Jedi Force
Jun 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
Just Blaze — devoted son to his mother (a high school principal), superfan of Roland V-Drums and Ableton Live, owner of three feisty poodles and producer of such tracks as Jay-Z's “Public Service Announcement,” The Game's “No More Fun and Games” and Ghostface Killah's “The Champ” — just can't shake one crazy dream. Sitting in Studio A at his Baseline Recording Studios in New York, Blaze (aka Justin Smith) puts down his three cell phones while munching on chicken and rice to retell this recurring dream.
“I am out in China somewhere in the mountains,” Blaze recounts. “I meet up with some friends who are on the run from the government or the men in black. We all jump on a bullet train, we're speeding through the mountains, and all of a sudden the train stops at a Sam Ash store. It's the same Sam Ash people I know in New Jersey and New York. ‘What are you guys doing here in China?’ I ask. The men in black were on the bullet train, too, and they are about to enter the store. We have to get out of there. I see a drum set, and for no reason, I sit down and start playing. Everyone says, ‘What are you doing? They are going to kill us!’ But I can't stop playing. Then I wake up.
“That was the third time I'd had that dream in four days,” Blaze continues. “I bought the Roland V-Drums that day. The first time I sat down on the drums, I knew what I was doing. When you have made beats for so long, something is wrong if you don't know how the drums should sound. But you also need that coordination. I am no prodigy, but that coordination came naturally.”
TRACKS FLOW LIKE RIVERS
It would seem that many things, including native talent, coordination and a golden production touch, come naturally to Blaze. As well as producing the bulk of Jay-Z's last three records, he has created tracks for the Beastie Boys, Memphis Bleek, Busta Rhymes, Mariah Carey, DMX, Dr. Dre, EA Sports, Fabolous, Fat Joe, Freeway, Talib Kweli, Killah Priest, Nike, Diddy, Rhymefest, Beanie Sigel, Snoop Dogg, Usher, Kanye West…you get the picture.
Blaze has ridden a wave of success that began with his first Jay-Z commission, “Streets Is Talking,” back in 1999. Nowadays, he's adding finishing touches to his as yet unreleased masterwork, Saigon's The Greatest Story Never Told (Atlantic, 2007). Just as his drumming fetish (which found its way onto many songs, including Jay-Z's “Show Me What You Got”) has served to power drive some of his best-known tracks, Blaze is all about raising the stakes in the here and now on his first project as executive producer. With an eye toward his legacy, the 30-year-old New Jersey native talks about “creating a continuous, steady flow with no breaks between tracks” on Saigon's impending release. “It's not a hip-hop opera,” he explains, “but from an audio angle, I am just tired of hearing one song follow another.”
Blaze brings up three Saigon tracks, “Truth,” “Enemies” and “Friends,” on the studio's 48-channel SSL board. The tracks represent the song-morphing technique that may be Blaze's crowning achievement, which he likens to the digital facial blending first seen in Michael Jackson's video for “Black or White.”
“I wanted to apply that theory to music,” Blaze explains, “where all of a sudden one kick becomes another kick, where one string line became another in the middle of a song — a musical morphing thing. We haven't gotten it down 100 percent, but Ableton Live was the one program that allowed us to take our ideas and process them.”
The tracks boom through the studio's large custom Augspurger speakers. The music is dense and epic, not unlike Blaze's best Jay-Z work, but with a smokier, old-school edge. Just when you think the first song is over, production effects take hold: Instruments, vocals and beats twist and stretch into a slightly nauseating fissure, slowly creating the next track. The effect is unsettling. Your perceptions are manually adjusted, and along with it, a view of a possible audio future. Blaze credits working with Ableton Live and stems as key.
“Whenever I mix records,” Blaze illustrates, “instead of just recording to ½-inch or DAT, we make stems. With stems, after the record is mixed, we take every sound in the mix and rerecord it back into Pro Tools with its mixed levels and effects. So at the end of the day, you get a mixed multitrack. If you are mastering from multitrack, and the bottom end is lost when you compress, for instance, you can go back in and manually correct it.
