Benjamin Santiago's AKA$HIC RECORDINGS

beat of the week no.028. Queen of Virginia

This beat and its name were inspired by Majella Zeze Diamond, otherwise known as theQueen of Vagina (thanks to The Bonezone for finding this, check Homezone no.2 for that). The energy of her music is so weird and confused, a little bit like Wesley Willis. I was trying to get there but with a little bit of a southern rap tinge.

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.027. Cinq Alive

The name of this beat comes from the fact that it is in 5/4. Nothing too crazy, but I generally think in odd time signatures. The actual phrase is from a skit on SNL where southern ladies ask for Five Alive in France (I can’t find it on youtube, but Wikipedia confirms it exists).

I originally wanted to do a drum sound made from the instrument in Live called Tension (which simulates stringed instruments), but later just added some more regular drums into the mix. 

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.026. Keep it Grrly

The title of this beat is just supposed to be a play on the idea of keeping it “gully” Not sure why though.

Didn’t have much of an aim or an inspiration with this guy, just kind of approached it organically.

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.025. Crystal Healer

The name of this one is because it sounds a little cheese to me, but not in a bad or ironic way. I think it is mainly the delayed 808. It just sounds like a dude who is into crystals trying to be relevant. In particular, I remember hearing at one point that on one of Yes’ latter tours Jon Anderson reserved a special tent that was full of crystals and he could absorb their energy.

The guitar part came from another one that had the same chords but a different feel. That one sounded more like a Dave Matthews Band song (Satellite). The one present here is more of a bad Allan Holdsworth impression. The lead part I am actually pretty proud of, it was a different line, that I cute up into little bits, and triggered the parts individually (kind of in an MPC style). The sound I got is from taking a reverb turning up the decay/time of the reverb and then placing it in front of the amp and a distortion pedal (in this case it was Guitar Rig’s facsimile of a ProCo Rat).

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.024.Saturday Night Stay-cation

The name of this beat comes from a purposeless mixing of the title of the game Saturday Night Slammasters…and just the word staycation. No real meaning there. Saturday Night Slammasters (if you haven’t heard of it, it is a Capcom wrestling-based fighting game, that features Mike Haggar, who you probably know from Final Fight) was always funny to me because of how thinly veiled the homoeroticism is, even in the title. It just sounds like a bunch of buff dudes in a scary basement getting oiled up and doing poppers. The Japanese version is even worse, it is called Muscle Bomber - The Body Explosion. I find stay-cation funny because when the economy was worse they kept floating this word around to make the economic collapse cute or something.

I put two funny things together.

The music just uses the vocal sample I’ve been using a lot recently. The only thing that may stand out is that I tried to make the reverb on the drums a little more nuanced to help the drums sound a bit more real. 

This beat was made with Ableton Live.

beat of the week no.023. Turd Blossom Cutter

The name of this beat comes from Bush II’s affectionate nickname for Karl Rove and a colloquialism for a butthole. Which I guess was an inadvertent way of linking the fake country sound of the music and the fake countrified quality of George Bush (he’s from Maine).

Musically I wanted to do both an extended mix and include a guitar part that had two handed tapping. Both of those things are present here.

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.22. (F)LOWBEE

The name of this track is just a (dumb) play on words. In an effort to play guitar parts in a lower register without getting a baritone, 7 or 8 String guitar, I just tune the low E string down to B. This creates a fortuitous situation if you are playing in a B-related key (In this case B Minor…I guess relative to D, but there isn’t much else going on so it doesn’t really matter). Another thing I have been doing is randomizing several parts to create more dynamic sequences out of simpler sets of parts. Here I basically take a relatively simple drum track, duplicate and freeze it and then use the resulting audio file to warp it and create a bunch fills/noise. These are randomly launched and gives the feeling like there is much more going on.

This beat was created with Ableton Live and Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.021. Monte Cristo

A Monte Cristo (sandwich) is too much. It represents crossing the border into excess. It is also delicious. Lately I’ve been experimenting a lot with double tracking the guitars and drums and it has been a pain to actually mix it together in a way that doesn’t sound like d00d00. It also tends to hinder me a bit with the very rare awkwardness of switching between composing and arranging in Ableton Live (if you’re familiar with Live, what I mean is that I will often start writing something, be satisfied and make a second or third part. I then have to arrange them together and I might create a basic arrangement. If I go in and add another part that maybe requires a slight variation I will often have to go back and change the arrangement, which is not a terrible hassle but a little counter intuitive at times)

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do is to take one phrase and then just alter the voices performing the melody and background. This is kind of what Zappa does in Peaches en Regalia, which is probably where I got the idea. I also wanted to have the different parts a little more refined since there would not be a “B part” that had different chords or a significantly different dynamic. I did this by making a few variations on the melody and drum parts and then had them be randomly selected in Live.

This beat was made in Ableton Live with the synths and samples internal to it and Native Instruments’ awesome VST plugin Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.020. Night Lite.

This one I just wanted to play a little bit with Guitar Rig’s Harmonic Synthesizer which is based on EHX Micro Synthesizer (used on the main guitar line). It is pretty subtle but still there. These airy/sparse ones don’t get seem to get much love but I am into them.

The name is just because it sound dark. 

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig.