RZA OUTTAKES…
continued 2/3
The Producing MC…or the rhyming Producer?
All my beats were beats you can rhyme to. Most producers were making beats for a producer. Howie T and all them niggas in the late 80’s. They was good at just getting loops and samples together but they couldn’t rap so they didn’t know if it was a rap beat. Hank Shocklee was one of the first producer who took noises and chopped them. Later, you found out where he took them from but it was genius. “Welcome to the Terrordome,” “Rebel Without a Pause.” Three songs on that were the same record, James Brown. He just picked parts of it and made singles out of it. He was able to take certain sounds and use them as the base of his beat. He was the first person to do it like that to a certain extent. He made that hard Hip-Hop but it wasn’t everyday rhyming Hip-Hop, like as soon as it came on a rapper was going to jump on the beat. I was able to make it MC friendly every time. Those are some of the things that I feel I added to the flavor of Hip-Hop. Being a Hip-Hop student and an icon living it for years, I think I transcended certain people who did it. Large Professor and Pete Rock were one of the first producing MC’s and they both had crazy flows and were dope. But at the same time, maybe it was something else they didn’t understand that I understood.
Lab Cab in California..
I’m an engineer. I engineered the whole Cuban Link album myself. The whole Liquid Swords album myself. The one session we did, I still had to mix it back. This just shows that my knowledge of my music was as extensive as my knowledge of equipment. When we go inside and you take a peek. I got a studio here, another one in LA, you’ve seen the one in New York and there’s one in the mansion in Jersey. The point I’m making is I know how to use almost every piece of equipment ever made. You can’t give me a machine that I don’t know how to make a beat with in one night. When I first learned the SP-1200, I just got it with no manual. That’s one of the hardest machines to learn because all it has is names written on the side of it. In one 24 hour period, with no sleep and a lot of weed, I figured it out. “Bring the Pain” came off that machine. ASR, same thing no manual. I know a lot of producers. Easy Mo Bee was the first nigga I seen with an SP-1200. I couldn’t afford one, I had to swindle one. A producer named Backspin who produced some early LONS stuff, he had studio 440’s. That was the first SP, which you could have the samples on it, the shit used to sound incredible. When I first seen that I didn’t know what type of shit was going on. I had no money. I was a nickel bus riding nigga at the time. Then I started getting money, bought the equipment and mastered that shit. That’s what I think makes the RZA be the RZA is that I try to master things. I think that shit has let up.