“Let's say we are going to do a kicks stem,” he continues. “The song is mixed. Now we are soloing the kick and recording the output of the console, which is the mixed, compressed and EQ'd kick back into Pro Tools by itself. So you have the raw kick and the processed kick. Once you have repeated that for every instrument in the song, you strip away all the raw audio, and you have that same exact song mixed, but every sound is now separate. The next step was to take all those sounds and dump them into Ableton Live, which is a sequencer that also allows you to do independent pitch and tempo shifting for every track in the session. So I took the stem session I had in Pro Tools, which consisted of WAV files, and transferred them to Ableton Live; that gave me one set of stems for the song. You can draw another set of stems into Ableton as well. So now you have two songs with two mixed multitracks — your kick, snare, bass, samples, keys, all mixed in one session. Then I can start playing with that. The possibilities are endless. Say one song is 93 bpm; the other is 89. Doing it subtly, we can blend the songs together in Ableton, though I can't show you exactly how we did it!”
NONE OF THAT FAKE SH*T
Production on Saigon's album, which includes “some '70s hillbilly rock, gospel and soul samples and Japanese movie soundtracks,” Blaze says, is ongoing while he works on upcoming tracks for Memphis Bleek, Nas, Mario, Talib Kweli and a video game for Midway. Blaze's attention to detail is obvious in the Saigon tracks, and that same mindset permeates his working approach. If he can't clear base samples, as it so happened with Ghostface Killah's “The Champ,” Blaze will hire musicians to replay the music, then effect the results until they sound like samples. If Mr. T refuses to grant permission for his gruff vocal samples (as with Jay-Z's “Public Service Announcement”), Blaze will sing the parts himself. And if his own drum beats and MPC rhythms don't cut the mustard on their own (Jay-Z's “Show Me What You Got”), Blaze will bring in another drummer (production/musician collective 1500 or Nothing's Kenneth “Bam” Alexander) to flesh out the track. An accomplished drummer in his own right, Blaze goes all out to bust a groove — whatever it takes.
“When I am making my records, I always try to envision what the record would sound like if it was played live,” he explains. “I try to program with more of a live feel. The bass player and drummer should always be in the pocket together. I take those real-life concepts of what a band does and apply that when programming music. I don't use a fake hi-hat, for instance; I use a hi-hat that sounds real. Now that I have started playing the drums, I realize that some of my earlier ideas were right, and some were impractical, like three hi-hats being played simultaneously. But it has caused me to listen to music differently; I respect what those drummers we have sampled for years were doing. Listen to the drummer [Clyde Stubblefield] on James Brown's ‘Funky Drummer’ and try to replicate it; it is damn near impossible.”
That same careful attitude regarding beat/groove placement informs Blaze's use of the quantize function. Or not. “Quantizing is the computer just reinterpreting your groove for you,” Blaze states. “I don't like that. It does come in handy sometimes. Depends on the track. If I start with a sample, I may quantize that just because sometimes the original musicians on the sample were not in perfect time. There was no MIDI Clock in 1975. I will take a sample, chop it, rearrange it and maybe quantize that. But when I do drum overdubs, whether programmed or live, I keep all that freehand. If not, it sounds like a robot. It is a robot! It's a computer! These days, the drum patterns are so simple, quantized or not, who can tell the difference?”
While Blaze goes for an old-school analog sound and real-feel live quality, he no longer uses the MPC for beats. Even his most valuable vinyl record, Monty Stark's A Stark Reality, will be sampled via Native Instruments Battery 3, not the MPC.
“I am totally off the MPC,” Blaze proclaims. “Battery and Pro Tools finally got their MIDI stuff together. What makes the MPC work in hip-hop is that we like to use it to cut up phrases. You can take 10 different sections of a sample and play them live. Battery is Native's drum machine, and it plays back samples as well; it has 16 rows of pads just like the MPC. So Pro Tools is my sequencer, and Battery is like my MPC. What everyone loves about the MPC is that you can get so much done in the least amount of steps, and you don't need to read the manual. However, I know Pro Tools like the back of my hand, and their MIDI and processing is the same. And Battery is similar enough in concept to the MPC that I only had to rethink certain things. Once I got used to using the mouse, I was on the way.”
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