This is my first entry out of many, and It's going to be about an album I'm working on known as Upper Echelon. It's going to be an album like the Life Of Pablo, it tooks YEARS of production and went through so many changes, from being called Yeezus 2, Swish, All Day, ETC... That's how my album is going currently. It was called hydronic50k at one point, and it was also gonna be called YYPIERCER, but I came with Upper Echelon after listening to an Osamason song "X & Sex" where he said "I just took the X, shut up" but for some reason I thought he said "I just took the Upper Echelon, Shut Up!" and it striked me really hard, and that's when I came up with the album name.
The album's production process is pretty rocky because I'm the only one producing it, because it's you know, my music, but I have been yearning for a collaboration for a while now. The album was gonna be solely just Drum and Bass, but I fell out with the genre after becoming more used to making rap beats, especially sigilkore, and i just slowly started to make more sigilkore and rap shit. So, I scrapped hydronic50k, and started making hella rap shit and that would eventually become Upper Echelon V1. In this version, I was just experimenting and trying to find the sounds I like and nothing notable came out of it but a jersey club song I released as a single known as "KRUSHCLUB"
I found this sample a while ago on https://samplette.io/ and when I first heard of it I thought it was crazy, and at the time I was experiencing making Jersey Club songs using very ambient, electronic songs. I took the song immediately and found a couple notable areas I wanted to sample but what spoke to me the most was the intro of the song, which I am sure is a sample too, and I kept on listening to it, it was like slowly letting a drug slip. I timestretched the sample a little, added some reverb and whatnot, and it got this ethereal energy to it. The rest of making the song was nothing notable, I added ugly, offbeat kicks to get the attention of the listener, like some type of juxtaposition in music form, but it slowly transforms into ugly offbeat kicks into these hardhitting kicks in the jersey pattern while these hi hats just go. [Side note: I asked the producers who made this song for sample clearance but they never responded to me. Weird.]
Another Notable Jersey Club Track I made was called "NMESH CLUB" because the sample I used was made from somebody called NMESH I'm pretty sure, but until this article, it was never seeing the light of day because I wasn't really seeing anything in it. I ABSOLUTELY love the sample I used though, and I'll probably use it again in the coming weeks because it's such a beautiful sample. The beat had me doing the uzi hip dance when i first made it though, gotta love that.
A track I was really proud of was called "Starboy" and I wanted to release it and actually get a verse on there from somebody, but I asked for sample clearance first from this guy named "Glassnine" who made the song, and when I showed him the track he said he wasn't gonna clear the verse and not to ever sample his music again. It really put me in the dumps, it made me feel like a trash producer and made me understand that the process using samples can be hard sometimes. The beat is a little quiet so I edited it to be a bit louder, the mix sucks since I made it when I was less experienced. I still love this sample.
I had this one beat from this era called "I Got The Ecstasy" featuring VI, the girl who did my producer tag. All love. This track is also a sample (if you don't realize, I like sampling a lot :P) and the sample originally sounds nothing like a rap beat but I kept on messing with the beat until I heard something from it and thats when I laid the 808s and hihats. The mix is bad though, so I scrapped it.