For his blog, Hooked On The American Dream [click here], New Jack City and Above The Rim writer Barry Michael Cooper sat down with Bad Boy Records CEO Sean “Diddy” Combs for a video interview titled Sean John Combs: Once Upon A Time In America.
Asked about early Bad Boy Records‘ producer Easy Mo Bee, often credited for honing Notorious B.I.G.‘s sound, Diddy recalled, “I know we had got a tape of beats. These were just producers out there doin’ their thing.” “Mo Bee and Biggie, they kind of like gelled together.” With Mo Bee having produced for Miles Davis, Big Daddy Kane and GZA through that point, Diddy added, “He was one of them up and coming producers that was just a real studio rat – in there, creating all the time…. he aesthetically, kind of went with our sound. He had these real unique drums; the snares were just stupid hard! The way that he would EQ everything… before there was Pro Tools and everything, it was SP-1200s and MPC 60s, and everybody had like their own sounds. People would create their own kicks and their own snares, and nobody else would have other people’s sounds.“
With Mo Bee producing Craig Mack‘s hit “Flava In Ya Ear” as well as seminal Biggie records, Diddy certified, “He had a soul to the way in which he played it and formatted it.”
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Looking at his own production approach, Diddy spoke about his knack. “I was big into my sampling thing. I would sample and touch joints that everybody else was afraid of because a lot of people didn’t know how to make songs.” He also addressed the controversial approach to taking full loops and basslines from hit records. “[Many producers’ approach] was finding obscure samples; I wanted to find the sample that gave you that memory. I was a specialist, I would say, on picking the right memory – ’cause you can fuck around and pick the wrong memory.”
1994’s Ready To Die found Diddy (then Sean “Puffy” Combs) co-producing both singles “Juicy” and “Big Poppa,” which sampled hits from Mtume and The Isley Brothers respectively.
Diddy contests though, “It was almost harder to make a hit out of a sample, ’cause you’ve got to make a hit out of a hit.”
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The Notorious B.I.G. was murdered 12 years ago today.
Three separate clips of Cooper’s exclusive interview with Diddy can be found [click here].
