The Sound Board

Mike Greene has done it again. Can't wait for his walkthrough.

Where'd he get my picture???

Wow, a tool for dummies with no musical skill to turn in a great authentic hip hop track? It's every Jay Asher dream come true!

I guess controller interfaces will be key on this one for live performance. Tweaking with a mouse is all well and good, but having it hooked up to pads and sliders might sell it to hip hop fans more.

(tangent - I've been meaning to post this in the music section for a while, but anyone with even the most cursory passing interest in hip hop and its history must watch Hip Hip Evolution, a truly fantastic 4 part Netflix documentary)

Did you know Mike used to be a pretty big Hip Hop producer? I love how he says, "Any idiot can turn this thing on.."

I always thought Mike was urbane-didn't realize that I didn't actually need to add the "e".

IFM wrote:Did you know Mike used to be a pretty big Hip Hop producer? I love how he says, "Any idiot can turn this thing on.."

I didn't! All ears!

By no means was I big time, but I had a few modest successes. I got into hip hop because while I was pursuing (in vain) rock and roll stardom, I managed to make a few bucks writing R&B songs (Vanessa Williams, Pointer Sisters) and producing song demos for aspiring singers on my Fostex 16-track.

I started also getting calls from aspiring rappers, one of whom was a guy calling himself A.L.T. We did a number of demos, one of which was a drinking song using the Champs' "Tequila" riffs. Cassette copies started getting out and we got a lot of west coast radio play, joking that he was on the TDK label. This attracted the attention of a few labels. He signed to Atlantic and I (along with Geoff Rios) produced the album. Tequila became a top-40 hit for a nano-second, but long enough for my wife and I to hear Casey Casem introduce it on his "American Top 40" show while we were on a vacation. That was a pretty big moment for me. I still have a box of Billboard and Cashbox magazines charting it. Here's a video:

During the making of that record, I got introduced to a bunch of other rappers, and a "Latin Alliance" was formed amongst the Latino rappers in L.A. with me as one of the house producers. That's when I met Kid Frost. I produced a few tracks for Frost, including the title track for "East Side Story":
In that song, there are a number of additional voices, one of whom was B-Real of Cypress Hill. Cypress had just been signed to Sony, so we might have had to replace him, but I think he's still there. Side note - I'm pretty sure B-Real is also one of the voices chanting "Bill! Bill!" on the Bill Nye the Science Guy theme. I had written the theme song, but needed the chants, so one day when I had a bunch of rappers in the studio, I asked them to do it. They never got paid.

I worked on a few Cypress Hill albums, but not as a producer, mostly I just let them use my studio. (Which was the 24-track multi-room facility I have now.) Still, many elements were written by me in a work for hire capacity. Kinda dumb in hindsight, but in the same way that I didn't pay for the "Bill!" chants, things were very collaborative and loose then. Plus, at the time, hip hop was taboo for most radio stations, so it was not especially profitable. I think I got $3k per track to produce, plus a point and a half on sales. I was doing Barbie and TV work by then, which paid way better. Hip hop was more for fun than anything else, so I'd only work with certain people who I liked, like Muggs of Cypress Hill, because he'd often bring in fun projects.

One of these was Ice Cube, who I only name here because there were a couple interesting things about him. First, he had a binder with typed lyrics for songs he'd written. We'd play beats and he'd thumb through his binder, looking for a lyric that would match. This was before everybody had computers, and I'd never seen another rapper who typed his lyrics. I was really struck by that. Also, on one session, he had recently joined the Nation of Islam, so he had a couple chaperones come with him, I suppose to make sure he didn't smoke any pot or anything, which . . . well, let's just leave it at that. Although I'll mention that Ice Cube was not an especially friendly guy to begin with. Add a couple humorless dudes in suits, and the sessions were pretty deadly.

One other song of note is the instrumental for House of Pain's "Jump Around" was recorded here. I might have played the piano part on that as well, but I can't remember. I did *not* think that song would be a hit, which shows how much I know. In fact, Tequila was kind of the end of "pop" rap (ala Will Smith), because as Tequila peaked, then plummeted, Jump Around steadily rose and rose until it hit #3. A.L.T. caught a lot of heat for being "bubble gum," even though he really wasn't, outside of that one song. He was a very talented guy who was a victim of timing.

Anyway, the funny thing about that album was that the main guy in House of Pain was Erik Shrody, who in a previous incarnation was a modestly successful rapper named "Everlast" and used to have a girlfriend named Tairre B, a modestly successful female rapper. I had produced Tairre, who was an absolute handful, so Erik and I would swap stories, which was fun. My favorite Tairre B story - she wanted to do a song based on Peggy Lee's "Fever," which was a great idea, except she wanted to sing the hook. Mind you, this was in the days before digital audio or Autotune. (The fact that I even mention Autotune should tell you all you need to know.)

