Corner copia ft. taelor gray by alert312 & eb83
Corners are important places in cities.
They’re local landmarks. Mico meeting places. Memories’ melting pots.
And if you’ve listened to Alert312’s music before you may have noticed that corners and neighborhoods are important to us as well.
Hollywood and Ashland.
Edgewater.
The list can go on.
And Corner Copia ft Taelor Gray continues in this vein.
It’s two MC’s from their respective city corners - Chicago, IL and Columbus, OH respectively - waxing poetic about God, His salvation, and His goodness.
As I’ve mentioned before, Esteban and I desired to approach eb83 music from a place of ease and a sense of simplicity. We wanted the process to be low friction, organic, and loose, with the results being top shelf, high caliber and excellent. It sounds easy enough but in many ways it isn’t.
In order to attempt to create in this manner we had to keep ourselves accountable in 2 ways:
First: We had to tell ourselves not to get in the way.
As Alert312 we had a major compulsion to overwork our songs. We would continue to add and add and add thinking we were making something better because more things were happening more often. We would label it as ‘different’, ‘complex’ or ‘creative’. Nah, most of the time we were just doing the most. And in hindsight some songs would’ve been much better off stripped back and simplified. I spoke about this bad habit previously in another post.
And Second: If we were serious about a simple, loose and low friction creative process, with high quality results, that meant we had to create with high quality ‘ingredients’ from the start. The raps had to be clear, well written and performed well. And frankly, the music had to be dope. And in order for that to happen, we had to work on our craft. Because with simplicity and minimalism there is no room to hide. If the raps are bad you can’t hide behind a singer. And if the music is wack you can’t hide behind the veil of live instruments and‘complex arrangements.
What that meant for me, in returning to making strictly sample-based music for eb38 I had to intently train my ear to listen again. The ear is the tell of a truly great sample based producer.
The way one hears a snippet of music - mere seconds - to then transform it into a whole new arrangement is a mysterious gift. And it varies from producer to producer. The way Pete Rock hears music is different from the way Q Tip hears music. And Alchemist hears music different from the way Dilla heard music.
So when I began to listen again, I gave myself very clear guidelines for what kind of music would be used as samples.
No sample packs or pre-made, pre-curated samples are allowed. No Splice. No Output Arcade. Not even Tracklib. All the music sampled had to be discovered and heard by my ears or Esteban’s ears.
The music had to be - at a minimum - at least 25 years old. No music allowed after the year 2000.
The music had to come from Latin American countries. I really wanted to showcase that latin music was soulful, diverse and a treasure trove. And that it was more than the occasional salsa horn shimmy with a trap loop.
I’ll be honest though, number 3 was a hard principle to keep because some pieces of music are just too good to pass on when you hear them. So a couple of songs in this eb83 batch of music were sourced from places outside Latin America, but the soul is still there, that's for sure.
I say all of this because ‘Corner Copia’ is a prime example of the simple, easy, low friction workflow, yet high caliber result ethos of eb83 music. Esteban’s raps were personal, poignant, and God glorifying while the track met all three points of my sample criteria. Bottom line - it was just plain dope.
The sample itself is a 1976 latin pop-rock crossover attempt from the Fania catalogue. It’s a true case study on how musical genres cross and merge and influence each other. Because even though Fania was a latin music record label famous for exporting massive salsa classics, their artists were simultaneously making music reflective of their soul and rock influences of the moment. This record being one of them. It’s a slow dance jam reminiscent of the artist's doowop upbringing. The song has a soulful 2 and 4 sway effortlessly carried by the drums with sprinkled support by timbales. But when the 3:30 minute hits the band shifts from slow jam to salsa all while seamlessly keeping time. Corner Copia’s musical source material was top shelf.
In fact the sample was so good, once it was chopped it barely needed work.
I duplicated the chop and filtered the bass frequencies.
Sequenced a kick and a snare.
But snare began to feel like too much, so I gave it a hi hat on the two and four instead.
And the track you hear today is the demo I made on the first day.
The icing on the cake is that the day Taelor Gray heard the loop - he wanted to be on the track.
