electrofunkroots
05-05-2005, 08:18 PM
The first 12” in the ‘Credit To The Edit’ series I’m doing for Tirk (Nuphonic) is out and about. It's Piccadilly's Record Of The Week in the Disco section:
http://www.piccadillyrecords.co.uk/ver2/genreWeekly.php?whichWeek=0&genre=22
The 3 tracks are Raw DMX ‘Do It To The Funk’, Kool & The Gang ‘Sesame Seed’ and Mike T ‘T’s On The Mike’. Already getting a great response from the test pressings and initial promos that went out, with support from DJ's including Mr Scruff, Ashley Beedle, Idjut Boys, Unabombers, Andy Smith, Bill Brewster, Kelvin Andrews, Dave Jarvis and Frank Tope, to name a few. Sleevenotes below:
http://www.wordandsound.net/media/pic/35087.jpg
CREDIT TO THE EDIT
It’s almost 30 years since I did my first basic edits. This was for a demonstration tape I made for local radio, which, as was the way back then, would only be listened to if submitted on reel, rather than cassette, with the tracks shortened to minimal length (the emphasis placed firmly on how I sounded on the microphone, rather than the music I was playing). The guy who taught me how to splice tape was a presenter from Radio Merseyside called Dave Porter, who still works on radio today (nowadays he’s based in the North-East).
However, it wasn't until 1982 that I began to explore the possibilities of creative editing. By this point I was a successful club DJ in the North of England, working at the best two venues in the region, Wigan Pier and Legend in Manchester, where I played the latest imports (Soul, Funk, Jazz and, of course, the music I became most associated with, Electro). I was also one of the few people in the country to fully embrace turntable mixing and, in May ’82, I was invited by a DJ called Mike Shaft to create specialist black music mixes for his show on Piccadilly Radio, in Manchester. They were the first mixes of their type in the UK and I became known nationally as an innovator of this style. These early radio mixes were as live, recorded onto reel-to-reel at Legend (during the daytime) and topped and tailed back in one of the stations editing booths. At first someone else did this for me, but one day there was nobody available so I had a go myself…
This would be the start of my obsession with editing. Pretty soon I’d decided to invest in a home DJ studio, where I’d subsequently record and edit my mixes. I bought a Revox B77, the best piece of equipment I've ever owned, and this, along with 2 Technics SL1200's (extremely rare to see in a club back then, let alone someone’s home), a Matamp DJ mixer and a cassette deck (for the occasional pause button sample), made up my kit. When I demonstrated mixing live on Channel 4’s music show, ‘The Tube’ in February 1983, I also had the Revox on stage with me (using it for dub/echo effects).
What I was doing was pretty unique from a UK perspective. I had nobody to reference, so I devised my own techniques, some of which had been inspired by innovative US bootleg mixes, especially 'Big Apple Production Vol 1', plus some of the Disconet DJ only series. The first ‘Kiss FM Mastermixes’ LP, released on US Prelude in 1982, would also make a big impression on me.
During the next few years my approach to editing became increasingly intricate. Even after I stopped deejaying in 1984 to concentrate on producing my own tracks, the razor blade remained central to my work, becoming something of a trademark.
In June 84, the Street Sounds ‘UK Electro’ album was released. I worked on all the tracks, bar one, as co-writer and producer. I also mixed them, with editing a key ingredient. This was taken a whole stage further on the three 12” singles that were issued from the album, plus the various ‘mixes’ of the tracks (which were, in effect, re-edits, cut-up sometimes to a major degree). ‘UK Electro’ was the first homegrown Dance project to make a main feature of sampled voices, twelve months before Paul Hardcastle topped the British charts with ‘19’. Interestingly, the engineer brought over to work with me on the ‘UK Electro’ remixes, a New Yorker called Craig Bevan (who’d recorded with the B Boys), would later collaborate with Steinski on his cut ‘n’ paste classic ‘The Motorcade Sped On’.
My vinyl debut had actually come the previous year, when Island Records pressed up a mad little edit I’d done of one of their releases, ‘Heaven Sent’ by Paul Haig, as a DJ only promo. To the best of my knowledge this is the first example of a re-edit by a British DJ.
