly how much of an impact it will have on your ability to express yourself more effectively. You may even have extensive experience in building your pitch vocabulary. Despite that fact, it is likely you are neglecting at least some aspect of your scratching that could benefit from a wider range of pitch choices. Start being heard more. Demand people’s attention!
For more information on how to improve your scratching, go to http://kwotemusic.com and sign up to my newsletter where I feature free lessons monthly.
On my recent visit to San Diego, got a chance to link up with fellow skratch artists to jam in broad daylight. Nothing better than a tables full of tables. Some of the featured DJ’s include Rayted R, Konfusion (Handdroidz), IQ (Handdroidz), and Juyadek amongst others.
I personally like when i slam the cam down (around 01:50), forgetting it was my turn to cut.
We’ve waited for something like this for the last 10 years or so. I remember falling out of my chair when I first heard about this reunion. Mind you, these dudes are two of the biggest reasons of why I do what I do. Realizing that I couldn’t actually make it out to the live show due to homeward obligations, I decided to go cry over spilled milk, wiped my tears over my neighbor’s dog’s fur, then listened to Wave Twisters, Phantazmagorea, and watched the KlamzUv Deth battle. Before proceeding with any further depression, I had an epiphany. We live in the age of technology advances, and I remembered that YouTube is pretty much the best thing invented since sliced bread a.k.a. interwebz.
Enjoy! As I have…
Big ups this dude for the recording…
I am proud to announce that Monday, January 31, 2011, marks the official launch of SkratchMore.com’s Youtube Channel, up and running full force with a tiny handful of skratch segments spanning from the multi-gigabyte hard drive archives of the early 00’s to the present day hand-to-vinyl ‘table massacre, documented through various pairs of hawaiian eyes, that is, the point of view from a few of Hawaii’s finest deejays in the game; from humble beginnings to the ninth inning; from aspiration to inspiration.
To the gradual rise, fall, & stagnation of Hawaii’s scene, we’re just trying to do our part in moving forward and/or backwards in the sense of the term ‘skratch’. This channel is probably long overdue, but by finally getting a hold of a firewire cable after many years, video docs are now a part of the arsenal. My plan is to disappear for a few months and leave these moving multicolored imprints for you to enjoy. Hope it works. Here’s to seeds and sprouts.
What is hip-hop without the DJ? Better yet, what is modern music without it either? The music industry until recently was vastly shaped by the taste-making DJs who were responsible for earning the trust of the average person and impressing upon them the latest tunes to enjoy. This practice had especially involved into a showcase of craftsmanship, polished knowledge of music, and bragging rights within the past three decades. DJing has become such a sensation that even a recent trend has developed with actors and personalities in Hollywood trying their hand at the craft, but that’s another story. The DJ culture has changed the way people interact with and enjoy music, and even recently has allowed pretty much anybody to enjoy partaking in it. It’s partly this reason that there has been recent criticism about the flood of inexperienced people seeking to either profit or take advantage of the technology that has simplified the mixing of music to mere button pushing. The profession has always been under scrutiny from music pundits, and even starting from its heyday, has had to fight to prove its validity.
Raydar: Sampling is seen as some sort of criminal act. A lot of the guys who produce were DJs. You get into this whole argument then where it’s about them not using an instrument. It’s not an instrument in the traditional sense.
The now infamous party that Kool Herc spun at in Sedgwick & Cedar projects in the Bronx back in 1973 that is credited as the start of hip-hop, as well as the mistake Grand Wizzard Theodore made when he ‘scratched’ his record when his mother told him to quiet it down and he stopped the record for a moment, set in motion a new generation of musicians who turned to their old records to create music. Yes, I said musicians.
