J-Zone on Black Moon’s ‘Enta Da Stage,’ Homemade Time-Stretching, and Sampling from Cassettes
The origins of this interview go back to late 2011/early 2012. After finishing a two year graduate program while working full-time, I was miserable in a new teaching job. Between a two hour commute and a domineering supervisor who hated me, work life consisted of fear and stress. I started dating my wife, which helped me keep my sanity, but in terms of career self-esteem, things were pretty bad.
During this time I read Root for the Villain, a hilarious autobiography about author/drummer/rapper/producer J-Zone’s trails and tribulations in the music biz. In addition to the stories of J’s time as a studio engineer for Vance Wright and his gut-wrenching retelling of tours and shows gone bad, the book contains a great deal of wisdom for people interested in pursuing a job in the arts. Anyone who has tried to make a career of something they love and failed will relate to the frustrations that J expresses in the book. At a time when my teaching career felt hopeless and I was in a creative rut, the book inspired me and helped reignite my passion for reading and writing.
I was so fired up after reading the book that I asked J if I could interview him via Twitter. What follows is a modified version of our three-part interview that I published in March of 2013. You can read all three parts here. In this portion of the interview J explains his love of cassette tapes and the process of sampling from a cassette with an E-mu SP-1200. J always does a great job breaking down his creative process and I love studying his methods of utilizing defunct media, half-broken equipment, and his basement studio to create great music. He never complains about his lack of new, shiny gear. He works with the tools he has.
It is worth noting that although Root for the Villain was supposed to act as a goodbye letter to the rap game, something amazing and unexpected happened after the book’s publication. J-Zone is achieving newfound success as a break record creator, drummer, and producer. In fact, one of his beats was selected for the first episode of the final season of American Idol. Kudos to J-Zone for not giving up and continuing to grind. Because of him I will always root for the villain.
“The hardest thing about finding samples on cassettes is that you have to listen to everything. You can’t skip around the way you do with records. But then you don’t miss anything.”
Gino: I have a friend who runs a tape only label. Some of the people he works with say that tapes, when done right, sound better than vinyl. Do you have any opinions on that?
J-Zone: I always say vinyl, but it depends on how it’s mastered. Anyone who’s a collector can tell you that Cold Chillin’ and Tommy Boy vinyl albums are notoriously horrible. My cassette version of 3 Feet High and Rising sounded better than the vinyl, obviously. Usually, I like the sound of vinyl the best. But if the vinyl ain’t done right…cassettes, when they’re in good shape, sound great.
With analog, it will distort a little bit when you pump the volume, but it’s not like digital where if you go over, it will clip immediately. With cassettes, you want the levels to jump in the red a little bit. It almost gives it a sound like it’s compressed or it’s on the radio when you jam it plus two or plus four in the red and it’s jumping a little bit. A cassette where everything is under zero at all times is going to sound airy and kind of shitty. But when you pump it right, it gives it a full sound.
I don’t even think store bought cassettes manage to get the full, maximum sound. On a lot of tapes, they were trying to avoid distortion when mass-producing them. When I make cassettes at home, I get the good Maxell and record the vinyl to cassette. You can kind of control the volume and how you pump it. It sounds really dope. If you have a high bias blank tape and you have the record levels jumping in the red a little bit, you can get a really warm sound. With digital, you’re not getting the full dynamics. A lot of times I would sample stuff, put it on cassette, and then sample the cassette back just to get a little bit of warmth to it. I was using an MPC which isn’t as warm as the SP-1200. So a lot of times, samples that were really clean, I would run them through a good cassette deck.
“A lot of times I would sample stuff, put it on cassette, and then sample the cassette back just to get a little bit of warmth to it.”
Gino: It’s interesting that you bring up sampling cassettes. In Brian Coleman’s interview with Da Beatminerz from Check The Technique, they said they couldn’t afford a lot of big break records at the time Enta Tha Stage came out. Some of the samples they used for that album were cassette copies of big-time records.
J-Zone: That makes sense. At that time, if you were trying to look for drums and go outside of the ultimate breaks and beats series, you were using drums like “Power of Zeus” or “Get Out My Life Woman”. If you went to the Roosevelt Record Fair, those records would be between 50 and 200 bucks. I didn’t have a DAT player and CD burning wasn’t the thing yet. So I used to go tape samples from people. When I worked for Vance Wright at his studio, he had a lot of records I didn’t have. I would tape shit from Vance, take it home, and sample from the tape. I still do that.