I’d fully utilise my editing skills during the latter part of the 80’s and into the 90’s, especially on the two Ruthless Rap Assassins albums and the various singles by the Assassins and Kiss AMC. Apart from editing tracks together, the Revox was also used as a sampler of sorts, from which I'd spin sounds I’d recorded onto tape into the tracks I was working on. I compiled numerous reels of ‘spins’ for this purpose, all with gaps between each snippet (much like a sample CD). Even when the Akai revolutionised the whole sampling thing I'd only use it in conjunction with live spins from the Revox. Sometimes a sampler couldn't quite give you the vibe you got from spinning a sound in. It's an effect The Beatles used during the mid/late 60's to add texture to their tracks.
I'd cite The Beatles (or more precisely producer George Martin) with the greatest single edit of all time. This is when John Lennon wanted to use the first section of one recording of 'Strawberry Fields Forever', but take the rest of the track from a completely different and more progressive version. His comment to George Martin, when he pointed out the difficulties of pitch and tempo, was 'you can fix it'. The fixed version is the definitive one that we all know, two recordings perfectly merged together by one decisive splice.
In 1996 I put together my final mix using the Revox ('The Monastic Mix'), recorded for an experimental club night I was involved in called ‘The Monastery’. This mix, which I worked on in conjunction with a young Liverpool DJ called Matt Shannon, filled one side of a cassette given away on the first night, and has since become regarded as something of a cult-classic by those who got hold of a copy.
I remember that when people would watch me working at the Revox they were amazed to see all the pieces of white splicing tape running past the heads. Sometimes a series of edits were grouped so closely together that all that could be seen was a long stream of white tape whizzing past. I would literally take a ruler and measure a beat, before cutting it up into smaller and smaller fractions. I'd have bits of tape everywhere, bars and beats and bits of beats all marked on the back with a chinagraph pencil so I knew what they were. Having nobody else to refer to, I’d evolved my own madcap system, which made perfect sense to me, but must have seemed completely chaotic to anyone else!
Suffice to say that editing has been a major part of my life. Nowadays my work is computer based and I can do things that would once have taken me hours in just a matter of minutes. Many tape edit effects, which used to be highly complex and time consuming back in those distant days, are now made relatively simple by modern technology. That's not to say that the craft has gone out of editing, you still have to come up with the ideas and that's always the most important thing, no amount of technological expertise can make a silk purse from a sow's ear. However, the precision and speed of computers undoubtedly makes life a lot easier, allowing so many more possibilities than I could have imagined during those countless hours sat over my Revox, blade in hand. There are also things that were impossible when I started out editing, like changing the tempo of a track without changing the pitch. The tools I had at my disposal back then were undoubtedly primitive when compared to what’s available now.
When I made my DJ comeback at Manchester’s ‘Music Is Better’ in December 2003, I prepared a number of edits / mash-ups for the occasion. A couple of these were re-workings of things I’d done 20 years earlier, in my back in the day mixes (both live and on radio), including ‘Walking On Confusion’, a coupling of New Order’s ‘Confusion’ with the acappella of another Arthur Baker production, ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rockers Revenge, which was obviously a favourite during my time at The Hacienda (when ‘Confusion’ was released) and also featured on one of my radio mixes in Sept ’83. Dave Rofe re-created this for the ‘Viva Hacienda’ compilation in 1997. Although he intended it as a tribute, the sleevenotes failed to mention its origin. Nowadays, some of the people who’ve heard the ‘Music Is Better’ mix, assume I got the idea for ‘Walking On Confusion’ from the Hacienda album and are quite surprised to discover it was actually the opposite way round.
The first thing I played on my return to deejaying was a mash-up I put together especially for this night, which I called ‘Do It To The Funk’ by Raw DMX (the acappella section of ‘Do It To The Music’ by Raw Silk over an instrumental edit I’d done of DMX Krew’s ‘Who Got The Funk’). ‘Do It To The Music’, being a classic Wigan Pier / Legend tune, linked back to my past, whilst ‘Who Got The Funk’, a more contemporary recording, reflected my intention not to simply trade on my reputation of two decades earlier. This perfectly symbolized the direction I wanted to take, which would be based around my direct experience of the early 80’s, a greatly overlooked era in the evolution of UK dance culture, but without it being a purely retrospective exercise. Having gained a reputation back then for being forward-looking in my approach to deejaying, it was important for me to remain true to this principle now. It was with this in mind that I opted to use a laptop while I worked, so that I could prepare and play my own edits. As a by-product of this decision, I brought the Revox out of retirement, along with my reels of ‘spins’, to provide the ideal balance between past and future.
