Artists like Kanye West and Pete Rock may have record sales and reputations on their side, but as far as emcee/producers are concerned, Oddisee’s talent and catalog are just as potent as his peers’. Getting his first big break by working with Jazzy Jeff on the cult-classic The Magnificent [click to read], Oddisee has since spent much of his career crafting a mix of soulful soundbeds and trunk rattlers for compilations on his Halftooth Records label home and his Low Budget crew (which consists of Kenn Starr, Kev Brown and others), along with J-Live, Little Brother and other emcees. He further displayed his talents on the mic in 2006 with his Foot In The Door debut mixtape, which included new songs and splices of previous material he rapped and produced on, but rampant bootlegging of the project thwarted him from achieving the full-bodied buzz he had intended to make as a dual threat.

Last year, Oddisee took things into his own hands, offering the Oddisee 101 mixtape—which featured the likes of LB, Jean Grae, Zion I and others—as a free download on his blog [click here]. In an interview with HipHopDX’s Producer’s Corner, Oddisee talks about his growth as a producer, two upcoming projects with new emcees, and getting paid for your product.

HipHopDX: What’s your background in music, before you started working with Jazzy Jeff?
Oddisee: From a technical standpoint, I started out with the ASR-X, made by Ensoniq. It’s not the ASR 10 that people mistake it for, that’s the keyboard version. The X was basically Ensoniq’s answer to the MPC. They made a box version with pads to compete with the MPC. It didn’t go as good; the MPC flourished, and the ASR got discontinued. I just got into a bit more of the grassroots forms of Hip Hop more than the glossy stuff toward the beginning of my career. Now, I’ve grown to appreciate it all. But as far as the beginning, I was somewhat of a purist. I would only sample from records, I wouldn’t take samples that had already been used, and [although] of those invisible stipulations and guidelines which complete nonsense to me now, I love when I first started making music.

DX: What were those guidelines?
Oddisee: I would only sample things that I had on vinyl. I wouldn’t sample something that had already been used. I wouldn’t take drums from another producer—like if [DJ Premier] left a snare open or something like that. A lot of things. Some of those things I still kind of stick to, but for different reasons. I still, to this day prefer to sample only from vinyl…or CDs, it doesn’t matter, but I don’t like to sample from MP3s. As nerdy as it sounds, I really do hear a sound quality difference. A couple tricks of the trade that I do on my samples, I can’t do on MP3s; let’s just say that. [Laughs]

As you advance in your career, and your hobby becomes your career, what you love to do becomes your money maker, you learn that…I think it comes with a level of maturity. You learn that as long as the end result is good, and that your craft and your hard work and time is visible, and it can be heard in the music, it doesn’t matter what the process is to get there. I used to say, “Aww man, I’d never use a computer to make beats.” Yet I barely even use my ASR anymore, I make my beats completely in ProTools now. It’s a whole bunch of stuff that, when I was younger, I just had this purist mentality. But when you get older, you’re more compassionate and understanding of other styles and techniques. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

DX: You’ve got the albums coming out with Stik Figa and Tranqill. Tell me about these guys.
Oddisee: Sure. I’m always a fan of working with breaking, new artists. I kind of do my best to shy away from the usual suspects that people think I’m supposed to collaborate with because of the category that I’m in. That’s no disrespect to them, because I love ‘em, and the music is dope, but all in all, I don’t want to collaborate with the usual suspects. I get disgusted when a record comes out that I’m on, and then I see everybody that I’ve already worked with on that record. It’s like we’re just constantly making compilations over and over and over, and the only way to preserve and progress this culture is if we constantly introduce a new market. The underground, a lot of us … get in these little cliques amongst ourselves, and we don’t get outside of them. So I’m a bit more conscious about those things in my career, so I prefer to find another artist who’s hungry with innovative, bright ideas and create something new. I love taking that risk, and it keeps me intrigued in a project, so I don’t know what to expect.

Stik Figa, he’s from Topeka, which is about an hour north of Kansas City, Missouri. He reps Kansas City just as much as he reps Topeka, he got his start down there in the Hip Hop community real strong in Kansas City. … He’s just got this real dope Midwest swag to him. His lyrical potency is up there—and no disrespect—it’s what you would compare a lot of east coast artists to, or the rhyme complexity of a Detroit artist. Detroit artists, I guess they don’t have as much of an obvious southern twang to their flow, so it doesn’t catch you off-guard. Often-times, it’s a negative thing, but we associate the thicker the southern accent, the more inferior the lyrics are, which isn’t the case. Continued on page 2 »