To get a decent take, I'd have to keep trying and trying until I'd eventually get lucky and by pure chance, she'd sing it right. The challenge is getting her to keep singing, because rappers in general tend to think they nailed everything on the first take. So I had to use every trick in the book on this one. "That was good, but I wasn't in record." Or "Oh, I recorded that one too hot, we'll have to do it again." Or "Geoff's chair squeaked on that one." (Mind you, Geoff is in the control room, so any alleged squeaks wouldn't pick up on her mic, but after a while you get desperate for reasons to re-take.)

So a few days later, the guys told me that Tairrie had been complaining about me, wondering how I could be so incompetent. They knew exactly what was going on, so they were laughing their heads off. Such is the price we sometimes have to pay to get a good take.

I enjoyed reading this Mike, thanks for sharing

I had noooooo idea. Fantastic to read all that, Mike. And boy, I can't tell you how much it helps to know that the person behind Hip Hip Creator has created a lot of Hip Hop.

Awesome, Mike- had no idea you were MC RealiMike in a previous life!

Most entertaining thread I've seen on this forum so far

Well Mike I rate that as enough success to be considered big time...it's all relative I suppose.

Guy Rowland wrote:I had noooooo idea. Fantastic to read all that, Mike. And boy, I can't tell you how much it helps to know that the person behind Hip Hip Creator has created a lot of Hip Hop.

That's why I mentioned it...if anyone was going to create such a library Mike would be it!

Signature Mike, the big fella always brings it!

Cool stories, thanks Mike! :-)

Hey, it's finally out! Looks both fun and completely legal, a really well thought through product. Congrats to Mike Greene.

$149 intro, $249 regular.

https://realitone.com/products/hip-hop-creator

Wait-where’s Grandpa??

Ugh

Bought this for $99 in the Black Friday sale, so thought I'd add some thoughts.

First - yes, its fun. Of course it's fun. But you knew it would be, right? It's Mike Green after all. It has infinite variety, and seems to cover a broad variety from the genre across the decades. The complexity sliders are great, as is randomise. There's a huge bank of sounds, and the mixer is intuitive with sep outs right there if you need them.

I do have two areas of concern however.

1 - the keyboard mapping. The way Creator is designed has a few different modes. Drums vs Keys is the first, and depending on which area of the gui is active - left (drums) or right (keys) - depends on how the keyboard behaves. The other factor is the chord progression area at the top. It wasn't obvious to me, but on the right of this there's a bar count which can be 1, 2 or 4. Crucially, this also hides the Live mode, which determines whether or not you can play chords live near the top of the keyboard, or it follows a predetermined pattern. So between all these modes, its a potentially quite confusing array of different things a keyboard does depending on what state you are in. Selecting an instrument or left or right enables that side of the gui's mode - and can be a bit fiddly in my experience - or clicking a pad does the same thing.

For example, let's say you've hit the snare pad, so the you have access to playing all the drums (mapped slightly idiosyncratically with kick / snare / claps on octave 1 and the other pads octave 2. You can then start the squencer by hitting D#3. Then if you click a keys pad, you lose the ability to play the drums, but get chromatic playability of whatever sample you've selected. But hold on - you lose the ability to start / stop the sequencer as this is now regular old D#3. If you then switch back to a perc pad - and the sequencer is still playing because you can't turn it off yet - you lose the chromatic stuff. But get control of playing chords up the top of the keyboard. IF you're in Live mode, but not if you're not.

Aaarrgh!

I can't help thinking there must be a better way based around a permanent mapping. Personaly I'd have key pads mapped from C0 to G1, drums all mapped from C1 to G0, sequencer start / stop on A0. Then C1 - B4 is the chromatic zone for whatever is selected, C5 - C7 for chord playing, and this overides the sequencer if you hold a triad of any kind, then when you release it goes back to the sequencer. No more modes.

I guess the reason why it isn't like this has something to do with not everyone having 88 note keys... but maybe there's a setting somewhere that could switch between the different configs?

2 - Pattern and Kit save. I might be being slow but I can't find a way to save either a pattern or a kit, and this is a pretty serious problem. Creator so invites experimentation its easy to forget where you were and get lost in the wonders of it. So a way to save a state is pretty essential imo.

So I'd love an update at some point with these points addressed. I'm a bit fearful I won't use it as much as I'd hope because I know it will likely take my brain a while to get my head round it each time. Probably I'll end up using it quite simply as a source of beats and the odd sample, and then drag and drop the midi to the DAW and do everything else in there. I don't have buyers remorse, it is a great tool (and fun) but it's not full-blown love at first sight.

Thanks for picking this one up, Guy. Your comments are totally valid, and here are my thoughts on them:

1. Keyboard mapping is one of the bigger challenges we had (and still have) with this instrument, because HHC tries to do more than what one instance of a Kontakt plugin should be doing. (I don't mean that to sound like sales-speak.) Drums, bass, and 7 treble instruments can't help but trip over each other.

