I went down to Kingston, Jamaica in mid-June to record with Vybz Kartel and I’ve finally gotten this post together.

In June, Kartel was watching every single World Cup game, so he was waking up around 8am which left me a little concerned as to whether he would be up for some late night recording. I flew down on a Monday and our first scheduled session was for 3pm on Tuesday, but by 7pm there was no word from him and things weren’t looking too good. Still, I had heard stories that I would likely be waiting, so I was ready for it. By 9pm, I heard the arrangement was to meet him on the side of the road at a specific time—to be waiting in a car—and then follow him to a studio that he was not going to disclose in advance. That’s exactly what happened. When the time came, we linked on the side of a road and subsequently began a twisting and turning journey through the streets of Kingston following Kartel to the mysterious studio.

Walking into the building that housed the studio, there was a dark room with a few young women half asleep on two black leather couches. Past them was the doorway to the actual studio. Once inside, the door was locked and we got right to work. The first track I wanted Kartel to voice was the least dancehall track I had brought, a sort of 135 bpm, half time thing which you can hear a snippet of in the video below. Kartel liked it straight away and said he was good to voice it. His engineer Notnice was manning the computer and handling the recording duties. Kartel had him play the track repeatedly while he messed around with his Blackberry. After a few minutes he was ready to go. Notnice turned off the lights and Kartel sat in front of the mic with the music in his headphones and smoked as the beat played. After a minute or two, he began to make wordless, vocalizations over the track. Notnice was recording everything. I could barely discern any melody, but he was clearly searching it out. Occasionally he would ask Notnice to play back a section to listen to a part and think about it. Within ten minutes, he had started putting down full lines with words and melody. He wasn’t too particular about the lines or fragments of melody being in linear order. He might do the fourth bar in the chorus before going back and doing the first three. Things like that. The pace started to pick up and the song was taking shape very quickly. In addition to writing the words and melody, he was hearing the mix of the song in his head and instructing Notnice to take this word or that word and double it and pan each take. Within an hour or maybe an hour and a half, the first song was done.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice was Kartel’s ability to voice a line during a second or third take exactly like the previous takes. It was incredible to watch. Say he made a mistake in one word, he would go back and re-record the previous line and I would watch the waveform on the computer redraw his new take over the old take and it would always look like an exact copy—the shape of each word, the volume, all exactly the same. I knew Kartel was a master of his craft, but this was some Robert Johnson level virtuosity.

After the first track was finished, the lights came back on and Notnice loaded up the second track which was a sort of “Yuh Love” follow up, a 90bpm poppy, dancehall thing. After hanging out for a bit, he quickly got to work with a similar process – searching for the melody and then piecing together disjointed lines until he had assembled a perfect pop song. Within another hour or so, the second track was done and we called it quits for the night.

We linked up for the third track on my last night of the trip and it was at the same studio with a similar process. Kartel’s approach on one of the verses was particularly impressive. The instrumental was set up for a twelve bar verse and he started by recording bar twelve first. He listened to it, and then went back and and recorded bar eleven, stopped the tape, checked it, and then bar ten…and then bar nine and so on, piece by piece. He literally wrote and recorded each bar in backward sequential order to construct the verse. It was a pretty amazing thing to witness and the verse worked perfectly.

This a snippet of the first track we worked on.

While in Kingston, I also got a chance to record at Shaggy’s Big Yard studio. I linked up with Konshens for an uptempo track. He came gave an impressive voicing with some serious harmonies. I wish this picture showed the enormous subs in the studio, they were ridiculous.

I also got a chance to link up with Natalie Storm and check in on the mixtape she is prepping. It’s definitely going to impress, look out!

This is a detail from a large amount of graffiti in Notnice’s studio. On my last day in Kingston, I stopped back through and Notnice and I had a vibe session. Aside from engineering for Kartel, he’s also a very solid producer. He’s just started working with Logic Pro, which is what I use to produce, so I spent the afternoon giving him some Logic tips. We hit it off and since returning to Brooklyn, he’s been ringing me when he needs Logic advice. I’m hoping that on my next trip he can teach me how to get deep with the MPC. For the record, I’m taking a little credit if any of his riddims in the next 6 month have arpeggio synth lines.

Tags: Big Yard, Dancehall, Dre Skull, Jamaica, Kingston, Konshens, Natalie Storm, Notnice, Shaggy, Vybz Kartel