Slackline Radio: Greetings, chuckee. Let our readers know a little about how you started producing in 2015?
Chuckee: Yo, happy to be here, thanks for inviting me. So how it all took off was, I got started deejaying when I was in middle school when the whole EDM craze that started around 2010 happened. Dudes like Skrillex, Cotts & Ravine, all the Monstercat compilations, Funky Panda uploads and deadmau5 blowing up, stuff like that. It didn’t take long for me to go from playing tracks I ripped from music blogs on my secondhand, royal purple HP laptop with the overheated Intel i3, to wanting to be the one actually making the tracks. Matter of fact, the first stuff I produced was really, really awful French house on a cracked version of FL Studio 7. I was just hardcore biting off of The Phantom’s Revenge and Go Go Bizkitt, I was and still am a huge fan of both.
Sometime after that, I got super heavy into vaporwave when I was 14-ish around 2013 and I got some buzz off of it in the online forums I used to post my jams to, so I kept it going for a couple of years. There’s a lotta stuff about the way vaporwave artists utilize samples to construct a mood and a feeling that even now I still really dig and respect. It’s the almost the opposite from how we do it in hip-hop. Where we cloak and manipulate stuff we sample to make it as different from the source material as we can, the appeal and the point of vaporwave is to use stuff that’s so blatantly recognizable that the feeling you get from listening to it comes from memories you might have from when you originally heard it. To this day, I carry some of that with me in how I put together songs. Vaporwave is ill.
The big turning point was one Christmas Eve when I heard wun two’s penthouse for the first time.
It was around midnight and I couldn’t sleep cuz I was too excited (still like that at 26 years old, go figure) and I remember just browsing around YouTube and seeing this black cover with a cat in a windowsill on the front. Shit was mad intriguing. Then I pressed play and it was literally like a switch flipped inside my head right then and there, like “this is what I wanna make”. From the artwork, to the atmosphere, the way that samples were intentionally laid back into the mix and how the drums snapped and thumped, I’d never heard anyone put beats together like that before. I begged my parents to get me an Akai MPD18 for Christmas and after that, I set up a separate SoundCloud page for my hip-hop stuff away from what was my main page for vaporwave and called myself chuckee. I never looked back.
Slackline Radio: And what’s the backstory on the name?
Chuckee: As a kid, I loved the Kenan & Kel show that used to get re-ran on Nickelodeon. Kel’s character used to have a thing about loving orange soda, and as a kid it made me love orange soda too. And to add on, one of the biggest influences on me when I started making hip-hop was beatboxbandit. So when it was time for me to pick the URL name for my chuckee. SoundCloud page, I just smashed the two together and came up with “orangesodabandit”. Which has taken on a life of its own nowadays, I got a million different names based on that one mashup from my childhood and teenage years haha.
Slackline Radio: How would you characterize your style of hip hop? What sets you apart, do you think?
Chuckee:Best way I can put it is that Showbiz & A.G. sample I used in HITACHI – so many styles, you don’t know which one is coming next. It’s dense, it’s jazzy, it’s groovy, it’s a lotta stuff that’d take too many words to describe. Every horn, piano, bassline, snare, weird sound effect, synth, whatever – everything I put into my beats is intentional, and whatever you hear that gets your ear twitching is what makes mine perk up too. I can do straight ahead hip-hop stuff, or I can throw you for a loop and bring out some super-swung, SP404 soulhop shit like it’s 2015. It’s part of what I think sets me apart the most from everyone else in this community I’m blessed to be a part of. Lots of cats, dudes I look up to like WIZDUMB, Goomson, Al Dali, they got their own signature sounds and vibes and whatnot, and I like to think that there’s no doubt who made what whenever a song of mine comes on outta the blue.
That and the fact that I’m Black. Most of the guys in the current old school instrumental hip-hop scene are white guys from overseas (shoutouts to Devio and the whole Mi Sdraio crew, snares, Mike B, Strongbow Records, peace & love !!), and I don’t see too many cats that look like me making hip-hop the way we do. (Big ups to Jon Deliz, I see ya mane!) Which could just mean I haven’t looked hard enough! But still, it feels both nice to represent where all this hip-hop stuff came from and it can be sorta lonely.
Slackline Radio: You have been producing a number of releases lately? What inspires you to keep creating when the other world duties persist?
Chuckee:The way I see it, we gotta work to live, not the other way around. I’m working to become a lawyer nowadays, but it’s all to support buying records and building up my studio and giving me time for the books that I write. If I got something that I wanna do, I get tunnel vision and I don’t stop ‘til I say, “well, alright, that’s enough songs to call an album,” and it’s been like that since forever haha.
