"UBER MC"

After Black Love ended, I moved into an apartment with my buddy Sharky. We moved into a place in North Hollywood but we were promptly asked to leave due to our late-night soirees, jamming on guitars with our friends while high, banging on makeshift bongos and singing songs about tacos.

We ended up in Sherman Oaks with a manager who played a mean electric guitar. Talk about kismet!

That was when the idea for Sherman Locs first germinated. Sharky left the apartment after a year to go work at a university in Spain, teaching conversational English. I ended up getting a one-bedroom place in the building and started creating a home studio.

I was working at the radio network, learning how to edit with audio programs such as Sound Forge. Sometimes they would sell used equipment, and I came up on some doozies: a 24-channel tascam mixing board and an 8-track reel-to-reel tape machine, all for the unbeatably low price of... $40! Yes, $40.

When I decided to upgrade my studio wares and go digital, I sold the board and the 8-track for $800 on eBay. That's a $760 profit!

My forte during the Black Love/Oral Syndrome years was making beats. Paulie would find the samples, I would supply the drum patterns. I became so good at making beats that, on occasion, I could fool real drummers by telling them the beats were made by hired session players. Sometimes I would spend hours with the headphones on tinkering with snares and bass drums, perfecting the rhythms and the nuances.

My drum machine of choice is the Boss Dr. Rhythm 770. An offshoot of the legendary Roland R-8, Dr. Rhythm provides an easy-to-use interface with user-friendly functions such as Real-Time Playback as well as a plethora of presets and drum sounds.

Yes, the MPC series is superior, but I like the Dr. Rhythm-- it's portable, hooks up easily to any recording scenario, and is MIDI compatible. The only way the MPC has a leg up on a regular drum machine is that the MPC is also a sequencer and a sampler. To equal this, I bought a cheap 8-bit DJ sampler and hooked it up to my drum machine. It did the job satisfactorily, although 8-bits is really nothing, fidelity-wise.

As I started to experiment with making my own beats and writing rhymes, I met up with Down Low. Sharky introduced us before he left to Spain, but it turned out that I knew Low's older brother in high school, and so we had a bit of a prior connection. Low plays guitar, and so at first the two of us were getting together, smoking kush mixed with a strain of pot known as "The Kevorkian". Our jams were stony and hazy, and we were churning out at least a song a day.

Then, one day, whilst drinking heavily, Low and I started to bust rhymes. Low had no experience other than years of internalizing the collected works of every great gangsta rapper from Tupac to Master P. Meanwhile, it was refreshing to be the better rapper for a change. It gave me confidence to try some of my written rhymes on for size. Our early sessions were comprised of Low and I trying to shock the other, or trying to make the other laugh.

After a while, as friends started to frequent the pad/studio, it seemed that almost everyone wanted a chance to bust out on the mic. Evenings spent hanging out and watching the Lakers evolved into freestyle sessions, and pretty soon Low and I were amassing more rhymes and beats than actual songs.

As a joke, we referred to ourselves as the Sherman Locs, which is funny if you know what Sherman Oaks is like. It's quite simply the least gangster part of the Valley, which has a rep for being hopelessly suburban and upwardly mobile as it is. The ghetto it is not, and the notion of gangster rappers in Sherman Oaks was too humorous for us to pass up.

Bro Man, always a huge rap fan and a connoisseur of spoken word, started sitting in on the sessions. As noted in an earlier post, Bro Man is not exactly the deftest rhymer out there. He takes long pauses between verses and breaks out laughing at some of the hyperbole (for a while he started every rap with a variation on the concept of being born in a mental institution) but his voice was great.

If only he had a sense of rhythm, I would say to myself whenever Bro Man took the mic. Then I remembered the late great Eazy-E, and how he didn't know how to rap until Dr. Dre and the rest of his NWA crew coerced him into learning the verses for what became the song "Boyz N Tha Hood". I suddenly had an idea: if I could record Bro Man's flows onto my 4-track recorder and then dump his vocal track into a program like Pro Tools or Wavelab, I could edit his raps and make them on time. Then, he could take copies of the tracks home and learn them as if he were listening to his favorite rap CD or cassette.

And so the idea of The Syllabeast came about. And now, I give Bro Man "MC homework" so that he can bone up on his skills. I want to create an Uber MC, a Frankenstein monster who can rap.

This is my mission, my goal. If I can make Bro Man a better rapper, then my work on this planet is done and I can die a fulfilled human being.