But wait, here comes the protectors of all things related to ‘real music’ who have to dash the hopes of the kids by telling them that they have just been living a fantasy. They’ll tell the people at the party that what they’re listening to is pure rubbish, and they need a real band to have a good time. While this is only a part of the disdain for the hip-hop culture itself, DJs are especially seen as skill-less hacks who like the modern day producer as well have nothing better to do than to steal from other musicians to earn a quick buck. While this view has become less common with this generation who grew up on legendary DJs such as Jazzy Jeff, Jam Master Jay, Red Alert and Marley Marl, there still persists within especially the classically trained circles a rejection of this development without any realistic consideration to what is shared in common rather than not. And this stubbornness has been very misleading on many levels, some of which will be highlighted in this post.
Raydar: It’s the same thing over again. That’s how history repeats itself. You look into the past to advise what we will do in the future. The same thing with criticism, it’s all coming back again.
Before any type of meaningful discussion can take place on the authenticity of this art form through, a crucial event in the decade that hip-hop was born in has to be taken into account. The massive downsizing of public schooling in the 70s, which included the elimination of music programs, had a much larger impact on urban culture, one which may have very well altered the trajectory of music in the United States itself. The communities of mostly African Americans and Hispanics were mostly on the edge of poverty, or living in it. Due to this, many could not afford to have their children engage in the kinds of activities that have since been proven to be essential to child development. This included the arts and physical education. Public school offered these programs, and many a legendary musicians got their start because of this kind of societal investment. When hard economic times and conservative politics started to cut the budgets for these programs, many children were left without ways to express themselves creatively.
Raydar: But that’s the cool thing about music. There’s always going to something new, or some way people remake what we have to make new sound.
This is the point that the majority of critics entirely miss for the most part. When one considers that the birth and surge in popularity of the modern DJ began at this same time, it becomes clear that this shift was not voluntary. Many of the early DJs who come out of this period have often mentioned that the elimination of the arts in schools severed kids from access to instruments, teachers who knew musical theory, and opportunities that they otherwise had no way of getting involved in. When DJs such as Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash showed that there was a way for then to make music using only a record player, many took to this chance to develop their creative skills through this other means. It seems as if though some of these so called purists forget about this, or maybe didn’t realize the kind of privileges they had, but others didn’t.
Raydar: Just because you can’t write it down, doesn’t mean that it’s not an instrument. The writing is only a translation of what happened.
DJs are not purely isolated to hip-hop and dance music either, and the argument that they have never worked with other ‘musicians’ in a musical setting is false. The now famous hit of the 80s from Herbie Hancock, “Rock It,” featured the scratching of Grandmaster DXT on the track when the art of turntablism was just starting to grow into something bigger. This kind of experimentation also led many DJs into the realm of sampling, which has become the foundation for the modern day producer. By the time Branford Marsalis’ Buckshot Lefonque came out with “Breakfast At Denny’s” a decade later with Gang Starr’s own DJ Premier doing the cuts, the concept of being a DJ had evolved especially within the hip-hop circles to allow for more methods of expression. From looping a part of a song together to create a extended mix, to the transformation of using records to construct new songs or sound collages, the options of what a DJ could do were greatly extended.
Raydar: You have trumpet valves, you have bass strings, you have hi-hats. But all of those things are pieces of metal, pieces of string. They’re tools, just like the synthesizer is a tool. But its only devised in a way that makes it more user friendly. It’s still just a bunch of wires in a metal box. Just like the turntables are a a tool.
Just as turntables started out with a different purpose, musicians over the years have approached various instruments differently from their original intended purpose. They have gotten creative in the way they draw new sounds from their instruments, such as using plungers on trumpets, plucking the strings on a upright bass or swiping on a grand piano wire. Or even the improvisation of using common objects to make sounds such as blowing on a bottle or a shell is right up there. It’s this kind of thinking that really draws a similarity and realization in the way a musician, or any type of artist for that matter, finds new ways to express themselves through any tool and means available to them. In truth, there really should be no reason to differentiate between the development of the DJ or any other kinds of musicians. They may work with what they have differently, but what they are trying to achieve is the same: making music.