Besides God, music is my entire life. I can’t put that to the side for something as small as money, at least not in the way that puts all of the emphasis on making cash at the expense of missing out on life. You gotta have a balanced life. Do what you gotta do to make sure you can take care of yourself and handle biz, but don’t forget why you’re working so hard to begin with. Effort goes both toward hard work and play, and honestly I think that the stuff you’re passionate about deserves more care and attention than most give it. I do what I do because I love it, and if I’m able to give someone their favorite song or an important album to chew on, then I think I’ve done a good job.
Slackline Radio: You recently released The Fat. How did this collection come together and who may have helped along the way?
Chuckee:Yo okay this is a long story. So the year before, I’d come out with what I consider my real “debut” album, SCRATCH. It took the better part of four years to make, partly due to college and life stuff, but also because I bought and sold the MPC1000 six different times. It started because I fell into the trap of listening to cats on forums and YouTube taking mad shit on the 1K and saying it wasn’t a good sampler, all types of reasons why it was inferior to the MPC2000s and the 60s and 3000s and all these other samplers, the converters, blah blah blah. And I’d learned how to make music without a computer on one!
Once I started thinking the 1K was as bad as everyone said it was, I couldn’t make music on it anymore.
It was like all my mojo left me. I sold it and some other small samplers – including a SP202, SP303, an OG Digitakt and the Maschine Mikro I used to make most of my music from 2016 till 2019 on – to get an MPC2000 that had been refurbished from Jazzcat, the legendary dude from the UK, because I’d seen Damu the Fudgemunk use it for years and years. I got it and immediately hated it, sold it probably two months after that. And that was the story for the next four years, I’d buy another MPC1000 from the funds I got from selling the last sampler I tried, and then I let the internet tell me it wasn’t good enough and I’d sell it again from something different. I tried out a 2000XL, an Akai S3000XL rack sampler, another Digitakt, an SP404 MKII, even an Isla S2400 and an Ensoniq EPS16+! I made good beats on all of them, but something about them just never sat right with me. There’s five MPCs out in the world with the blue screen and white pads like I have mine right now, all customized and refurbished by me.
Eventually, I came back to the 1000 and my trusty SP404SX and I finished the album. And what I noticed was that the MPC1K was a really, really special type of sampler. Sure, whatever you put in it is gonna come out more or less the same – but if you take time to dig into it, it can absolutely SING. Aliasing, crunchy drums, snappy transients, great swing and groove, whatever makes a sampler and a sequencer great, it has it in spades. So when it came time to get to THE FAT, it only took me from April to early August to arrange everything, mix it down and master it. I knew what I was doing this time around. Essentially, the title and the mood around the music came from me sitting down and putting everything I had learned in my times with all those other samplers into practice with the boxes that fit me the best.
I made a ton of beats in that four month period, and I always work with a tentative tracklist in the background so that I know what the goal is and how many songs I might have to cut is gonna be. But besides having what’s basically just an outline, I just made beat after beat, and if I liked it enough, I sequenced it out, ran it through my Analog Heat and my Tascam through the stereo outs, printed it and called it a night. Now that I have a system in place to keep stuff as uncomplicated as possible, THE FAT was probably the easiest and most fun time I’ve had making music since I started.
Slackline Radio: In your search for samples in your productions, who are you most interested in at the moment?
Chuckee:Aw man, I’m all over the place. I’m really heavy into digging at record shows nowadays, and I like to pick up whatever looks rare and like something I’ve never seen before. I look for the usual things guys like us go crazy for. Private press regional jazz and soul is always great, 70s soul-jazz, Brazilian samba, Polish jazz fusion, CTI and Kudu stuff, Bruton Music and KPM compilations (whenever I can actually find them), anything that’s hard to find and sounds cool, I’ll buy it. Bonus points if it’s got breaks or snares and kicks, those are quickly becoming my favorite types of records to come across in the wild. My favorite labels to dig for currently are Milestone, Embryo, Fantasy, Pablo Today and ABC when they were doing a lot of their jazz fusion experimentation stuff in the early 70s. Never skip up a John Klemmer record. But truth be told, now I’m getting into buying 80s smooth jazz guys like David Sanborn and Shakatak, they’ve got joints!
I’m not one for buying stuff that costs a whole bunch or is super revered by producers and whatnot, cuz to me that just means that a ton of people have touched that record. I’m all about originality, it’s one of the main principles of hip-hop music that attract me to it. It’s why I don’t wanna know the sample source 99% of the time to a beat that I really like, cuz I don’t wanna know if I got the same record in my collection! The more undervalued and the more off-the-radar a record is, the better, to me.
Slackline Radio: What is your production process? How do you pull your beats together?
