I can remember fast forwarding through my favorite hip-hop songs to that small portion of instrumental at the end with little or no vocals recorded against it. I would use this little portion of beat to my advantage. This is when I started splicing beats.

Before I had a computer, before I had a deep machine, before I had a set of drums, I had double cassette boombox with an auxiliary in jack. One of the first beats I ever spliced was Black Moon's "Buck'em Down" joint.

There was a portion at the beginning where all of the midrange and highs were filtered out. I would have my recording cassette deck loaded with the pause button engaged. When this be started to play I would hit the pause button to punch in. After a couple of bars I would hit the pause button again to punch out.

After I got good at this. I started to accumulate tapes full of me rapping over these spliced beats. Around the time when I was doing this, you could buy a hit single on a cassette tape with the instrumental on the other side. This was convenient when the beat was one I wanted to rap over, but a lot of times the beats I really wanted weren't available and that form.

If you tried this with the wrong boombox, then your beats probably contained a lot of clicks and pops. Some pause buttons weren't reliable enough to guarantee that you stop in the right spot. When we were doing this, there was no going back and correcting a beat in a spot where you punched out too early or in to late. Every single splice was serious business. Every once in a while you come across the perfect boombox for splicing. Before the real stuff came along, these trusty little music jewels were a joy to find laying around waiting for your talent.

Of course there is software that does all of this for you now. A couple of clicks of a button can do what took me 15 minutes to do then, but if you never got to experience this method of artistry in its old-school form, I must say you really missed out on something you would have considered phenomenal.

Jonathan Daniel is a recording artist and graphic designer who loves to share his thoughts and information with the world through his articles and blogs. To find out more about Jonathan Daniel and to get information on music techniques, songwriting tips, and more, visit: http://www.flowsandbeats.blogspot.com/

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