London city is a multicultural place where the sounds of many genres merge together. The resulting musical fusion flows in different directions enriching the cultural heritage of London town. The city echos the sounds of jazz, soul, funk, Latin, reggae, as well as the urban sounds of hip-hop, dancehall, grime, reggaeton, afrobeat, electronic music, and much more. This cultural diversity influences the young generation and encourages the city's creative output.
In December of 2019, a young boy from London composed a hip-hop beat on Garageband. When he played his idea to me, I was immediately taken by the vibe of the ground bass. The bass line had a prominent laid-back groove that hooks the listener.
Listen to KGJ's original beat.
I decided to open his Garageband's project on Logic Pro X to develop his idea further.
His beat was in a minor key, and had a tempo of 90 BPM—a suitable downtempo for a laid back jazzy hip-hop tune. What is better than a jazzy saxophone melody on a chill funky beat, heh..?
As KGJ is a saxophonist, his beat was asking for his alto-sax's original sound. We jammed together at home, and came up with some complementary sax melodies for the composition. Then, we went to our home-studio and started working on the project. We recorded the sax melodies and experimented with various edits for the song. During mid Dec 2019, we went out with a DSLR camera, and captured some footage for a promo video.
The year 2020 followed, and the COVID-19's pandemic hit the world, putting us all on lockdown for a year. In 2021, I revised the project, and decided to contact a professional bassist friend of mine to remotely take KGJ's original bass-line to the next level. I sent him a couple of stems, and he tracked his bass guitar—enhancing the groove whilst maintaining the original concept.
Finally, I mixed and mastered the audio for the project, and completed the production for a humble audio-visual promo.
The record "London Sax" is available on all your favourite streaming platforms such as iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music, among others.
Check the links below:
CLICK ON the Youtube's link below to view the PREMIERE for the audio-visual (music video) this Thursday, July 29th at 8:00 PM on Bashylongo Records' Youtube channel.
Stay tuned for news and updates.
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