Chuckee:Sometimes it’ll start with some drums I found on a record, other times I’ll just be jamming on whatever I recently picked up from the conventions or the shop and I’ll hear something that makes me stop mid-groove. I like to separate out the tops and bassline from a sample and process them in their own channel track inside the 1K so that I have better control over what part is loud and what part needs to be more laid-back in the mix. I’m constantly speeding stuff up on the turntable and slowing it down inside the machine, I love the aliasing and the character it gives samples, drums and basslines especially. The cool thing about the MPC1000 is that it’s a fully 16-bit machine, it’s not a 12-bit or a 22kHz sampler, but it can do it if you downsample. And it doesn’t sound like an SP1200 – nothing on this planet sounds exactly like an 80s model, non-recapped SP ran through a Panasonic Ramsa or a Mackie CR1604 like they mighta done it back in the day, I’m sure – but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have its own flavor. The same goes for my 404SX, there’s literally NO sampler I’ve ever used that sounds like it. It’s got a hi-fi sheen but a lot of weight behind whatever goes into it. The EQ that’s in it helps a lot with the character too.
From there, I like to beatbox out a drum pattern to make sure I’m keeping enough space in the pocket with the main sample (big up to Alonso Majikal for that piece of advice, his Weekend Beat Time series on YT taught me a ton of stuff I still use today). Nothing can ruin a good beat quicker than a kick drum that’s too busy or too sparse. If I can rhyme to it, I know I’ve got something good. I’ll find a couple more records to throw in sound effects, synths, saxes and horns, vocal hits, stuff that goes on in the background that the listener can hear but isn’t aware of, but fills in the space and gives the track life.
The secret to how I arrange beats is pretty simple, I just make sequences as if there’s an emcee rhyming over top of it and make the right dropouts and note-repeat some snare hits. It’s how I’ve done it for years now, and it’s always fun to do, even if I gotta mix it up here and there so I don’t become predictable. It’s like a three-act structure in a movie, a three-rhyme beat is my bread-and-butter. If I’m making tracks on the 404, I MIDI it up to the 1000 for sequencing, but other than that, I’m slicing samples up and using all the effects on the 404 by itself to make some wonky, tripped-out stuff. It’s like the opposite from the 1K where I know exactly where I wanna go when I start up a beat, here I kinda just let whatever the SP’s feeling mold the track into what it’s supposed to be.
When everything’s said and done, I use the 1K’s master compressor and EQ – an EXTREMELY underrated feature, one of the main reasons I won’t ever leave the 1000 – to glue everything together and make it sound pretty. I’ll bring it through my Elektron Analog Heat MKI for that little extra bit of weight, sometimes record it to chrome tape, but I mostly use my Tascam 122 MKII cassette deck for the transformers (and even then, it’s not doing a whole bunch), and then into my Novation Audiohub interface to get printed to a two-track inside of Reaper. Nothing in my studio is super expensive, but everything’s here for a reason and it does its job really well.
Slackline Radio: Tell us about your youth? Who may have sparked an interest in hip hop?
Chuckee:Definitely my parents. They were playing Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis while I was in my mom’s belly. My dad constantly bumped Loose Ends, Eric B. & Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One, X-Clan, all types of hip-hop when I was a kid going to school in the front seat of his BMW. My mom was the Michael Jackson and Prince fan, she used to play Duran Duran and The Time, Tears For Fears, Thompson Twins, a ton of new wave music. I like to say I was raised like an 80s baby early on as a joke, since I grew up watching the original Inspector Gadget cartoons, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and the music I was listening to was brand new as far as I was concerned. I always thought it was cool that that was around the time the world decided to revive a lotta trends and sensibilities from the 80s, so to me it was just what was hot.
I remember Nas’ Illmatic was the first album I listened to all the way in its entirety when I was 11 or 12. Not just hip-hop, but any album period. After I heard “The World Is Yours,” I knew hip-hop was gonna be in my life to stay. And I guess I was right!
Slackline Radio: What’s planned in the future for chuckee?
Chuckee:Right now I’m working on a remix album, where one half is dedicated to me remixing acapellas with original instrumentals from me and the other half is made up of some of my friends and fellow beat junkies remixing beats that I’ve done in the past, a radio mix show concept album that’s structured like the Stretch and Bobbito Show or The Halftime Show, and later on, my version of a live album-slash-fictional Blaxploitation movie soundtrack. On the hush-hush tip, I’ve been experimenting with jungle and house music stuff a lot lately, so maybe there’s an album of that coming soon, who knows…
Other than that, I’m finally adding in a little Mackie console and some effects to The Tape Factory so I can do some advanced routing from the 404 and the MPC1K. Plus I’m checking out the Roland S-1 and the Sonicware Lofi-12 XT as my first synth and another cool flavor sampler, we’ll see what ends up happening with those.
Slackline Radio: What will you be eating or drinking later this evening?
Chuckee:Some red beans and rice, sweet potatoes and cornbread. I like to get my grub on something serious. Appreciate you for having me on!