Since that first night, the Raw DMX edit has been a big favourite with the underground audience, wherever I’ve played it, and it’s fitting that it’s now included on this, the first of a trio of 12” singles that launches the ‘Credit To The Edit’ project for Tirk.
The other edits I’ve chosen have also been getting a great response in the clubs. The first, ‘Open Sesame’ by Kool &The Gang, needs no introduction. This was something I first played when it was released in 1976, but it’s best-known for its inclusion on the ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack the following year, for which it won a Grammy. It’s an edit I actually did a number of years ago, when I got my computer and started cutting stuff up, more to get used to the program I was using than anything else. So, when I started deejaying again, this, along with a few other things I’d done at the same time, provided me with some ready made exclusives to play out. It’s a very dynamic edit, based around just a few sections, rather than being a re-arrangement of the whole track. My working title for it was ‘Sesame Seed’.
The final edit, Mike T’s ‘Do It Anyway You Wanna’, came about completely by accident. Having dug out the 12” to record into the computer, I found that it was jumping at the intro, so, given that I wanted to play it the following weekend, I began to edit it around. I was really happy with the outcome, preferring it to the original arrangement, and it’s since received great feedback. I called the edit ‘T’s On The Mike’. Back in 1981, this was a massive track for me at Legend and the Pier, one of the biggest underground black tunes of the year (although pretty much unknown outside of the specialist scene), so it’s good to be able to bring this hidden gem to peoples attention almost a quarter of a century on.
I hope you enjoy this 12” and the subsequent releases in the ‘Credit To The Edit’ series. Thanks to everyone at Tirk for making this possible, especially Scott McCready, for his sterling work in co-ordinating the project, and, of course, Sav Remzi, for making it all possible.
COPYRIGHT: GREG WILSON
ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN 2003, RE-EDITED (WITH ADDITONAL TEXT) IN 2005
FURTHER INFO: www.electrofunkroots.co.uk
http://www.piccadillyrecords.co.uk/ver2/genreWeekly.php?whichWeek=0&genre=22
The 3 tracks are Raw DMX ‘Do It To The Funk’, Kool & The Gang ‘Sesame Seed’ and Mike T ‘T’s On The Mike’. Already getting a great response from the test pressings and initial promos that went out, with support from DJ's including Mr Scruff, Ashley Beedle, Idjut Boys, Unabombers, Andy Smith, Bill Brewster, Kelvin Andrews, Dave Jarvis and Frank Tope, to name a few. Sleevenotes below:
http://www.wordandsound.net/media/pic/35087.jpg
CREDIT TO THE EDIT
It’s almost 30 years since I did my first basic edits. This was for a demonstration tape I made for local radio, which, as was the way back then, would only be listened to if submitted on reel, rather than cassette, with the tracks shortened to minimal length (the emphasis placed firmly on how I sounded on the microphone, rather than the music I was playing). The guy who taught me how to splice tape was a presenter from Radio Merseyside called Dave Porter, who still works on radio today (nowadays he’s based in the North-East).
However, it wasn't until 1982 that I began to explore the possibilities of creative editing. By this point I was a successful club DJ in the North of England, working at the best two venues in the region, Wigan Pier and Legend in Manchester, where I played the latest imports (Soul, Funk, Jazz and, of course, the music I became most associated with, Electro). I was also one of the few people in the country to fully embrace turntable mixing and, in May ’82, I was invited by a DJ called Mike Shaft to create specialist black music mixes for his show on Piccadilly Radio, in Manchester. They were the first mixes of their type in the UK and I became known nationally as an innovator of this style. These early radio mixes were as live, recorded onto reel-to-reel at Legend (during the daytime) and topped and tailed back in one of the stations editing booths. At first someone else did this for me, but one day there was nobody available so I had a go myself…
This would be the start of my obsession with editing. Pretty soon I’d decided to invest in a home DJ studio, where I’d subsequently record and edit my mixes. I bought a Revox B77, the best piece of equipment I've ever owned, and this, along with 2 Technics SL1200's (extremely rare to see in a club back then, let alone someone’s home), a Matamp DJ mixer and a cassette deck (for the occasional pause button sample), made up my kit. When I demonstrated mixing live on Channel 4’s music show, ‘The Tube’ in February 1983, I also had the Revox on stage with me (using it for dub/echo effects).