Crazy as this may sound, I hadn't thought of an 88-key mapping like what you described, because I assume hardly anyone has them. Even in my own case, I only use a 61 note controller. I do have an 88-key controller, but it's off to the left and I only use that when I want to play piano. So when I'm doing Kontakt instruments, my mind never goes to 88 keys, because I don't think many people have them. I fact, you'd be amazed how many complaints we get from people with 3 or 4 octave keyboards, annoyed that our keyboard mappings assume they should have 5 octaves. (That's why we came up with the flexible range assignments on Fingerpick. It's pretty damn cool, if I do say so myself.)

You are right, though. The mapping you suggest would be pretty easy to do. Like I said, I just never thought of it. I'll add that to the update list.

I also might see if I can make the 1/2/4 beat versus "Live" mode more intuitive. There are a whole lot of things going on, and I hadn't really looked at that element in a while.

2. Pattern and Kit saving is something we'll be adding in an update. In fact ... it's already there, just slightly off-screen. (That's how we created the presets. )

I intentionally left that off of this release, though, for a couple reasons. First, because I have to come up with a system for where those user-presets are saved. Either as my own invented presets menu (my first choice, but there are challenges with this, especially in naming the presets), or as Kontakt "Snapshots" or some other method. I could be wrong, but I think you already have the ability to save as snapshots. Otherwise, the assumption is that when you have something you want to save, then you "Save-as" a new instrument. In my own case, my Instruments folder has a pile of nki files of various beats. Not slick, but slick takes time, and time is something I ran out of, lest the release get pushed back another year.

The second reason we don't yet have a save function is that the ultimate plan is that the user will be able to save patterns/kits and then be able to trigger those in real time, so you could have a separate intro beat, etc. That coding is already started, but not finished, and the plan is that this will be be the direction of how saving is done.

Again, though, this instrument is crazy complicated. It's been a lot of fun to code and I really enjoy the challenge (the "challenge" is the main reason I did this in the first place), but it's been over three years on this, and eventually I had to accept that some elements will have to wait for an update. Those updates will indeed happen (the Ladies and RealiDrums are proof that I'm serious about following through on major updates), and also includes a piano roll grid where people can enter their own notes.

But honestly, I needed a break from this one. It turned out to be a way bigger project than I originally planned, and unfortunately, it's not a project where I can charge appropriately for how much work went into it. In fact, I was half tempted to pull the plug on the large concept, and instead release this as separate elements. I think that would have been a lot more profitable, although less rewarding.

To that end, this has been the most educational project I've done, in terms of mistakes I made and how the business works. And with that, I've drifted way off topic, but I do hope to write about the experience some day.

Mike - what a lovely man you are (but you knew that, right?) I'd be really intreresting in reading the full Hip Hop Creator memoirs.

Needless to say, if the mapping and saving come in a future update I'd be delighted. I tend to operate on a principle of tech in general (and absolutely sample libraries / VIs) being only as good as the weakest links in them. If a phone is phenomenal except the battery gives out after 30 minutes, or even something as trivial as a protruding button that means you make silent calls in your pocket, it will likely be discarded after a frustrating few days or weeks. Hip Hop Creator is an amazing product, so much content and clever ideas going into it, but it feels like those couple of achillies heels that stop it really taking off. I'm hoping those coding updates aren't a complete horror show for you....

That said you're quite right about Snapshots. That's definitely a more elegant solution for now than saving new .nkis - just tested and the work just fine of course. The main advantage of something you coded directly would be to separate the kits from the patterns I think, ultimately it would be great to control these separately. Dammit, something else on the wish list...

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jan 26, 2017 3:51 am Wow, a tool for dummies with no musical skill to turn in a great authentic hip hop track? It's every Jay Asher dream come true!

.?

Ashermusic wrote: ↑Nov 25, 2019 10:20 am

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jan 26, 2017 3:51 am Wow, a tool for dummies with no musical skill to turn in a great authentic hip hop track? It's every Jay Asher dream come true!

.?

(it was an ironical moment )

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Nov 25, 2019 10:21 am

Ashermusic wrote: ↑Nov 25, 2019 10:20 am

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jan 26, 2017 3:51 am Wow, a tool for dummies with no musical skill to turn in a great authentic hip hop track? It's every Jay Asher dream come true!

.?

(it was an ironical moment )

Because I have posted that I think people should develop their skills and not just rely on the tools to do the work for them?

Ashermusic wrote: ↑Nov 25, 2019 10:24 am

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Nov 25, 2019 10:21 am

Ashermusic wrote: ↑Nov 25, 2019 10:20 am

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jan 26, 2017 3:51 am Wow, a tool for dummies with no musical skill to turn in a great authentic hip hop track? It's every Jay Asher dream come true!

.?

(it was an ironical moment )

Because I have posted that I think people should develop their skills and not just rely on the tools to do the work for them?

That's the one... when I first saw it I thought the sales pitch was likely the antithesis of everything you hold dear.