Raydar: That’s the thing that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. They say that “oh their using prerecorded sounds.” So what? Then they try to say that you’re not a musician.
One of the main attempts to discredit DJs and their methods of producing music is the claim that the turntables themselves aren’t capable of generating sounds themselves, which is funny to me, since I don’t recall a drum or a sax or a piano playing itself unless there is a human or some kind of object to produce the sound vibration. Mainly the blame goes towards the notion of the equipment DJs use as not being authentic, meaning acoustic in their terms. By that notion, it would then be unfair to provide any kind of musician with the equipment used to record or reproduce sound then, since the music is not being created authentically. It’s this sense of technophobia that is commonplace amongst such critics that can bad mouth anything musical from the 80s to the present, but aren’t able to see there being a little hypocrisy.
Raydar: And then you had groups like The Beatles who would use samples of audio recordings on their records. It was on The White Album they did.
Many of these critics who tend to discredit such technological advances also then place the likes of artists like Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix on a musical pedestal above those in the hip-hop culture. What is overlooked in those cases is those acts were notorious for using sound effects, distortion, and unique panning methods with their music. Yet countless artists, even in jazz, cite them as a influence or as being great practitioners of music. The majority of the critics against hip-hop will admit, maybe even brag about, the fact that these artists are in fact valid. Just don’t let these artists they praise get involved with jazz or come from the urban culture, because then that would be sacrilegious on all counts and would put them at risk to getting their music card revoked.
Raydar: We wrote out quarter notes, 16th notes, just like any other (instrument). You devise your measures, time signatures and everything. We have icons that let you know how to accentuate the cut, or which way to rub the record, so there’s definitely an accomplice to that. That’s why I see it as an instrument.
The turntables were also discredited as an instrument because no notational system had been devised for sheet music musicians to read. This has changed though. In the hip-hop classes at Berklee, Raydar says that his students have to learn about using the pitch changes on the turntable to hear the new sounds they made, and then assign notes to those sounds. And since the turntable is capable of reaching pitch ranges that the original sound they are using couldn’t, they are in fact generating new sounds from their turntable. I don’t know how then that can be interpreted as stealing music when the sounds the DJs make can’t even be reproduced by the original musicians themselves in many cases, and did you get down that there is a notation system that DJs use?
Raydar: One of the things that we have now more than ever is portable technology. The lines between what you can do in a studio and what you can do on a stage now are getting blurred…I’ve seen bands now triggering live samples on stage alongside a horn section with a DJ on the side.
If there is still any doubt about this, then one should consider what the new advancements in software aimed at DJs are starting to unlock. The leading program, Serato, has already sent a shock wave through the DJ sphere and freed them up from certain limitations from before. Plus now with the added functionality of sampling and the ability to hook up a drum pad, likening it to the famous Akai MPC or SP-1200 line, DJs can more easily expand their repertoire to include sounds of any instrument such as a drum or a keyboard to play with the music they’re spinning. This unlocks the potential for them to manipulate their music in ways that were mostly limited to a studio, or if someone was willing to bring their equipment with them to a show, and to take the sounds of classical instruments and play in the same way the revered musicians of the past could. I know this is scary for the purists out there, but yeah, it’s happening. This avenue in being explored now as we speak, and finally shatters the final barrier in the so called debate of musicians.
Raydar: Every time I get on a turntable deck, I really begin to take off and go on all of these tangents and find all of these things, and then I find some way to pull it all back together in the end. And the end result is that everyone is dancing. That’s incredible to me, but I’m pretty sure that for any instrumentalist they feel the same way. Spending all that time practicing with your fingers on the flip board to try to get the positions right, and for some guys you have to stretch your pinky extra. It may hurt at the time, but you work it out and get used to it. And then you go as a musician on stage and present it, and people will dance to it.
