It may be Thanksgiving here in the United States, but it’s also Thursday, and there are no holidays for XLR8R‘s resident wise man, Nick Hook. After all, with so many readers undoubtedly stuck at home with their families over the next few days, it’s hard to think of a more appropriate time for the good doctor to be doling out his unique brand of advice. If you need help from Doctor Nick, drop him a line at doctornick@xlr8r.com. Otherwise, read on and see what he has to say this week.

Hi. Happy holidays y’all. I’m thankful to be here, thankful that people give a fuck, thankful that I have amazing friends, and thankful that we get to do what we do—every day. So, thank you, really, from the bottom of my heart. I feel so lucky. I was walking down the street and Vince Vaughn looked me in the eye the other day. It was weird.

Here we go.

Hi Doctor Nick,
What’s the process you go through to sample vocals and instrumentals?
JM

There are two ways. The first: I go to the record store, buy something, put it on my turntable, and sample it into Ableton Live. There are many ways to cut it up, depending on exactly what you wanna do. Ableton’s slice to MIDI is pretty underused in my opinion. Cut up drum breaks, layer them with whatever drum machine sounds you like, filter, or just take a break and chop in the arrange window. I’m mostly an Ableton guy, so Simpler Sampler is my shit. Take pieces, toss them in there, tune it so it’s in tune, and play it. I could go more in depth, but there are mad nerds out there on YouTube who probably already handled that already. Logic I think does the same thing with the EXS24. Fuck Logic tho.

It’s also 2012, and in a weird way, I think sampling off YouTube is bringing back some sort of lo-fi, 12-bit kinda vibe. An amazing tool is Cycling 74’s Soundflower. It routes your computer as an out and you can input it into Ableton, easily recording/sampling whatever you want off YouTube. It’s free. Get it here.

I have a Maschine by Native Instruments. It’s fun to load samples into that and mess around MPC style by laying everything out onto the pads. Honestly, my methods are always changing. I’m a crackhead, so I never do things the same twice.

Mostly, it’s important to be creative. Peep this and hear how Mobb Deep flipped this Herbie Hancock sample to make a beat that makes you wanna knock everyone out the second you hear it. This gives me the chills. And the drums are sampled and just looped. Damn.

Hi Doctor Nick!
I’m a fellow ginger, so props for that. Anyways, I live in a small “hipster” city, which up until about a year ago didn’t have much of a forward-thinking dance scene. There were and still are a lot of talented house heads, D&B dudes, dubplate scratchas, and breakbeat turntablists, but as a DJ myself, I was interested in hearing some of the more contemporary “global bass” sounds: footwork, cumbia, UK Funky, ballroom, Jersey club, etc. So I started a little party of my own, and it’s gone off pretty well for about a year now. We managed to host some awesome DJs, which I’m really proud of. Unfortunately, at this point, I feel a bit like we’ve plateaued. It’s hard to keep people coming back every month, and I want to bring even bigger DJs, but my budget won’t allow it. I do this because I love it, and I usually end up not paying myself and barely having enough to pay the guest. Do you have any advice on how to take the party to the next level? Promotion? Explaining to the club owner that this is good and they should help us out more? Getting sponsors? Please help!! A lot of kids are counting on me to keep this party going, but with virtually no budget and no professional experience of my own, I’ve basically made it up as I go. How do I keep the ball rolling?
Che Ros

Hey man. Thanks for writing.

It’s amazing that you started your own party. It takes guts, especially because in terms of the music game, putting on parties has the least reward for how much you actually put in. You should be proud.

I grew up in St. Louis. I wasn’t throwing my own parties back then, but I knew people that did and they had similar problems. The good thing for us was that most artists went to play in Chicago, so with the right hustle, you could get guys in. I remember we had Goldie on a Sunday night in a place that fit like 50 people. So, I would say reach out to promoters in your vicinity and just put it out there that you would be interested in trying to tag along on some of their bookings. It could save the other guy money on travel, so everyone starts to win. It also helps said DJ out with another show, even if it might be for a little less than “normal.”

Also, I would reach out to booking agents, same deal. Just let them know you have X budget and you are trying to help build acts. When my friends and I threw our party in New York, the whole premise was not to make a penny but to just have something we loved and people didn’t forget. We ended up bringing SBTRKT to America for the first time in his life, hosting Lunice’s first headlining show, Egyptrixx, HudMo, DJ Sega, DJ Assault. It definitely helped people find out who I was as a growing artist, and eventually helped get me out of town, too.

