No Budget

A song about having no money and or recording space/equipment, but doing it anyway

This was from the long overdue "Big in Japan" album, a collaboration between myself (then known as Mr Thirsty, cos I sucked like a Shamwow), and a rapper named Tungsten9. We don't really talk or work together anymore, but for some reason I like a lot of what we came up with back then and thought I'd share.

Anyways, the point is we knew a lot of guys with formal training, education, professional equipment, and the always elusive "street cred", that somehow couldn't manage to make a track that compared to what we could come up with by sending beats and vocal tracks over AIM between apartments 1,000km apart in our respective living rooms on bootlegged copies of Acid 1.0. Maybe. You decide.

(Get Flash to see the track player.)
posted by Hoopo (5 comments total)

Bootlegged copies of Acid 2.0 got me through most of the nineties. And an $80 dollar Shure SM57 or 58 microphone, in the right hands, can give the most expensive mic in the world a run for its money. In the end, it's the quality of the ideas that matters most.

Cool track. I'm not really knowledgeable about hip-hop. Cool Keith's Doctor Octagon record and Jurassic 5's "Quality Control" record are really the only rap albums in my regular rotation. But this sounds damn good to me for a no-budget project.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:28 AM on February 18

I still remember making the upgrade to Acid something point something when I got on some new file-sharing thingy--maybe 4.0? It looked different and it instantly made me miss the old version. I swear, Sonic Foundry had it right the first couple of times. And Sound Forge? Man, I've yet to find anything quite as intuitive and user-friendly. Even what I use now in lieu of it (Sound Studio on a Mac laptop) has a frustrating feature of not allowing you to "slide" your selection window (if that makes sense), which is a major ass-pain when you're trying to clip your samples with any kind of precision.
posted by Hoopo at 7:51 AM on February 18

Yeah, I'm with you on Sound Forge--I don't know how it's changed since Sony bought it, but the original Sonic Foundry version rocked. Syntrillium's Cool Edit 2000 was a close second, and a serious bargain (it had direct x plug-in support and only cost like $20 as a download, so I actually ponied up for a legal copy). Then Adobe bought Cool Edit and started selling it for around $200. Bastards.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:14 AM on February 18

One good thing for me about Sony buying Sonic Foundry is that I once bought a Vaio laptop and it came preloaded with Acid 2.0. Which I've heard is not as good as the later versions but I still love it, it really is unbelievably intuitive and useful.

As for your track: good, good hip hop. I really like this sort of Brooklyn style hip hop. The more laid back and even kinda melodic rapping kind. If you can post them without problems, I'd love to hear more songs from that album.
posted by micayetoca at 6:37 AM on March 2

I love it. Half the reason is because the song is good. The other half is because I totally relate to making hip-hop with no budget. I'm glad I'm not the only one doing things like using freeware and a laptop internal mic to record DIY beats and rhymes in a shitty apartment.

I empathize. And I have to say, you have much more ability to fake professionalism than I do. Kudos.
posted by swellingitchingbrain at 8:54 PM on June 30