Behind the Beat - “Dollarcab Redux”
Or “There and Back Again…”
“This beat is very nostalgic for me, in terms of its sound and in terms of its lived history.”
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The Source
It took several years for “Dollarcab Redux” to see the light of day. It started with a short keyboard idea I put together in my old Chicago apartment back in 2016. It sat in digital purgatory on an SD card in a JamMan Loop pedal until I stumbled upon it again in 2020, practicing guitar over another loop.
The Source:
Back in Chicago, I was just beginning to turn music from a hobby into something more. All of my gear was set up in a closet because there was no room for it anywhere else. Hour after hour was spent barefoot on the creaky hardwood floor trying to find my sound…and failing.
The Ghostface poster was motivation, but I was far from being the next RZA.
I was working on the basics and trying to fulfill a creative need. Experimenting with recording and sampling techniques was my main focus, which served to sharpen my playing skills and chord theory, but any beat that sounded good around this time was surely accidental. I recorded what would become the keyboard part for Dollarcab Redux in this closet, set it to some rudimentary D’Angelo inspired drums, that I re-sampled through a tape deck (as seen in photo above) to get some warmth and grit. After the basic beat was “done”, I moved on to other ideas for 4-ish years. I was pretty jazzed about it, but didn’t really know what to do with it.
On the Road:
After I moved from Chicago I hit the road, living out of the van (again), working odd jobs, and digging for records all over the USA. In this span of time, I released the first two “Holodeck Beats” installments, linked up with Guilty Simpson to record “Actus Reus”, and improved my beat game exponentially. By the end of 2019 I was hitting my stride as a producer and ready to grind out a few more solo releases and collaboration albums throughout 2020. If I could sum up this era of my career with one phrase it would be “pull over, I have to pee.”, I mean, “trial and error”.
This machine had some city miles on it. I took it across the lower 48 and only had to fight one carjacker.
The Process:
I was tired of sampling vinyl and wanted to get back to original compositions. One day, while practicing guitar, I chanced upon the forgotten keyboard part. I loved it, even more than I did when I made it. It was like meeting an old friend, but in a good way, not the terribly embarrassing way. It begged to be finished and released.
I applied my newly developed beat skills and blended some samples into the mix to give it some extra “guramba”:
The Drums: I completely re-did the drums. The pattern is about the same as the original, just better mixed and higher quality samples were used. The hats are layered and panned. The drum samples provide a bit of the vinyl sound you hear on the record, along with the accents. You can hear a bit more vinyl grit when the organ and voices come in.
Keyboard Sample: The original keyboard part was a bit thin sounding. It was played on a Casio WK-3300 E-Piano setting and recorded into a JamMan loop pedal, so it’s not any fancy top of the line synth or VST and the loop pedal records at CD quality. Reverb was added to give it a stereo spacial presence.
Vocal Accents: The vocal accents come from several different records. The vocal accents were pitched to the sample using the trusty speed knob and my soon to be not-so-trusty ears. A little reverb was added for presence and atmosphere. These are here to add depth to the beat and also can act as bar counting points for an emcee. When you hear the female voice count “1, 2, 3” you’re at 16 bars and the organ comes in acting as a hook melody. The woman’s voice counting in at 16 bars was found at Płyty Gramofonowe in Warsaw, Poland. I flew all the way to Poland to find a record of a lady counting to three.
Synth Accents and Organ Hook: These synth accents are discoverable in your local dollar bin. They add melodic depth and act as a friendly 8 bar reminder for the emcee. The organ hook was taken from the most useful record I’ve ever purchased, and it was in a dollar bin. I got both records for these accent samples at Record City in Las Vegas. There was a really cool guy there digging and he chatted with me a bit about music and the type of equipment I used. I left a copy of “Actus Reus” with the staff for him to grab later. Great shop. Nice people.
Orphaned records hoping to find purpose again.
The Result:
Dollarcab Redux is finally a finished beat and it’s the second single from Holodeck Beats: Program 3. Way back when I first recorded the keyboard melody, I would never believe you if you told me that I would be releasing music with some of my favorite rappers and that this idea would make it on an album. This beat is very nostalgic for me, in terms of its sound and in terms of its lived history.
The name of the beat, “Dollarcab Redux”, came from a friend of mine who was an OG Brooklynite during the rise of hip-hop. He ran a clothing shop I used to hang in as a kid, and he had tons of stories from the “good old days”. The name comes from unlicensed cabs in New York and it was also the name of Special Ed’s studio. The original idea was titled “Dollarcab”, but since the new version is updated I added “Redux” to the title, meaning “brought back”, since the beat was resurrected from an all but forgotten corner of my musical past. There was a scratch sample from Special Ed’s “Lyrics” but it got removed from the final version. Maybe I will add the original version to a physical release someday.
