Pro Techniques from Daddy Kev

Pro Techniques 7.2003

By Randy Alberts


	Daddy Kev

Following Mikah 9's lilting up- and downward jazz vocalese arpeggios as he shadows a piano line is enough to make any listener feel better. Especially if that listener is Daddy Kev, who produced, played, and recorded everything else on this underground classic, "First Things First," which reflects this southern Californian DJ's jazz, R&B, and hip-hop upbringing.

"I surrounded myself with old-school jazz people when I started taking production seriously," recalls Kev of his time spent with such legendary players as Los Angeles jazz drummer Billy Higgins. "Billy was over 60, and he'd played with everybody. He passed away two years ago, but he really pushed me in this direction before he left. Also, people like JMD — who used to play with folks like Horace Tapscott and Sun Ra — really impressed me with that tradition, and inspired me to keep it moving on."

Undergrounded For Others
Daddy Kev co-founded the popular Celestial Recordings, and produced many of the label's classic hip-hop records at his Echo Chamber Studios. He has produced and collaborated with a who's who of underground hip-hop world: Freestyle Fellowship, Abstract Rude, Supernatural, AWOL One, Busdriver, D-Styles, Slug, Eyedea, Living Legends, Phoenix Orion, Sole, and Dose One, among many others.

Pro Technique 1 —
Dynamic tempo changes with a "homemade" relative grid system
If you sometimes create songs with the bpm (beats per minute) changing every measure, half measure, or even within every beat, then you're thinking like Daddy Kev does at the outset of a composing session. He explains that his initial abstract compositional approach to a song often includes enough dynamic bpm changes to render the bpm virtually incalculable, and the song a free-form, third-stream jazz adventure.

"Sounds clashing with other sounds, that's what it is," says Kev. "The more I got into losing structure with regards to bpm, the more I hit a wall with the grid. If you're going to keep it in grid mode, then you really need to plan out your tempo changes ahead of time. My composition process often doesn't have it planned out like that. I'm composing and pushing things together in order to find what sounds good together."

Kev explains that he builds his own custom grids for each song by placing markers by hand within a given groove or loop. With drums, for example, he'll figure out how many measures a loop should extend, and then copy, paste, and move 16 bars of drums together.

"At the beginning of each one of these cuts, for each measure, I insert a marker," Kev continues. "At any point in a session, you have your normal grid that's locked to a session start time of zero. It's always locked to where the session begins. This relative grid allows me to just slide something in right where it starts, without being too concerned yet about all the tempo changes in a song."


	Kev's own relative grid system Click to enlarge

"Let's say I want the grid to start at exactly 13.329 seconds. I want that to now be zero, and to start over at this new zero. You can't reset your bar count, because it always has to start from absolute zero no matter what. At this point it's really good to be able to have a marker set up at your new zero, so you can line things up with no cares about staying on a grid or in a particular set bpm. Without a relative grid, it's almost impossible to do one whole section at a time like this. I would have needed multiple sessions for one song to accomplish the same type of dynamic tempo changes. This way, I can have as many as 16 markers per measure."

Start with a drum or melodic loop, one bar or longer.
In Shuffle mode, copy and paste the loop so the files are placed next to one another linearly, 16 in a row.
Select the first loop and insert a marker at the very beginning. Then skip perhaps four measures down and insert another marker at the beginning of that loop. With these markers in place, it's easy to determine the length of time between one bar and another.
Pitch-shift and/or time-stretch melodic parts to fit into the region you're working in.

Pro Technique 2 —
Experimenting with melodic elements in free-form hip-hop
Daddy Kev typically uses this Pro Technique next in his early free-form composition process. He zooms in very close to the drum part he's created, and becomes "intentionally unintentional" in his melodic sample placements. It's subtle, but noticeable, how he offsets by up to 20 milliseconds to add a sense of tension and resolution to his hip-hop mixes.

To get a better sense of this technique, listen to the concept album Slanguage, by AWOL One, which was produced by Kev. AWOL One's voice drifts beautifully over a droning musical bed with a completely different feel.

"You're just hearing elements being dropped in and dragged around. One sound here, a swoosh there," says Kev. "Those are my free drum performances, over which you can hear the dissonant melodic parts somehow coming together. That album is my opus. It's the work I'm most proud of now. Things are not too offbeat and random, and there is a method to the madness. Using Pro Tools, I'm trying to incorporate that MPC-like live feel of hitting the pads and triggering samples just a little off the beat."

Once Kev realizes he's going to keep a certain part, he clones it and pastes it with the markers intact before moving on to build another element in the track. He never knows what will happen next, which is a very good thing.

"It just works, as strange as that sounds," Kev concludes. "I'm not always playing the lottery with Pro Tools like that, so to speak, by just dropping stuff in and not caring where it ends up. This is just a rudimentary composition phase that eventually evolves into something more structured and focused and intentional. It's not random anymore at that point. But that first spark of 'OK, that sounds good' — that's where I'm working in the first stages of a song's creation."

Establish a looped rhythm pattern as short as four bars to create a pocket that will be central to a song or movement.
Select a series of melodic samples you're willing to roll the dice with: for example, bass, piano samples, or just a couple of piano notes stacked somewhere within the session.
Grab one sample or loop at a time and drag it over an actively playing rhythm loop as randomly as possible — but with intention.
Blur eyes slightly when dragging and dropping samples.

"I'm trying not to be intentional; that's why I sometimes even blur my eyes a bit, so as not to see where I'm placing a part within a song. Often it's not going to sound good, and may take as many as ten or 20 random placements before your drop sounds perfect. But you feel it when it's hittin' — it just feels good, and never sounds contrived or tight. It sounds right."