Slave

Since upgrading to the magic, wonderful and fantastic Reason 6the already awesome arsenal of music tools at my disposal has been topped off with the ability to sample (for which I have waited ever since moving from Impulse Tracker to Reason). This has finally brought back an old friend of me: remixing.

This time, I decided to pay homage to an incredible artist: miss Grace Jones. While walking in my hometown on an unscheduled journey through the cold, I flicked trough my entire iPod library and stumbled across an old, but never forgotten, classic; “Slave to the rhythm”. The pure excellence of the track could not be matched, but I thought I could at least try to give the track a facelift remix to accompany it in the 21st century, by throwing it in with a set of synthesizers I had been working on a while. After fiddling with it for hours, I could not get it right. Until I dropped a drumcomputer into the rack : my ‘Jeff Porcaro Kit’. A set I had I recently constructed, inspired by Porcaro’s legendary drumming. Basically, the drum arrangement you hear is the very same set up as Jeff’s performance on Bozz Scaggs’ track ‘Lowdown’. I must have listened to that track a thousand times, trying to get the shuffle, the hats, snare, kick and – more importantly – the timing just right. It proved to be a good combination (in my opinion) and I very much like how it turned out. Frankly; I think this is my best (musical) work to date.

Have a listen using the player below, or go to soundcloud.com/c_kick/slave

Or, hosted at totalleh.com:

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