Making use of RZA’s production techniques mentioned in the previous blog post, I created a Wu-Tang/RZA inspired beat.
To start with, I found a sample that inspired me enough to use. The sample I chose was Mystical Dreamer by Lonnie Liston Smith.
I dragged the sample in to Ableton, matching the bpm to the project. I then dragged a loop I selected in to Simpler to chop and rearrange. I ended up reversing the loop before finding the chops to add to the creeping eerie vibe I was going for. I then found two patterns that I liked and started working on drums.
For the drums, I used a Wu-Tang inspired drum kit I found online. After deconstructing RZA’s productions, I found that he vary rarely used drum samples and just left them as is, so I attempted to manipulate them as he would. To do this, I layered some of the kicks with low mid range percussion noises to give them some very subtle accents and added an Omnipressor emulation on the drum buss with a relatively slow release to really tighten up the drums and have them feel cohesive with the sample.
I then did what RZA did on C.R.E.A.M and added my own bassline to the sample, I did this by playing writing and recording a bassline DI in to the DAW, with an amp emulation, tape emulation, compression and EQ to tuck it in to the mix a little more and have it sound like it was sampled from a different record. I also through in a few sound effects throughout the beat as well as some fill type alternate drum patterns to keep things interesting.
I then searched for film or dialogue samples to use, inspired by the intertextuality displayed by RZA’s kung fu samples. I ended up stumbling upon this video from 1949 about the techniques of propaganda.
I then chopped up some of these vocals (can be heard from 0:22 – 0:44 in my beat) to create two different patterns. One, panned to the right, is supposed to emulate a similar effect as the record scratch vocals found throughout many RZA beats, which I created by pitching up and stretching the vocals on beats warp mode, giving it a glitchy stutter effect similar to turntables scratching. The other, panned to the left, is a pitched down voice chopped to sound like he’s saying ‘Wu-Tang’ with some similar turntable like stuttering effects.
To me, this sampled based way of working is a very liberating and workflow orientated way of creating music. As someone who spends hours obsessing over tiny mixing or recording details to the point that I get too sick of what I’m making to finish it, allowing myself to use sampling heavily and let go of all the minute details of each individual piece to serve the greater picture as a whole allows me to get in a creative flow without interruptions. I also love sampling for its ability to represent intertextuality in very intentional ways, whether it be Earl Sweatshirt sampling his own parents on ‘Playing Possum’ or RZA sampling kung-fu all across his discography, the art form allows for deep and meaningful reinterpretations of existing media.
The suggestion that sampling is any less valid of an art form as playing everything yourself is bothersome to me, as I could not see someone making the same statement about an artist cutting up newspapers to create their own collage, and it seems that the animosity toward sampling tends to be more linked to the middle to upper class gatekeeping access to music creation and discrediting sampling as an art form because of its history in black working class culture.