What I was doing was pretty unique from a UK perspective. I had nobody to reference, so I devised my own techniques, some of which had been inspired by innovative US bootleg mixes, especially 'Big Apple Production Vol 1', plus some of the Disconet DJ only series. The first ‘Kiss FM Mastermixes’ LP, released on US Prelude in 1982, would also make a big impression on me.
During the next few years my approach to editing became increasingly intricate. Even after I stopped deejaying in 1984 to concentrate on producing my own tracks, the razor blade remained central to my work, becoming something of a trademark.
In June 84, the Street Sounds ‘UK Electro’ album was released. I worked on all the tracks, bar one, as co-writer and producer. I also mixed them, with editing a key ingredient. This was taken a whole stage further on the three 12” singles that were issued from the album, plus the various ‘mixes’ of the tracks (which were, in effect, re-edits, cut-up sometimes to a major degree). ‘UK Electro’ was the first homegrown Dance project to make a main feature of sampled voices, twelve months before Paul Hardcastle topped the British charts with ‘19’. Interestingly, the engineer brought over to work with me on the ‘UK Electro’ remixes, a New Yorker called Craig Bevan (who’d recorded with the B Boys), would later collaborate with Steinski on his cut ‘n’ paste classic ‘The Motorcade Sped On’.
My vinyl debut had actually come the previous year, when Island Records pressed up a mad little edit I’d done of one of their releases, ‘Heaven Sent’ by Paul Haig, as a DJ only promo. To the best of my knowledge this is the first example of a re-edit by a British DJ.
I’d fully utilise my editing skills during the latter part of the 80’s and into the 90’s, especially on the two Ruthless Rap Assassins albums and the various singles by the Assassins and Kiss AMC. Apart from editing tracks together, the Revox was also used as a sampler of sorts, from which I'd spin sounds I’d recorded onto tape into the tracks I was working on. I compiled numerous reels of ‘spins’ for this purpose, all with gaps between each snippet (much like a sample CD). Even when the Akai revolutionised the whole sampling thing I'd only use it in conjunction with live spins from the Revox. Sometimes a sampler couldn't quite give you the vibe you got from spinning a sound in. It's an effect The Beatles used during the mid/late 60's to add texture to their tracks.
I'd cite The Beatles (or more precisely producer George Martin) with the greatest single edit of all time. This is when John Lennon wanted to use the first section of one recording of 'Strawberry Fields Forever', but take the rest of the track from a completely different and more progressive version. His comment to George Martin, when he pointed out the difficulties of pitch and tempo, was 'you can fix it'. The fixed version is the definitive one that we all know, two recordings perfectly merged together by one decisive splice.
In 1996 I put together my final mix using the Revox ('The Monastic Mix'), recorded for an experimental club night I was involved in called ‘The Monastery’. This mix, which I worked on in conjunction with a young Liverpool DJ called Matt Shannon, filled one side of a cassette given away on the first night, and has since become regarded as something of a cult-classic by those who got hold of a copy.
I remember that when people would watch me working at the Revox they were amazed to see all the pieces of white splicing tape running past the heads. Sometimes a series of edits were grouped so closely together that all that could be seen was a long stream of white tape whizzing past. I would literally take a ruler and measure a beat, before cutting it up into smaller and smaller fractions. I'd have bits of tape everywhere, bars and beats and bits of beats all marked on the back with a chinagraph pencil so I knew what they were. Having nobody else to refer to, I’d evolved my own madcap system, which made perfect sense to me, but must have seemed completely chaotic to anyone else!
