Skahlah - “Ambitions end” Bluevibe Studio remix

by J Bluevibe on December 1, 2007

Skahlah - Ambitions end - Bluevibe remix

I’ve just completed a new remix for a wicked mc out of Tokyo called Skahlah, very talented fella I met through myspace. Now 1 of my reasons for bouncing round in space is to meet new producers and artists and get some collabs on the go. For me as a producer and musician its such a great source of wicked new music to checkout. A lot of people really pushing the edge of genre’s and styles, if you can wade through the masses I think there’s still some huge talent to be found.
I’m really into the technical aspects of production and love the gear and software probably a bit too much so I thought I’d go through what I did to put this together for those interested, if your not into that shit then don’t read on and go checkout Skahlah’s page. If you got any questions on all this then just comment and I’ll get back to ya. It’s just me on this remix too cos, well, I thought I’d see what I could do on this 1.

Skahlah sent me the original track and the vocal through and I got to work on it, now I havn’t done much work with mc’s, I mostly work with vocalists who have a soul edge to what they’re doin.

My beats are usually pretty heavily programmed and complex so I started this 1 in the same direction. Got some wicked beats goin, a great Rhodes melody and bass to fit, took about 3 weeks on and off to realise that it just wasn’t workin with the vocal. Too busy which really distracted from his flow. I’d also sped it up about 6bpm which again didn’t help skahlah’s vocal to work in the track.

Now I was reading the other day about Amy Winehouse who when workin on a track can pretty much figure out within an hour whether its gonna work or not!! Its def one of the things I’m strivin for. The tune worked but not with this vocal, gonna get some sweet soul action on it instead. This final remix took about 5 days on and off from start to finish.

So I started again and really focused on the flow of the vocal, actually worked some loose bass around it first then built the jagged beat around that.

I’d been workin with a sample for time on another track but decided to mash it up and use it on this 1.

For the technical stuff I use cubase with kontakt for all the sounds on the track except albino for the synth. The vocal needed some 1176 compression to make it stand out along with a touch of Uad Neve 88rs eq to make it sit properly. There’s some heavy filters, delays and panning on the individual channels of the stereo sample which I used to give it some width and weird it out nicely.

I’ve got a real nice Rhodes in the studio at the moment so wanted to just add a touch of that on the end of the track, simple but sits nice although I did smath it with the new neve plugin on my UAD card. As you can probly tell I went with a real dirty kinda edge on this track.

I’m currently running individual tracks out through a simple hardware chain to really give em an edge. The chain is RME convertor – HHB EQ1 (valve eq) – Revox c270 tape machine.Its simple but does stuff that I just can’t quite get in the box, plus I love playin with the valves and tape levels to get the right kind of harmonics for each track. Now my big issue like most semi-pro home producers is the final master, I did a rough master in wavelab just for some level. If we decide to put the track out then we’ll go into a mastering house and get it done properly, I don’t have the ears for mastering or the kit, not saying that some people cant do it at home but I firmly believe that mastering is an art in itself and requires the right kit, room and person to do it.

So hope you like the track even if you didn’t make it through all this technical bullshit, we’ve had some wicked feedback already and it looks like it’ll be available as a future Skahlah release. Go checkout his myspace page and download the free ‘midskool disciple vol 1.’ Album, its well worth checkin out.

http://www.myspace.com/skahlah

Let me know what ya think people, as Skahlah says, “build and grow”.

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