"This track is called "Luck-Eee" and it's produced by fellow member of The Prime, Sapient and if you can't tell by the slap, he freakin MURDERS it on the beats! This song was made just for The Present exclusively, ie. Just for YOU GUYS* It's a celebration of where I'm @ right now and just me trying to spit that crack on a Sapient beat without getting ran over!

This is a glimpse into the future and the sound of The Prime. Learn this song for future Lucky shows & most importantly, Please bump this with CAUTION!!!! (your speakers will thank you later*)."

Download The Present for free Aug. 2nd at: legendarymusic.net/thepresent

 - Sape

Published in Willamette Week

Sapient Make More

The opening track from Sapient’s Make More, “Here,” is about as bold as rap songs get: a rap manifesto set to a sweeping orchestral storm of sampled brass, strings, voices and beats that’s one part John Williams and one part Ennio Morricone. Sapient comes through loud and clear. “The industry is tainted/ Piss in the batter/ So I don’t listen to rappers and all their whimsical banter/ They don’t talk like they live/ And the pleasure material objects can give is as false as it gets.”

First off, these are some of the dirtiest synthed-up horns I’ve ever heard. It kinda sounds like some real-life trumpets and baritone saxophones dipped in mercury, then rolled around in a big bag of those spicy Cheetos. Imagine biting into those: It would taste delicious and then it would break all your teeth out. The beat as a whole sorta cradles me at its bosom and rocks me way too hard. Like a meth mom. This beat has it all: There’s animal in that creepy background breathing and fast-forward singing, mineral in the snaps and clinks in the spaces between the beats and vegetable in the dirty crunch of those horns.

If you haven’t met Sape in the past, this track ought to introduce you. The second song on his new album, it’s preceded by a powerful, John Williams-epic, wordy introduction called “Here.” But “My Grind is Tech” is the first track on the album with a Sandpeople-style beat (see previous paragraph) and the group’s marquee melding of humor and hustle as its guiding light. It’s also the single, and “Tech” is classic Sapient: Criticizing the culture around him while setting himself apart and saving the occasional wink for the listener—because, you know, the listener just might fit the description of what’s wrong with rap (Not that Sapient is always so understanding: He paints a detailed portrait of a rich-kid rapper’s life gone wrong on track four, then brutally murders the character in the main verse by splattering his white Jetta with brains. fun!). Most of all, he reassures us that even in a down-turned economy, business is alright. Sape sweeps across the lyrics like he’s doing the slide part of the Soulja Boy dance: “I don’t need no diamond necklace/ Check it my style is fresh,” he raps. “Like Irish Spring, Dial or Zest/ But I’ll never be washed up/ I’m enjoying the dirt/ Submerge myself in the soil and earth.”

I’m excited for you to hear the rest of this one. It sounds great, and Sapient has plenty more to say.

NEW Solo album Make More...

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY!

Making beats with Sapient

How Sandpeople's production master makes your head nod

Ed Johnson

Vanguard Staff

Published: Thursday, May 14, 2009

Updated: Thursday, May 14, 2009

Photo: Ed Johnson

this point, everyone knows about Sandpeople. It’d be hard not to.

Portland’s hip-hop mega-group has been putting out a steady stream of quality records and worthy performances for the past few years. And chances are, if you’ve ever nodded your head to a Sandpeople record, you’ve nodded your head to beat by Sapient.

In anticipation of the group’s new EP, Long Story Short, due out next week, and because we think that he’s making some of the freshest shit in independent hip-hop, the Vanguard visited Sapient’s “Basement Laboratories” in Northeast Portland.  We got the lowdown on how he does what he does by reverse engineering one of the new record’s best tracks, “Beyond Us.”

The setup
Sapient’s recording setup is surprisingly simple. He has a small mixing board, a single preamp, a compressor, a turntable with mixer (for scratches and sample gathering), a vocal mic set-up booth in what was formerly a closet, a keyboard used for sequencing and synths and, most importantly, a big-ass computer that runs digital recording software.

