Sometimes it’s hard to choose what to listen to in a world of endless options and every song ever made at your finger tips. That’s why I use an algorithm. My algorithm is four years old, 2 feet tall and almost always blindly chooses the best LP for the moment. Get yourself an algoriddim or blind pull yourself. My algorithm has a bit of bias currently towards Art Blakey, Frankie Paul and Sly stone, but trying to get it to “branch out” a bit
Mina Saiko!!! @zionhill_session tanyobi omedeto @highlife_saito Saito San! Happy birthday mi bedren thank you for having me yesterday to celebrate with you and the crew. #shibuya
Throwback Thursday, Way-back-Wednesday, depends on di time zone! A favorite banger from di past, more proof i am di werld's biggest celebrity. Sometime mi go over HERE, sometimes mi go OVER THERE. something we can ALL relate to. #majorlazer
More fun at the @relicroomnyc with @channeltubes recording guitars for the upcoming @uzimon album. Warning: geeky post! For the first song, I was thinking 60s/70s R&B fuzz guitar like Isaac Hayes records. But the studio didn’t have an obnoxious enough pedal, and I didn’t bring one. I saw all the old Ampex rack units on the wall and asked Brett (Mr. Tubes) if he could cascade them into each other and get distortion that way. He could! Gloriously buzzy! And since there was a Mutron Bi-Phase sitting right there, why not patch it in? I was hoping for some hot vintage limiter-on-limiter action as well before the fuzz sound, but even the Relic Room has, uh, limits. So Brett patched in a compressor from his pedal board instead. We used the Echoplex on Friday, so why not use the Space Echo on Sunday? It’s sitting right there. The next song was all finger-style nylon string. I played the long ska and the fills with my thumb. Brett was really excited about the mic that he used on the guitar, so I thought we should include a clip of it for the audio gear geeks. A big part of the fun of recording is finding the right sound as well as the right part for a given song. If you’re using plugins, which 90% of the time is what people want me to do these days, it makes you think a certain way. (The same thing is true when you watch the computer screen while recording. It changes the way you play.) When you create the sound outside of the computer by just using what’s there in the studio, it’s like making a picture with found objects instead of a paint set. The process is different, so you come out in a different place at the end. Oh, the shirt? It’s from Frank R. Perez AKA FRP of WORT-FM 89.9 FM in Madison, WI. I highly recommend his Tropical Riddims show. Great guy, great playlists! #reggaeguitarist #ampex #rolandspaceecho #mutronbiphase #wortfm899
While working on the new @uzimon album with @channeltubes at the @relicroomnyc today, I realized that the late great Mikey Chung’s guitar intro to @abyssinians51 “African Race” would make a nice lead in to the song that we were recording. I’m not much of a nylon string player so I asked Brett (Mr. Tubes) to just let me play the part over and over until it sounded OK. To help me through it, I focused on thinking about Mikey, a dear friend as well as one of my musical heroes, and Bernard Collins, who sang lead on the original recording. Bernard was one of my best friends when I lived in Kingston. I spent many Sundays at his little house near Trenchtown, playing music and reasoning. As I was playing, I was reliving my time with them and thinking how blessed and bittersweet it is that two artists I admire so much were a part of my life and how much I miss them. Things came to the surface that I haven’t thought about in years. It was…a lot. But this is why we have music, right? To help us process both the emotions we all have in common and the feelings we keep to ourselves because we don’t know what else to do with them. At least that’s part of it. Once I got something acceptable, Brett made a quick edit and I did a little voiceover while we listened to the playback. And that’s what you hear in the video. I didn’t record it to a click because I couldn’t stand waiting for Brett to set it up. But somehow I ended up close to the right tempo anyway. I don’t know if it will make the record or not. But I wanted people to hear it anyway because I’ve never done anything like it on a session. And I want people to remember Mikey and Bernard, who gave us so much. Igziabeher. #reggaeguitarist #nylonstring #mikeymaochung #bernardcollins #abyssinians
@zionhill_session blew my fmind tonight with this cover of Horace Silver’s Song for my father. Light of saba. Bless up @highlife_saito for including me amongst the Ibushigin. More life.
