Common F/ Talib Kweli & Marvin Gaye “The Light” (Remix)
September 29, 2010 by JLBarrow
Over the weekend I was out driving and Jill Scott’s “He Loves Me (Lizel In E Flat) came on the radio and the intro kept playing over in my head for the rest of the day. This happens to me about several times a day but I usually forget by the time I get home. This loop was stubborn though.
When I finally got home to the comp I clipped it off the end in Audition, ran it through the Fruity slicer, quantized it and chopped it. I played around with some drums and liked the way the Barry White kick and snare sounded but I wanted to play with the pattern some more. So I exported all of the parts using Slicex and placed them in the “pads” of the FPC to make a more unique pattern.
After that I made about 5 more different segments with various chops and drums and stashed them until I was ready to sequence. After playing the beat for about ten minutes I pitched up the sample and added some filters to differentiate it from Jill’s composition a little bit. Then I started hearing voices on the beat, so I went through my acapellas and Common’s “The Light” seemed to go with the whole thing so I matched two verses up to the beat and left it alone.
A few days later I came back to it and decided it needed a hook so I went hunting in my acapellas for someone professing their love to their woman and found the Marvin Gaye acapella to “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby.” I chopped it up and isolated the pieces I wanted to use to create a phrase and that became my hook.
From there the song felt short so I added Talib’s verse from “Hot Thing” (which was a pain in the ass to match up until I realized the acapella was fubar.) And that was it. I’ll dub this one the “Heaven On Earth” remix.
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