Interview: Buckwild Out Of SP-1200: The Art And The Science

Man, production really just isn't the same these days... A lot of my favorite producers have turned in their analog equipment and sampling drum machines in favor of laptops and PC's...I'm not knockin' it 100%, but, it's just...well, it's something else... One of the nicest cats ever in the 90's and still to this day I'm sure--on the much heralded and storied SP-1200; i.e. a drum machine that Hip-Hop was built on--is Buckwild.

Recently a fully comprehensive book, SP-1200: The Art And The Science, was put out by 27Sens as an ode to this wonderful machine and it's only right that Buckwild had a large interview in it conducted by JNOTA of Redefinition records... Great, great sit down here...Buck builds on everything from how he linked with DITC, playing his first beats for OC, the pros and cons of the SP-1200, his favorite joints ever, how he feels about the digitization of music and what he uses to produce now..

big time shouts to TheLostTapes on this.

-BIG D O

JNOTA: What are some of your general thoughts on the SP1200, it's features and pros & cons? 

Buckwild: I loved the swing about it. The swing, the truncation. Sometimes the filtering was like ... on the first 2 channels there was a lot of lil' glitches that they had that was glitches, but turned out to be pros. I think it was the first two channels and if you put something on there it turned out to sound muffled, so I'm not sure if they understood that, but it worked. The multi ... the scale, I loved that about it. One of our tracks was one of the first that really used the scale, which was "The O-Zone" for OC's album. And another thing I loved about it was that you had such little time, that you had to be creative. We had so many songs that just were made up of some sound bites. Like even, with (Organized Konfusion's) "Stress", it was a lot of sound bites in there. I found that disc one day and went through it, and was like, wow, I cant believe it. If you have nothing, you gotta do so much to create. You gotta remember back then, like Pete was sampling soul loops, Tribe was sampling jazz loops; these guys had the luxury of loops. Listening to O's album, a lot of it was sound bites. We didn't have a lot of the time for sampling or whatever. The SP forced us to be creative. It made everyone bring something different to the table. I think Show had to be the first one that really chopped a drum loop and made that loop do something else, in a different way. I forgot what it was but he chopped it and made it play a different pattern and dudes weren't doing that when he did it. Even for us, with DITC, while everyone sampled loops, we were chopping.  I learned to chop from Show and went off to learn it more on my own.  

Read the rest here