Suffice to say that editing has been a major part of my life. Nowadays my work is computer based and I can do things that would once have taken me hours in just a matter of minutes. Many tape edit effects, which used to be highly complex and time consuming back in those distant days, are now made relatively simple by modern technology. That's not to say that the craft has gone out of editing, you still have to come up with the ideas and that's always the most important thing, no amount of technological expertise can make a silk purse from a sow's ear. However, the precision and speed of computers undoubtedly makes life a lot easier, allowing so many more possibilities than I could have imagined during those countless hours sat over my Revox, blade in hand. There are also things that were impossible when I started out editing, like changing the tempo of a track without changing the pitch. The tools I had at my disposal back then were undoubtedly primitive when compared to what’s available now.
When I made my DJ comeback at Manchester’s ‘Music Is Better’ in December 2003, I prepared a number of edits / mash-ups for the occasion. A couple of these were re-workings of things I’d done 20 years earlier, in my back in the day mixes (both live and on radio), including ‘Walking On Confusion’, a coupling of New Order’s ‘Confusion’ with the acappella of another Arthur Baker production, ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rockers Revenge, which was obviously a favourite during my time at The Hacienda (when ‘Confusion’ was released) and also featured on one of my radio mixes in Sept ’83. Dave Rofe re-created this for the ‘Viva Hacienda’ compilation in 1997. Although he intended it as a tribute, the sleevenotes failed to mention its origin. Nowadays, some of the people who’ve heard the ‘Music Is Better’ mix, assume I got the idea for ‘Walking On Confusion’ from the Hacienda album and are quite surprised to discover it was actually the opposite way round.
The first thing I played on my return to deejaying was a mash-up I put together especially for this night, which I called ‘Do It To The Funk’ by Raw DMX (the acappella section of ‘Do It To The Music’ by Raw Silk over an instrumental edit I’d done of DMX Krew’s ‘Who Got The Funk’). ‘Do It To The Music’, being a classic Wigan Pier / Legend tune, linked back to my past, whilst ‘Who Got The Funk’, a more contemporary recording, reflected my intention not to simply trade on my reputation of two decades earlier. This perfectly symbolized the direction I wanted to take, which would be based around my direct experience of the early 80’s, a greatly overlooked era in the evolution of UK dance culture, but without it being a purely retrospective exercise. Having gained a reputation back then for being forward-looking in my approach to deejaying, it was important for me to remain true to this principle now. It was with this in mind that I opted to use a laptop while I worked, so that I could prepare and play my own edits. As a by-product of this decision, I brought the Revox out of retirement, along with my reels of ‘spins’, to provide the ideal balance between past and future.
Since that first night, the Raw DMX edit has been a big favourite with the underground audience, wherever I’ve played it, and it’s fitting that it’s now included on this, the first of a trio of 12” singles that launches the ‘Credit To The Edit’ project for Tirk.
The other edits I’ve chosen have also been getting a great response in the clubs. The first, ‘Open Sesame’ by Kool &The Gang, needs no introduction. This was something I first played when it was released in 1976, but it’s best-known for its inclusion on the ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack the following year, for which it won a Grammy. It’s an edit I actually did a number of years ago, when I got my computer and started cutting stuff up, more to get used to the program I was using than anything else. So, when I started deejaying again, this, along with a few other things I’d done at the same time, provided me with some ready made exclusives to play out. It’s a very dynamic edit, based around just a few sections, rather than being a re-arrangement of the whole track. My working title for it was ‘Sesame Seed’.
The final edit, Mike T’s ‘Do It Anyway You Wanna’, came about completely by accident. Having dug out the 12” to record into the computer, I found that it was jumping at the intro, so, given that I wanted to play it the following weekend, I began to edit it around. I was really happy with the outcome, preferring it to the original arrangement, and it’s since received great feedback. I called the edit ‘T’s On The Mike’. Back in 1981, this was a massive track for me at Legend and the Pier, one of the biggest underground black tunes of the year (although pretty much unknown outside of the specialist scene), so it’s good to be able to bring this hidden gem to peoples attention almost a quarter of a century on.
I hope you enjoy this 12” and the subsequent releases in the ‘Credit To The Edit’ series. Thanks to everyone at Tirk for making this possible, especially Scott McCready, for his sterling work in co-ordinating the project, and, of course, Sav Remzi, for making it all possible.
COPYRIGHT: GREG WILSON
ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN 2003, RE-EDITED (WITH ADDITONAL TEXT) IN 2005
FURTHER INFO: www.electrofunkroots.co.uk