At this point, the DJ culture has been embraced by the world on a underground and mainstream level, and those who choose to resist this have mainly become victims of their own selective tastes and memory. It always struck me as being bizarre that this idea would even come up where there was a time that Jazz music was considered inauthentic as well. From it’s early days where the Creole musicians would mock the African-Americans for playing what they considered uneducated nonsense, to the times of the 30s when it was referred to as jungle music, Jazz has had to climb a similar uphill battle to achieve recognition for its place as American music, and for many of its musicians to attack what essentially came out of the same cultural tradition is very much baffling. Maybe there is some ageism involved, or there are some valid points in these criticisms. At the end of the day though, if you can dance to it or feel it, then who cares? This has always been the nucleus to the rise of any music genre, and both hip-hop and Jazz have the ability to do that. Both also have taken their place in influencing music worldwide, and both are here to stay. So stop talking all that Jazz, and get hip-hopping when you hear that beat.
In appreciation of these fine artists, to bring in this new year/decade, I decided to recreate the “unofficial dubstep anthem” of the new year with my mash potato mixup/tribute of Excision & Datsik’s “Boom” tune. Probably one of the first tracks that really turned me into this sort of dub stepson of a monster. I played the ruff version at the turn of the year (12am HST) at Into11 for the few folks who decided to stay in the side room. Then I reached home later that night and decided to rev it up even more. This is the outcome, the tribute to the artist(s), and the product of inspiration that I share with you. Welcome to 2011.
I often find myself underestimating my holiday season. In, out, and round ’bout this time of the year, I expect many joyous things to happen for myself and others, which usually occurs in the most unexpected ways. For example, the total lunar eclipse of the winter solstice. I’ve waited for that moment to happen for long enough, and when the time comes. CLOUDS! …I guess it was meant for us to see with our eyes closed. Pineal gland sessions!
Another example would be to see friends and family that return home to be back in paradise. That’s always welcomed and wanted. No gripes.
Or, the many holiday greeting cards/token gifts from your neighborhood 99 cent store that you get from your circle of folk. Sure, it’s a nice gesture, and they obviously mean well, with blessings and compassion towards you and your great self. …But really, what am I suppose to do with this meaningless wallet, this random nonsensical keychain, or this two-fold piece of tree with empty words in it? “Thank you, friend” but no thanks. I have no room for my own clutter, please do away with that and just a simple exchange a verbal howdy do, and a shaka should suffice. Merry Christmas, Happy new Year and such.
Anyway, with that rant outta the way, the real reason I write today is to humbly apologize to those who have anywhere near a fifth of an ounce of care at all about this project that I began a little less than a month ago, before the rush of the holidays brushed over us like a gush of rainwater from the atmos above. I went into this project with a mindset of improvement, and to share this “improvement”. That is, 12 recordings of skratch progression within the month was the goal, as in the 12 days of Christmas…corny I know, thanks. (Which by the way, I never understood. There’s only 1 day, and 24 other days of hype and stressful weathering away of your kindness and gratitude. Oh well.) So, what this project ended up being is more like 1 & 2 skratch/skrape (scrape/cut/scratch…you get it) recordings of regression. Time takes a toll on yourself, the days become shorter, and the night’s stretch out to an everlasting sparkly harvesting of the moon’s energy. It’s not bad thing though, not bad at all.
I guess what I mean to say is that this will change from being the ‘skrapes of Xmas’ to the ongoing random recordings out of boredom, redressing beats with sounds as my art of decorum of sorts is pointed in the right direction of motivation, movement, improv, improvement. Yes! That’s I meant to do. Well…I suppose, you can listen to part 1 and 2 of 2 and wait with me on what will move me next. Turntable pivot, Carry on!
Spent Hallow’s Eve carvin and cam-capturin’. After developing an increasingly productive year working closely with the fellas over at Flip The Bird Entertainment, it’s only proper to pay respect in the most festive of forms. My orange ode to the “Bird of Paradise…”
