Nic opened a new Pro Tools session, as usual. We agreed upon a tempo, and then he started searching through some drum kits until he landed on something that had some sounds that caught our ears. He laid a four-to-the-floor kick as the foundation and started to build around that. I was sitting at the Rhodes, kinda nodding and kinda texting or tweeting -- probably about 50/50. Nic was on the drum machine going IN, layering each element piece-by-piece until the drums were pretty much complete. THEN! OK, so you know when you're in the studio how you just tap on a couple of notes back and forth to test if a keyboard's sound is coming through the mixing board? Well, Nic did just that. He reached over to the Moog Voyager keyboard and just hit a couple notes to get a quick sound check; it was successful, the board was coming through the speakers. Meanwhile, I put my phone down and quickly figured out that the two notes he hit during the quick sound test were C# and D. I figured, hey, let me see what happens if I mess around with those two notes and build some chords around them. The very first things that came to me were: Dmaj7 and C#min7, but hit in a rhythm that went with Nic's drum pattern. I kept playing the chords until we realized... Ayooooooo, we've got something here!!!
Now when I started playing the rhythm initially, my bass note and chord matched, meaning that my left and right hands were playing the chords stabs together at the same time. When Nic laid the bassline out in the song, the D and first C# notes were the same rhythm as what I played, but the remaining C#'s all hit on the "and" through the remaining measure and a half. I thought that slight change gave the drums a little more "bounce." Come to think of it, I have audio of Nic playing the synth chords over the drums and bassline while I sat on the Moog Little Phatty trying out different synth line variations. I have listened to it a good 20+ times since the release of the album because it's dope to be able to hear our initial reactions to what was being created. Hell, if you can't get excited off of the music you're making, you certainly can't expect anyone else to. And we were hyped up! At one point in the recording, I played a line (that we ultimately ended up recording on the song) and said, "Yeah, that's the one I like!" Then I started singing/humming the beginning of the line as I played it and Nic sang the second part in approval. The very next line variation I played, you can hear Nic in the background react, "OH!!!!!" And the clip concludes with him saying, "That is it! I think we may have to record that..." It's REALLY dope to listen to now in hindsight. Our initial reactions to that music captured in audio form, all because I wanted to make sure I didn't forget the line I was practicing. It may have taken us a grand total of about 30-40 minutes to finish the entire instrumental and once it was done, I think we ran the joint for ANOTHER 30-40 minutes. We knew we had a helluva song on our hands with this one, it just felt way too good for it not to become a standout. We sent the finished product over to Phonte who was also in the studio with Carmen Rodgers just a couple of hours northwest of us in Raleigh, NC. His response to the music contained in that email?
"FISHGREASE"
