Very relevant DJ Shadow interview...

Fellow MPCers,
I found this interview with DJ Shadow online and thought that it might be relevant to our cause. It's an old interview (about the time after "Endtroducing" and before "U.N.K.L.E."), but the MPC techniques he discusses shed some light for me. He talks about "fading" samples, but I'm not sure if he's talking about adjusting the attack and decay in the Param screen. Plus he uses an MPC60 and an MPC3000 (I've never even seen either one in person let alone use one), so for all I know the fading thing my be a feature on one of those. I guess he did all of Endtroducing with a turntable and an MPC60 only (plus hundreds of LPs). Makes me want to sell my synths and buy a turntable.
Later,
Ara

http://www.solesides.com/winblad/shadow ... d1097.html

The 60 is still my favorite MPC, i will never sell it. It truly gives back to the user.

I think, what he means by fade is most likely a soft attack setting like you said. I got this new joint i did, where the girl says soft and gently is my love, but its only 1 bar long, so i copied it, isolated soft and love, played with the attack settings and extended the original sample to two bars with the two chops, it sounds smooth. Good interview, dood can scratch too.

damn dope shit..!!

This give me a slap in the face and reminds me that i wanted to keep it simple and straightforward! I wanted to buy all kinds of stuff.. but I just needs the midi interface and the DBX MC-6 lil compressor

i've got the rest

Just goes to show what you can do with basic equipment.

That fading thing is a cool idea - sampling air from the record, adding decay and attack and layering it several times over to create a reverb tail for the snare.

MPC-Tutor wrote:Just goes to show what you can do with basic equipment.

That fading thing is a cool idea - sampling air from the record, adding decay and attack and layering it several times over to create a reverb tail for the snare.

That is dope, and i went home and tried it last night.... it sounds pretty good! I have a clean snare that ends real abruptly, so i grabbed some crackle/air off of a record and laced it behind the snare, and trailed it out past the end of the snare. It took some serious velocity adjustment, but after a while i got the desired decay effect! Anyway...... just thought i'd share.

Shadow comes off as extremely intelligent in that interview as well. Definitely a pioneer in his own right.

Amen @ architect

that is a cool technique but I'm not sure how you layer the air at the end of the hit. Can you create a new sample on the 2000xl which has a few different samples over the top of each other?

I've actually been doing that for a while now, since I have zero efx and my set up is real simple. Matter of fact over the years I never bothered to upgrade my memory from the original 10 seconds stereo or whatever it is! This has led to a bit of creativity on my part, tons of short samples.

Copy some reverb as it's own sample, assign to pad and tap it in a couple of times after the hit you sampled the air from, step edit to get the precise timing if need be, and play with attack/decay to get it right so it all fades nicely. I also go into step mode and play with the volumes of each one to get a proper fade.

Good thing I read that article, it gave me another idea. I have never tried to have "air" run all the way through my drum sequence. I may try to add an almost inaudible or almost ghost "hiss" all the way through. Maybe that'll make it sound like a straight loop, in a good way. Or maybe it'll make my whole track sound like crap, hahahaha.... probably gonna have to watch those volumes. Experimentation begins tonight!

thanks for the article post, rare insight and good ?s

tight interview......makes me wanna bang out some beatz right now........I'll Holla

sick interview.....SHADOW is Living-Legend....Nuff said

DJ shadow is all over this cd.. is really on the best DJ goign head to head on the 1s adn 2s! i'm an intern at univsersal and this cd is always playing... if you want to go win some cool stuff then go to... www.thumprecords.com/deadlydjcuts

Bump.

Thread was before I came here, and I only just saw it!

Inspired.

Awesome find. I'm still tripping on the 91-94 era DJ shadow megamixes (DJS DO NOT SLEEP ON THESE MIXES) you can check most of them out on grooveshark.com search for "DJ shadow megamixes". Great interview. Peace to the boards.

Aint gonna lie.

I copped Entroducing about a month ago on the back of all the hype I'd heard about Shadow doing it all on the 60II.

I was thinking 'he did all that with 1.44 mb or RAM, surely not!'...

But now I know he used overdubs, it still seems almost impossible!!

Hell I'm 15 years late on this one!!!!!!!!!