“I’m not like super tech-head about audio,” says Sapient. “But I know what I need to know. And anything I don’t know I can figure out really quick.”

He says that making a beat is a variable process, done in starts and stops until a finished product is ready to go.

“I think that there is probably a good, rough time, but I’m not sure,” says Sapient of the time it takes to make a beat. “’Cause when I’m in the zone, working, time is non-existent. But, probably a good, fast beat where I’m really just feeling it can happen start to finish in a couple hours.”

After the initial stages of production, he’ll revisit the work over the next couple days, tweaking it after a test run in his car and putting it up to multiple listens.

Step 1: Drums
The very first thing Sapient does when making a beat is to figure out the drums, which he either records himself on the kit in studio or sequences from samples or other recordings. He often sequences his own drum sounds, as well, combining them with other sounds.

“There’s just so many different ways I do stuff, ” he says. “But I always start with the drums, then I put the sample or synth and then I adjust the drums around that, if needed, which is most of the time. Sometimes I find a sample and say ‘Oh, I want to make a beat’ but even then, I go back to the drums.”

Step 2: Synths and samples
Next, Sapient decides what to build around the drums. In the case of “Beyond Us,” it’s a choppy synth line, which he mimics with sequenced low-end bass, adding that bump.

There are a few other synth parts for bridges and change-ups, including a quick symphonic sweep and an organ part, which Sapient played, sampled and then cut up to fit the songs. Around all of that, he starts fitting in samples from old records—“Beyond Us” uses parts from ’60s psych rock, Himalayan chant music, Motown and cheesy Russian classical guitar playing.

Most of these samples are short, and heavily modified from their original versions. They are cut up, spaced out, condensed, pitched up (or down), reversed and any number of other things. What’s remarkable—and the mark of a great producer—is the disparate nature of Sapient’s samples, and the ingenious whole they create.

“All of these I manipulated to work with the melody. Some are pretty close off the bat and some of them, rarely, are exact,” Sapient says. “A lot of people can’t use samples the way that I do because they can’t get them to be the right pitch and the right time, the right length. I just have ways to do that.”

To arrange and utilize samples (and for his production work in general) Sapient uses ACID pro, Cubase and a few other digital techniques.

“I don’t really have purist morals about that stuff,” he says. “If there’s new technology, I’m like ‘fuck it,’ as long as it’s not cheating—like programs that cut up your sample and set the tempo for you. Abelton, I think? I don’t mess with that stuff.”

In terms of finding the records he uses for samples, Sapient spends lots of times scouring local record store bins gathering thousands of pieces of vinyl. Generally, he says he concentrates on psychedelic rock from 1960s and ’70s, pop music from the same time and international records that emulate their American rock heroes.

“One thing that’s really fucked up is [a local record store] just throws away stuff every week,” he says. “Rare records too, that just don’t have any value to them, but they’re like these records that that might be the only one, y’know? So I have this guilt for not going through there every week and cycling through, just picking the ones that could have some use.”

Because he has a portable record player, Sapient is open to pretty much any sound (well, except country) and tries out a lot of ideas. If it has drums, it might be worth a look.

“Sometimes I find like the stupidest butt-rock or whatever, but there will be an ill drum break at the beginning and I’ll just be like ‘swoop.’”

To follow our example through, “Beyond Us” has samples from about six separate sources, each of which is used in a couple different ways.

Step 3: Vocals and final mixing
The last step, once the beat is done, is to record vocal tracks. Here, Illmaculate started off the proceedings with a verse that Sapient says is about “being aware of your consciousness,” which happened to fit nicely with the track’s original name “Beyond Us.”

From there, whoever else is on the song, in this case Iame and Gold, added their verses and Sapient figured out a hook. Once the vocals are done, they get added to the track in Cubase, where Sapient adjusts the sounds to form a cohesive and consistent track, making sure there are no weird spaces.