Great interview with Godfather Don. The Demented Thoughts EP is still available so cop it while supplies last. Link
What type of equipment did you use to produce most of your beats and who or what got you into production and learning equipment?
Well actually being a guitar player, I had access to sampling devices. Not sampling sequencers like an MPC or an SP-12. I couldn’t afford none of that stuff. I didn’t have anything to program beats until after my first album. My first album, all the stuff I was fooling around with at home was just by ear.. Like listening to the records and saying “This would be nice here..” I used to write a note.. Hear another one, like “This would be nice too!”.. Then write another note down. You know I had like a little tape 4 track thing that I would use with my guitar sampler which had an 8 second loop on it to just lay down the things and the different tracks that I would want to happen. And then I would take all the records to the studio once Fred gave the green light to start doing some things and just play the records.. Take the parts i wanted off of ’em. We didn’t have a 1200 or anything in there! It was weird cause as I’ve said in the past, Fred hooked me up with a rock engineer. I wasn’t crazy about my first album as far as the sound because I was trying to understand why it didn’t sound like Kid N Play’s record or whatever and I had a complex about it a long time because I thought my music wasn’t good and that’s why it didn’t sound as loud as theirs. But now that I did more research, a lot of the songs were long and you know the thing with wax, if it’s a certain length of time the sound quality goes down and all that, so I realized that later.
Let’s talk about the “Demented Thoughts” EP we’re putting out. What’s the story behind these songs and how did most of them come about? Tell us where most of the recording was done.
A lot of the tunes, they were done at my house in Flatbush, you know, the same place where Chubb would come thru and hang out.. just that same place. A lot of them were made there. Couple of them were made other places like maybe Stretch’s house and, yeah Bob’s house.. a couple of them was made there and I think that’s about it. They wasn’t big deals, just had something planned and opened up some mics and whoever was there got on. We would run into somebody in the city when me and Keith was hanging out about to come home and would be like “Hey man, we goin’ here.. Yeah, we goin’ to Don’s house” Cats would be like “Oh yeah? Word? Can I come?”.. and sometimes that’s how it happened.
Now that the “Hawaii” joint with Bobbito is being released on this EP, people are finding out just exactly where the sample of Bob for the hook on The Beatnuts’ “Fried Chicken” comes from. What’s the story behind this being used back then, since it never was officially released until now?
What I know about that situation is, one time I think me and VIC were riding in his truck somewhere to do something and he was like “Hey man, check this out!”.. and I’m like “Oh wow, that sounds familiar!”.. he’s like “Yeah man, it’s from one of those demos, those tapes.” I guess he got it from Bob or he might’ve even taped it off the radio. Because I remember all of them people always saying “Hey man, I listened to Bob last night. What was that? When did you hook that up?”
