Take one musician more versed than a collection of sonnets. Add one MC who rips tougher than a phone book. Throw them in an industry think-tank devoid of artist development and full of MySpace rappers.
A dash of humor. A sprinkle of throwback. Stir.
Such is the recipe for Zo! And Tigallo Love the ’80s, a joint project with Detroit native musician Zo! and Little Brother emcee Phonte. The piping hot result is a set of yesteryear covers crafted to perfection without straying into the overly produced.
With no effective blueprint for the industry to subscribe to for signing and squandering talent, Zo! and Phonte were afforded the opportunity to (-gasp-) actually make music. There were no rules and they could develop and push their project however they saw fit — which lead to individually numbered, autographed, limited quantity CDs with a compact but muscular play list.
I recently caught up with Phonte online and asked him about the decisions he and Zo! made for putting out the record.
“It just came from me looking at the marketplace and seeing niggas complain about buying CD’s, but then turn around and spend $400 on a pair of exclusive limited edition dunks,” he said. “I just wanted to bring some sort of excitement back to music. You’re not just buying a CD… you’ve become one of the few…the proud….the Zo! and Tigallonians. *salutes* I’m trippin… we don’t salute…. lemme do this right… *sprays activator*”
The project more or less began as an often revisited discussion about music, including ’80s favorites. The conversations snowballed into equal parts creation, friendly one-up-man-ship and personal conditioning.
“With each song, I just took time to figure out how I would voice it to make it fit in a modern-day context,” he said. “Because these were ’80s songs, a lot of ‘em had vocal effects that sound dated now… real heavy reverbs and shit like that… so I just had to sit back and play with different vocal styles to see how I’d make it work.”
Phonte credits sound engineer Khrysis with being his “right ear in the studio.” Together they learned the unpleasantries of voice alteration for the computery stylings of Tay Pain on the track “Steppin’ Out 2008.”
A Cliff Noted lesson on alteration:
1) Vocoder – Allows an instrument to sing. Requires you to play an instrument well. Not an option.
2) Talkbox – Also requires instrumentation. Not an option.
3) Autotune – Championed by folks who can’t sing worth a damn live, i.e. T-Pain. An option… but…
4) Pitch Corrector – Championed by female vocalists operating under the guise they can sing live. Creates the Cher-effect, if used correctly. Ding!
Phonte sang all of his vocals straight, sent the tracks out for pitch correction, and got them sent directly back because he had sung too well (Phonte can saaang… in case you haven’t noticed.) He rerecorded the tracks a little left of kilter and sent them out again.
“Soooooooo… he sends the joint back to me and it has the effect on it. BUT… the computer only recognizes key… it doesn’t recognize individual notes. So that meant that me and Khrysis had to go through and match EVERY NOTE to the right pitch of Zo’s instrumental. THAT. SHIT. TOOK. HOURS.”
Thus deaded Tay Pain — activator to activator, dust to dust — after his one and only appearance.
“I ain’t never doin that shit again.”
The next day I spoke with Zo! on the phone about the laboriousness of getting his tracks right and what drove both he and Phonte through the process. Read the rest of this entry »
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