What
made you want to start making your own reggae
tunes, to make the transition from fan to music
maker? How did you go about writing/building
rhythms at that early stage? What gear were you
using at this time?
I
had picked up bass guitar when I was 15, but it
wasn’t for reggae, I never took it seriously but
always had the bass guitar around, I got into
reggae by the time I was 17 but it wasn’t until
much later that I got into making the music, when
I was about 24 I started messing with couple of
cassette decks, transforming dubs, things like
`king tubby`s meets the rockers uptown` and
`cultures - 
peace truce` some others too, then I see in a
magazine about these cheap 4 track recorders and
drum machines so I bought a tascam 244 and a
roland drumatix, to be honest the drumatix sounded
rubbish to me but it was a starting point, almost
all my early efforts were rebuilds of favorite
rhythm tracks, a little later I got myself a
better drum machine, a hammond dpm, it had
individual outs and it sounded better, for fx I
had a roland spring reverb box and an aria (dx1000
?) digital delay....I started getting a little
better at building the riddims and then my brother
came in, he could play rhythm and lead guitar, and
we’d share things like melodica and percussion,
I had two cheap (CHEAP) keyboards, some cheezy
Casio with a 1 sec sampler, it must’ve been
about 1bit in quality, it was crap, and a Yamaha
s01 synth, also crap but at the time I didn’t
have money for anything better, still we did our
best with these things, a little later still I did
get a seck 12/8/2 mixer to use rather than the
inbuilt mixer on the tascam 244...we started to
hear about Shaka, we knew of him before, had some
of his records but was never amongst the sound
system scene, at that time it was very underground
and mostly a black thing, anyways we heard some
session tapes and the power and vibe that was on
them gave us some inspiration so I tried to
emulate it in our recordings...the roland spring
had a whole heap of inputs and outputs and I was
able to send the whole mix back through it, out of
it and into a guitar amp that was mic`d up and
sent back into the mix, heavily eq`d, and it gave
it a crashing live sound system kinda sound, or at
least that’s how we heard it.
|
