@Bigoldnit Do you remember this incredible song? If not, you should love it.
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It didn’t ring any bells, but I dig it. The chorus + horns are very infectious!
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For a little background, Monie Love was a rapper from England who began in the late 80s. This song does not have a wikipedia page, but she was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Solo performance for it in 1990. U Can’t Touch This by MC Hammer won. Stay real, Grammys. Other featured songs were Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice, and I Get the Job Done by Big Daddy Kane. Queen Latifah’s whole album was nominated because they didn’t want to listen to any individual songs but assumed she sounded good.
I think Monie in the Middle was basically a perfect bridge from late 80s cheesy hip hop, such as Run DMC, to the classic New York hip hop sound that would start around late 1991. 1992-2001 to me is the best hip hop ever was. I think this song belongs right there, even though it was early. She was an incredible rapper, and if you look back on that category today, there’s no way she shouldn’t have won for this song. This was also the first of her two US Rap #1 singles.
I think she’s now a radio DJ in Atlanta. I can’t remember how I first had exposure to her, but I think it was due to British dance music because I knew her music before she got famous.
It was this song, which was a club hit (I DJ’d for a dance radio show in 1990):
Appreciate the history, and I’ll definitely check out more of her stuff. I’d say I only really started listening to hip-hop around the time Biggie and Pac went mainstream. Over time, I’ve tried to go back and fill in some gaps from previous eras, but there’s tons of artists I’m still not up on.
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Focus on New York and CA 1992-1995 for blind spots, the last part around the time Biggie and PAC were truly mainstream.
A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Gang Starr, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, EPMD, and on and on. Also Das EFX. Ice Cube late 80s to 1994. DJ Quik. Skee-lo, I Wish.
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Here is a hot of the presses remaster from me of one the best hip hop songs of the entire Golden Age. If you haven’t heard it, you should love it. New York hip hop of the early 90s was heavily influenced by jazz.
Original Version:
My Version:
This one I know well, and love <)
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I’m curious what you would do with the studio version of UB40’s Rat in Mi Kitchen.
Can you link me the version you want me to start from? I’ll do it.
I was listening to it on Amazon music, but this looks like it’s probably the same cut.
FWIW, I think that this is a really well produced song, but I’m curious how you might tweak it.
I can do a lot with this and may do it today.
I’m a huge reggae fan, but not of UB40. If you like reggae at all, I suggest doing a deep dive into early 70s to early 80s reggae for some of the best played reggae music ever, even if production techniques were almost a decade behind. My favorite modern reggae artist is Proteje. My favorite old reggae artist is Dennis Brown.
Here’s a good Dennis Brown along with my remaster.
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My Version:
Well, bye bye to this one. Beggar’s Banquet blocked this worldwide, so f them. It’s now part of the forbidden 15 or so I’ve done that got blocked. When you block a song, it disappears in more ways than one for me. Dumbasses. I guess it was too good. Now no one outside of the first 25 whole viewers in three days will ever know.
I’ve done this. I’ll be curious to hear your reaction.
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If you like my version, I highly recommend you find a site where you can rip a 320k mp3 from the video to get the full effect at full volume of the file.
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I enjoyed your remix, but through my untrained ears I don’t perceive much difference aside from stronger bass.
Everything is cleaner and clearer with the low end really detailed and more powerful. Plus, the whole mix sits better and is louder. The mix sounds alive to me. The other mix is decent but seems intended as a safe rather mid-rangey mix for radio or TV.
If you rip the mp3s from the videos and compare them, it will be much more obvious how different they are.
When you listened how did you do it? Headphones or something else?
Since no one had put a like on the video yet, I decided to tweak this a bit more after my car listen. I’ll occasionally do that if a video hasn’t been seen yet if I notice something I don’t like. The new version is in the embed above.
It’s possible that remixes are wasted on me, since I don’t like listening to music too loudly. I’m out of the house now, but I’ll listen to the revised remix when I get home later.
It’s true it’s less impactful if you listen low. The bare minimum is a decent pair of headphones and a good listening volume to get the full impact (you’ll get no impact listening to phone speakers or built in laptop speakers). ‘Loud’ is basically defined as the loudest you can listen your personal self without feeling like you need to ever turn down the music (that varies wildly person to person depending on how well they’ve taken care of their ears). You can still get some of the impact with decent headphones at a low listening volume, but anything other than that will make it tougher. You’ll also be able to tell listening in your car even at a low volume.
I usually listen at a low volume in the car unless I’m trying to enjoy music or am doing a critical listening test (I’d describe these mixes as being most impactful in decent headphones, the car, and the club as those are the intended delivery spots). It’s the same for when I’m working. I have a low volume that I know works for detail mixing for TV, etc. and the end is just making sure I didn’t miss anything and that the impact is what I intended. When I’m doing these, I’m only listening loud throughout most of the work. I’ll listen low at the very end to make sure it still plays low and that nothing sticks out as crazy wrong, but that’s really it. When your goal is to make the audience feel the full impact of the music, the only way you can work is at a loud reference level. When people mix movies, they mix them in movie theaters at the volume level they’ll be played back at for audiences. It’s a loud experience for them, especially when doing a final mix.
After listening in the car, I think I’m going to make a critical listening tweak to my process and add a third line of defense that I’ve mostly used sparingly. I have a pair of AirPods Max headphones that I usually just have off to the side. A friend of mine who’s also a mixer recommended them to me. He said they have some issues but when you get used to them they make listening to music a joy. I’d agree with him and just ended up buying them without testing his. I found they were very revealing when it came to mistakes (especially in the high end). They also let me know when I’ve been slightly too aggressive on the bottom end. I’ve been second guessing myself on some of my recent remasters, so I decided to pop those out again today. They were again revealing, and led me to make some changes to two remasters (two I kept because they played well). Going back to my regular critical listening headphones after showed the mixes now completely work there too. So, I’m going to add that for future ones.
All of that kind of stuff is in the last 5% that almost no one will notice, but I do. My goal is to really enjoy listening to my remasters for years to come (if I’m still around), and for the most part I get that feeling for a large amount of them. Some I don’t, but that’s ok. The song that I get the most ‘blown away’ feedback about of my remasters is Skyfall by Adele, a song that I worked very hard on.
The demographics of the channel for age and gender are very interesting:
- It’s 86.2 male,13.7% female, and 0.1% other (user specified).
- Age breakdown: 13-17 0.1%, 18-24 5.7%, 25-34 16.4%, 35-44 14.8%, 45-54 28.5%, 55-64 29.5%, 65+ 5.0%
- Most popular countries: U.S. 42.1%, Brazil 3.2%, United Kingdom 2.8%, South Korea 1.9%, France 1.5%
The vast majority of my audience is in my age demographic or older, the first time I’ve ever had that happen with a YouTube channel (I usually skew into the money making demographics of 18-49), but I’m remastering a ton of stuff from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, so it makes sense. There are also some 60s tricklers in there, too. I still do some modern songs, but my finger is not generally on the pulse of what’s going on in music enough to do a lot. I mostly do it when I run across something I like. It’s just way too hard to keep up, even for a genre you love when you get past a certain point in your life.
Maybe someone here likes Earth, Wind & Fire. Here’s Saturday Nite, hot off the presses on Friday nite.
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If I hate it by tomorrow I may redo it for Saturday nite.