I remember the 1st time I recorded in the studio with the Crooked City crew.
The place looked more like the lobby of Sofitel than a recording studio.
Polished wood on every surface with a feeling like I didn’t want to touch anything in case of incurring smudging costs. The booth was reminiscent of a log cabin in the woods.
Before I go too much into the recording experience, let me go back to when I 1st made contact with the crew.
Pre-studio Crooked City, Boom bap
I was on the lookout for boom bap beats. I’d decided I needed to take my music to the next level, which meant stop using jacked YouTube beats and invest in some originals.
It was time to elevate to Aussie rapper status. I grabbed my coffee and posted on my socials:
“Who’s got beats?”
The post blew up
The next 8 hours saw me sifting through peoples SoundCloud accounts and other various links. I was in the market.
Boom bap beat hustlers
Buy 2, get one free.
Buy now and save 20%. 30 beats for $30. So many
I was about 6 hours deep when I clicked a link that would change the direction of my life.
Crooked City - The studio
I clicked the link and knew straight away I’d found what I wanted.
I reached out to Crooked City and we hit it off straight away.
After chatting with the crew, it began to dawn on me that I’d be needing more than just beats. I needed a studio and a sound engineer for starters. Crooked City provided everything.
It was perfect for me at the time.
Recording Madman – behind the scenes studio
After my initial experience of actually seeing the studio and making sure we were on the same page; it was time to record.
Madman was the 1st track I recorded at the end of 2017 although I didn’t release it for another 2 years. That’s a story for another day though.
A memory of chain-smoking cigarettes outside the studio in an attempt to calm the nerves drifts to mind.
I was excited.
This was it! Everything I’d been working for, everything I’d been grinding for.
I got in the booth and I unleashed. There’s nothing like the 1st time.
Up until that 1st experience in the booth, I had been rocking stages around Sydney City for a couple of years. A very different experience from the live shows. You could do more than one take for a start. A lot more breathing and technicalities in the booth. Live shows there’s a lot of energy from the crowd which I find hard to capture in the studio.
Nevertheless we smashed it out in a few hours.
Another studio - breathtaking boom bap
Another memory arises of recording Friendzone with Crooked City. This time found us at a studio in the middle of Sydney near Capitol Square.
It was an old part of the city and the studio was in an old bank that had been converted.
The lobby looked like a scene from The Matrix.
The recording booth was literally an old bank vault!
I’d step inside through a thick door with one of those circular door knob mechanisms that looked like a pirate ship wheel. The heavy door would close and seal behind me to form an airtight enclosure.
Talk about noise reduction.
After the experience in the vault booth, I released my debut single Madman on all streaming platforms.
That was August 2019. Since then I’ve released another 4 singles and 2 film clips. It’s now May 2020.
The grind is paying off and looking back I’ve certainly come a long way since that day I searched for boom bap beats.
I’m incredibly grateful to be on this journey as an Aussie rapper.
Sounds like an intense journey… Cool experience bro.
Thanks for reading homie!