Music: Nicolay/Lyrics: Phonte, Joe Scudda/All instruments: Nicolay/All vocals: Phonte and Joe Scudda


Backstory:

It should be no secret that the incredible beatwork of the late great J Dilla has been hugely inspirational to me, especially when I was first getting into production. I learned by studying his music, that there is room for musicality and for experimentation, as long as there is a strong and steady foundation going on underneath. Dilla's signature tracks always had that "sweet spot", that chord progression or melody that would tug at your heartstrings, while the drums and the bass would work on your neckmuscles at the same time. As a producer, his drums were eye-opening for me, not only because of his choice of sounds and of ways to process those sounds, but because of his often-imitated "drunken" style of drum programming. Before I got into Dilla's music, I suppose I more or less thought of drum hits as being relatively "fixed". For example, in one bar of four counts, you put a kick hit on the one and the three, a snare hit on the two and four, and hihat hits on every eighth note, with "swing" timing applied (or not, depending on what is called for). Dilla's programming taught me that if you exaggerate this "swing" timing, the drums come alive and feel more "human" and "in the pocket".

So far, we have had over 4,000 unique visitors logging on to our 'Inside The Producer's Studio' series, and I would like to sincerely thank everyone for their attention and for their kind words of appreciation and encouragement. I'm thrilled that so many of you have shown interest in our blogs. Please do continue to help spread the word!

On sampling

Because I am a musician first and foremost, I have never had to rely on sampling alone. Still, there's no question that technique involving sampling makes up an important part of my music production process. Earlier on in my career, a new idea would usually present itself in the form of a sample that I would find by randomly going through my records, in search of that next "Oh shit!" moment. Even though I love to go record shopping like any fan of music, I am not much of a "digger" because my collection is fairly small, especially after moving from one continent to another. I have personally never seen the point of owning thousands of records, knowing that I would never be able to listen to or study most of them in my lifetime, and so I only buy and hold on to records that are significant to me for one reason or another. As a result, I have a personal connection with each record that I own, and those are the records that I turn to for inspiration.

Music: Nicolay/Lyrics: Phonte/All instruments: Nicolay/All vocals and vocal arrangements: Phonte and Muhsinah

In his comment on the first part of Making 'Daykeeper', Eric Hirsh asked: "Any insight as to why both Connected and Leave It All Behind start with the same sound sequence (but both depart from it in different ways)?" Thanks for bringing that up, Eric; while discussing the origins of 'Daykeeper', I had unintentionally skipped over that intro sound, but it's an important element of both albums. I think it was Phonte's idea to bring back the sound that opens 'Connected' as a "sound logo" that would instantly identify the new album as a Foreign Exchange project. Since we were working with the "Leave It All Behind" concept, I wanted to take the original sounds, to let the listener know that The Foreign Exchange is "back", but develop them into a different, darker direction, to let the listener know that everything is not the same. At this point, the sound logo has begun leading a life of its own as we open all of our shows with it, and it always invokes quite a stir in the audience.

Music: Nicolay/Lyrics: Phonte/All instruments: Nicolay/All vocals and vocal arrangements: Phonte and Muhsinah

Backstory:

I came up with the basic track in november of '06, after coming back from my visit to Tokyo. Japan had made a huge impression on me and I was still in that state of mind, calling the track idea "Shibuya" before sending it over to Phonte to check out. I knew that it was very different from what we had done before, so I wasn't quite sure what to do with it and whether or not it would "fit", but when Phonte heard it, he knew that this was the direction that we were looking for and started to write to it. Not too long after, he recorded the hooks and verses together with Muhsinah and sent them back to me. I was so inspired by the song that I came up with the 3/4 section in the middle almost right away. In turn, Phonte and Muhsinah recorded their additional vocals to the middle section and with that, the song was complete.

It doesn't really matter what you use, as long as you use it well.

That has been my motto throughout the years that I have been into making music. I have never been a purist or even a "gearslut", and I really don't believe that it matters much whether you use an MPC, an ASR10 or Fruity Loops to make your beats, or at this point, whether you run a laptop or a $100,000 studio. What matters only are the results, and you generally get the best results by using something that you are very familiar with.

The question that I get asked most is without a doubt, "What do you use?". I'm a fan and student of music first and foremost, and I have always been more than willing to answer that question, but I have found that it is impossible for me to do so in a MySpace or Twitter message using only a few sentences. Print and online articles and interviews don't always allow for indepth discussion, either. Fortunately, our new website finally gives me the platform to share the method to my madness, and so over the course of an indefinite number of installments, I'm going to break down the what, why and how of my music production setup. I will discuss my favourite pieces of hard- and software, my favourite ways of (ab)using them and the track(s) from my catalogue in which you can hear them at work. Because at the end of the day, it is all about the music.