Sponsors are good, but it’s really difficult. Meet your local alcohol distributor. See if they can give you an open bar, or a few bucks. Go to the local college and get some weird hot girls to bring all the other weird hot girls—then all the weird dudes will show up.

And there’s the last resort that we all know works the best: sell drugs to fund projects that you love.

It’s ill, you make it up as you go along. In the game of putting on a party, I don’t think there is a tried-and-true formula. No risk, no reward, right?

Hope that helps. Happy holidays.

Hi, Doctor Nick! appears every Thursday on XLR8R. Do you have a question for Doctor Nick? Please submit your inquires to doctornick@xlr8r.com. Nick Hook can help you.

Recent years have seen dubstep largely leave behind its modest beginnings while growing into a commercial and global force, but XLR8R hasn’t forgotten the music’s early days, a time when just a handful of producers were turning out speaker-rattling tunes and altering the UK landscape. Pinch (a.k.a. Rob Ellis) was one of those artists; between his own production work and role as founder of the Tectonic imprint, it’s fair to say that dubstep wouldn’t have been quite the same without his input. Earlier this week, the Bristol-based beatmaker released MIA: 2006-2010, a collection of rare and hard-to-find tracks. Given that the record found him looking back through his past, we figured now would be the perfect time to enlist Pinch for our High Five series. The veteran producer was more than happy to comply, and picked out five of his favorite old-school dubstep classics. The twist? None of these tunes actually saw an official release.

In Ellis’ own words:
The following five tracks are all old-skool dubstep cuts that never made it to vinyl and all came from a time when the main dubstep players were still UK based and cutting acetate. All are personal favorites of mine that I cut (and still have) on dubplate. Sadly, there are a number of other ‘lost dubplate’ tracks that I couldn’t include here, as they’re not on YouTube (or I couldn’t find them at least), especially when looking for some of the older ones.

D1 “Crack Bong (Loefah Remix)”

I had to limit myself to just one Loefah-related rhythm, as there are quite a few that never made it off acetate, like “Midnight,” “Natural Charge,” “Just A Beat,” “Woman,” “Babylon,” and so on. This was one of the key tracks that really saw Loefah cement his infamous sound, following the devastating “Horror Show” on DMZ002 (2004). As far as I can remember, this is generously titled as a remix of D1‘s demented original (also a classic), simply because Loefah liked the 2001: A Space Odyssey vocal sample D1 had used in his version, which I believe is the only part the two versions of the track share. An important part of dubstep history.

Skream “Soundtrack”

Given away around a year ago as part of one of Skream‘s Freeizm free downloadable albums, this otherwise unreleased track first popped up in mid/late 2004 (if my memory serves me right), and was one of my favorite Skream tracks of the time. Simple, dark, brooding, and cinematic, this one is more than the sum of its minimal parts by far and is one of his earlier ventures in half-step. (Yes, it was new back then!)

Magnetic Man “Alright, What Happened – Is Everything Cool?”

Following on then, topically, is my all-time favorite Magnetic Man track that also never saw a release. It’s one of the first combined efforts between Skream, Benga, and Artwork and still sounds fairly fresh to this day! I guess they didn’t want to clear the vocal sample—I can’t think why else they wouldn’t have released it, as it was a massive tune on dubplate back in the day (circa 2007 I think) and always used to tear up the dance. I’m not sure what the proper title of the track is either, so this is a bit of a guess based on the main sample it features.

Mala & SGT Pokes “Answer Me”

I think this was put together around late 2007 and is a definite old favorite of mine—so much so that I had to re-cut it after wearing out the original dubplate and I have since gone on to wear that dubplate out, too! Tough congas and punishing subs carry this rhythmical roller in a heavyweight meditational stylee. The mood and movement of this track encapsulates a lot of what I looked for in a tune to play out at the time—dancefloor energy through percussion rather than wobble/mid-range bass. It’s also the only collaboration I’ve heard between Mala & Pokes (both on the buttons, by the way).

Deleted Scenes “Memory Loss VIP”

This is a VIP version of the first track Distance and I wrote together (the original was written in 2006, released in 2007, and the VIP followed some time in 2008) as part of our Deleted Scenes project, which is still quietly (for now!) ongoing. I still play this VIP occasionally and it always goes off, four years on from when we made it. The breakdown goes quiet for slightly longer than you think it will, so when the bass does come back in, it hits surprisingly hard, catching you off guard every time.