Journal #3’

I received and email on June 18, 2012 from Jarreau – it had an mp3 attachment. I had been making lots of beats at that time, thinking that most of them were shit, and just leaving the bounces on various hard drives. I can’t remember the workflow we had for sharing sounds then, other than copy/pasting directories between Lacie hard drives, but Jarreau had gotten ahold of some instrumentals and recorded some vocals on one of them. Even more, there was a female vocal signing the chorus, making the song complete. I recall the serendipity of just having this track magically appear, attached to an email. I wrote back, telling him that I still had the original REASON session if he wanted to make any adjustments to the arrangement.

Fast forward over a decade. I haven’t used Reason in as many years – all of my licenses have expired. I’d been dragging around several Lacie hard drives, for years, move after move, but never powering them up. They would fail all the time and were fragile even in the safest conditions. In December 2022 I finally ventured into my storage unit and retrieved an old wooden box containing 2 hard drives (in silver cases), and the internals of 1 hard drive just laying there exposed. I had used some old blankets to wrap them, hoping to give them half a chance for survival. Digging through these drives have been an actual journey through the past. Old demos, old studio sessions with the Chronicles, old sessions from the Warehouse studios where my brother used to intern – a time capsule; a gold mine.

And now, in February 2023, I’m working with Jah again to finally finish that song from June 18, 2012. Although I use Logic now (and not Reason), I was still able to find the Wave files, and even the REX2 files that I had used to create the original beat. The REX2 files even have the original sample chops exactly how I had done them 10 years ago. I just had to download a copy of Recycle so that I could export each chop as its own wave file. From there I loaded everything up into Logic’s Quick Sampler and Drum Machine Designer. Then, using the original mp3 file as a reference, I re-triggered the samples in the same order in the Logic session. Decoding the puzzle that my own brain had conceived a decade earlier was a trip. The basic patterns were easy enough to decipher, but as I got deeper I realized there were parts in the original that I had triggered with MIDI, bounced to audio, and then time stretched to fit properly. In the end, I’ve got a pretty faithful recreation of the original, but with better drum samples, and with a better overall mix. The next step is vocals, and then finally this nearly lost track can come into existence in its final form.