By B-Wise
Fri May 10, 2024 8:01 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3sEy8Uf9yk
“Urban Knight#04” by Harlem-Instrumental
Akai Force: Plugins Synths
Boss SP-505/Cassette Tape: Drums
MIDI Keyboard: Arturia Keylab 88mk2 (Hammer Action)
Recorded: 2024-05-07
Camera: Panasonic G9
This beat is a remake from 2003 a beat I made with the Boss SP-505 & Yamaha PSR-77 (a very basic GM MIDI keyboard that didn’t even have MIDI ports). I messed up the files of the first of 3 SmartMedia memory cards & lost a lot of the SP-505 samples, but it still had the Pattern & MIDI data. Around Black Friday of 2022 I took advantage of a sale for a cheap little boombox if you can even call it that. I mainly wanted it to play old cassette tapes from the late 90s & early 2000s of Underground Hip-Hop radio shows Used to record in NY like: Future Flavas, The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, DJ Clue & my favorite, The Half-Time Radio Show.
Anyway, in the box that had the tapes I found 3 of my old beat cassette tapes from 2003-2004. I didn’t know these were in there that whole time (it felt like finding missing kids). There was about 65-70 beats. Most of them from my first hardware unit the Boss DR-202, which died & I lost most of the its beats. Side B of the last tape had 11 beats from the SP-505. The last track was “Urban knight”. All this made re-buy the SP-505 soon after. My first 1 got messed years ago. In 2023 I started moving all the 505 beats (about 45) to the Force. TEDIOUS SHIT! But I’ll save that story for another day…
Thankfully, I was able to use the tape to remake the beat by playing each part into the Force with its plugin synths. The kick & snare I sampled from the tape & that’s why they sound so dirty. Luckily, I still had the MIDI sequence data for the drum pattern, which made it easy to redo. Once I remade everything, I started to jam with the piano track & came up with something dope, but the bass track was too aggressive, so I made a new bass pattern, which is the lowest octane piano part that repeats. I ended up making a new sketch beat with mutes & had the original main piano melody part on loop, but I didn’t record a video.
I recorded a new version before this one in the video, which came out cool, but I like this one better - so that why this is #04. Neither #03 or #04 has the original bass-line & main piano melody, but it’s melodic essence is still there. Maybe in the future I’ll release the other versions when I make the final version for SP-505 album. This is still just an unmixed/mastered sketch recorded in the camera & I don’t mind the piano playing mistakes.
