Winning the Scribble Jam Producer competition

It’s an amazing thing to take something that has already been created and giving it a new life. I know it sounds like a spiritual journey, mystical and hazy, but what I’m speaking about is sampling. There are many ways to achieve the same goal in this realm, but it’s not only how you do it, but how it sounds when it’s done. I’m X:144 and this is my story with Redmatica’s Keymap.

This past Summer I entered the first Scribble Jam Producer Battle, held in Cincinnati, Ohio every year for over a decade. This is the biggest Hip-Hop festival in U.S., an estimated 10,000 people were there this past year to experience the dying breed of untainted Hip-Hop activism.

So imagine this, July 2007, I’m currently the Florida Scribble Jam Producer preliminary winner... sounds easy enough, right? For some, no, for the elite, yes. Only the experienced sample-producer can make something out of a minimal amount of sampled material. The competition rules are as follows: Everything is sample-based, no synthesizers, no organic instruments, JUST SAMPLES! I’ll cut to the chase on how Keymap helped me get into the semi-finals at Scribble Jam.

Two out of the four rounds were premeditated, one of which was the sample round. This entailed us having to use two out of the ten songs provided; all drums and all instrumentation had to derive from this selection of samples. What does this mean to me? Chopping, Sound design, and lots of it.

Interestingly enough, my life was taking a drastic turn with my father diagnosis of cancer, so needless to say I started a week late into my two week grace period of my sample round. Sorting through ideas of how to get this done efficiently, my brother and colleague of mine, Divinci of Solillaquists of Sound, who is my twin in integrity, reminded me of Redmatica’s Keymap in one of our recent lust spells for production tools. I purchased mine instantly due to the the crunch time of this competition.

Alright, I’ve made a few beats that I’m not 100% on for the competition, but it’s given me chance acquaint myself with Keymap. It’s about two days before my trip to Cincinnati and I finally know exactly what I want to create. Ready to hear it? Well here it go:

Keymap is a pretty intimidating program at first glance, but like all things, you must find your uses within it then figure the rest out later. My basic needs were to efficiently slice, chop and sound design all of my samples, while still be able to utilize the EXS24 as my main sampler. Keymap is a lot like Logic in the sense that it has multiple ways to achieve the same thing. For example you can chop samples by merely slicing by selection, or region creation by transient...I chose the latter. Simply because it enabled me to edit regions non-destructively if no hard edits were made. Nothing is ever final until it returns from the manufacturing plant (if that), so I like to have the ability to always go back and edit.

With drums this feature is obviously a luxury, but depending on your source material you can easy find yourself creating regions manually by selection. On more dense sections of songs you have to do it the “old fashioned way”; select what you want, create region, then move on. Learning the modifier keys are a great help in any repetitive task of chopping with software, so after becoming acclimated to how the interface works I began to fly through this process easily. After each group of chops are made it’s time to assign each sample to a zone. Sounds like another tedious but fortunately the only way I found it possible from the sample editor was the “Automap sequentially” function. You have no idea how it begins to snowball from this point! It’s as easy as selecting all from your region’s list and ctrl-click to get the drop down menu. For the obsessive inclined, the Auto-phase feature is a good way to tidy up all start and end points to zero-crossings. But enough with the boring stuff, let’s do some serious damage.

In every track I’m compelled to reinterpret what was played in the original sample. So I chop and manipulate down to each progressive chord and key.... and man you have no idea how long that takes without Keymap. LOL. This is where my theory of sound-design take precedence. I’ve already selected samples from 7 different songs, each one in a different key...how can I make this work? Naturally I would just assign a sample to an octave, but what if I wanted to play chords and construct bass-lines? All of the pitch-shifting would lead to different sustain lengths in one play. “Clouds part and light shines from the universe, bestowing upon us “Polyphonation”; A newly defined term in MIDI/Music Production.

Imagine having the ability to just assign duplicates of the one sample across two octaves pitched accordingly? Imagine when you played a chord the sustain length on each note are completely the same. This is the reconstruction of a instrument sampled. Obviously there are artifacts that come with it, but that’s to be expected. This is how I achieved my bass-line for the track amongst other elements in the song. The intro to the piece sampled from a single note violin lick, then turned into a chord of what can potential be perceived as a quartet. For the “wah-like guitar” sound usage of the “Auto-loop”, which automatically finds the best loop in your selection a sample once it reaches that part in the sustain of the key pressed. The ironic thing of it all is that Redmatica helped me with every problem that I came across while working on this specific track.

With all of this said, would think that I’ve divulged all of my secrets, right? I’ve merely elaborated on what the geniuses at Redmatica have already posted their site. The real secret is how the music is made...talent cannot be taught.

Thank you Redmatica for your support, and creating tools that help true sample musicians with a vision achieve the imaginable. Now enough reading, have a listen to the actual track.

Yours truly,

The First Scribble Jam Production Battle Champion, X:144.

To learn more:
➲The X:144 Website
➲Article in Remix magazine
➲X:144 and SPS on MySpace

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