When I was making beats all the time, sometimes I would sample Indian music. A lot of Indian music is on tape. You can go down to Indian neighborhoods in the East Village and they have cassettes. The hardest thing about finding samples on cassettes is that you have to listen to everything. You can’t skip around the way you do with records. But then you don’t miss anything. Cassettes never ever fell out of my production process or the way I listen to music. I use cassettes as much now as I did in 89, 94, or 2002. It has never fluctuated or tapered. Obviously, as time went on, you get CDs more because they put CD players in cars. I use ITunes and Serato, so I embrace the other technology. But cassettes have never been obsolete to me.
“Cassettes never ever fell out of my production process or the way I listen to music. I use cassettes as much now as I did in 89, 94, or 2002. It has never fluctuated or tapered.”
Gino: I’m curious about sampling from cassette. Before reading the Black Moon interview and talking with you, that was something I hadn’t considered. Is this a common thing for producers to do?
J-Zone: I would say now, it’s not as common as sampling vinyl. Back in the day though, a lot of albums would do small issues on cassette. They’d actually be easier to find than the vinyl. For instance, Dorothy Ashby, the jazz harpist, did a record called Afro-Harping from like 1970. I found the cassette for 2 bucks, sealed. This was probably in the early 90’s. It was used on the Mecca and the Soul Brother album. When Pete Rock was hot, everybody was going out and trying to snatch up shit he was using. They figured it had other stuff or they thought they could use what he sampled better. So his samples were in demand. I found Afro-Harping on cassette and I never found the vinyl until years later.
The problem with sampling from cassette is that if you were using the SP, you can’t change the speed on cassette. You can’t speed it up so that you can sample more of it with the SP and you only have 10 seconds of memory. I used to high speed dub one cassette to another so that I could sample the tape’s high speed dubbing. It would sound like chipmunk shit and I’d slow it way back down. I’d actually be able to squeeze more time into the sample by doing that. You sample it and slow it down little by little. You gotta piece it down because it’s really fast. I would be able to squeeze two loops into the SP-1200, which was uncanny at the time.
“I used to high speed dub one cassette to another so that I could sample the tape’s high speed dubbing. It would sound like chipmunk shit and I’d slow it way back down.”
Gino: Like homemade time stretching.
J-Zone: Exactly. The sound quality would deteriorate, but during that era…There was a small time where sound quality was king in hip hop. I would say after The Chronic came out, everybody got overly concerned with sound quality. Tribe’s albums were also really well mixed. But I was never competing on that level, so I didn’t care (laughs). By the end of the 90’s, you had Doom and all the DIY shit on Fondle ’Em that was coming out. That was done on 4-track. Now we’re in an era where nobody even cares. We’re in an iPod generation. It’s not like you’re making music for jeeps anymore where you’re trying to EQ an 808 or filter something the right way. People just throw shit out. I always try to keep good quality to my music, but my sampling methods are very lo-fi. I never sample in stereo, I sample cassettes a lot, and I never clean my records off before I use them. I just like that whole raw approach.
“I never sample in stereo, I sample cassettes a lot, and I never clean my records off before I use them. I just like that whole raw approach.”
Gino: As someone who loves listening to a lot of different producers, I do like a lot of stuff that people like Timberland and Kanye make. But I love the gritty sound. Some of my favorite RZA stuff is his early, grimy work. I also appreciated Company Flow’s style of sampling. I think there is an era of people who, if you grew up listening to it, you’re always going to like stuff that doesn’t sound perfect. I know Prince Paul has said that there’s something good about a dusted out sample that comes off of an imperfect record.
J-Zone: Yeah. Prince Paul, The Beatnuts, 45 King…those guys would take those imperfections and make it work.
Gino: The Beatminerz said in that interview I referenced that they were praised for the gritty, dirty sound of Enta Da Stage, which in many ways was due to the cassettes they sampled. They were definitely using their limitations to foster creativity.
J-Zone: Yeah, exactly…making something out of nothing. That album was full of hiss. You could tell they used a lot of cassette and analog. It was super bass heavy, but at times it was really quiet and you knew that if they would have tried to bump the volume it would distort. A song like the bonus cut “Slave” has so much hiss and it’s so low, but it’s bass heavy. If they would have tried to max the volume out, it would have pumped way too far into the red. “How Many MC’s” is probably the only song on the album that is the mix standard. Everything else sounds like it was done on a 4-track, but that’s what made it cool.
“Everything else sounds like it was done on a 4-track, but that’s what made it cool.”
If you enjoyed this interview, check out the companion piece for some J-Zone cassette tape recommendations.
Connect with J-Zone on Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, and Twitter @jzonedonttweet.
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