When I was a kid I'd always make improvised drumkits out of cookie boxes and other stuff I could find. When I was about six my grandparents were sick of me stealing all their cookie boxes and banging them with sticks all day long. So they bought me with a drum kit and sent me to get a music education.
Throughout my teens and early twenties I've been in a fair share of bands here and there as a drummer in all kinds of different genres of music (punk rock, metal, rock, hiphop, funk, soul, ... )
When I was about twenty I was getting to a point where couldn't just put on a cd anymore. I would stick one specific song in the player and be there waiting till it finished with another cd in my hand, trying to switch the cd's a fast as possible. That's when I figured I really wanted turntables.
I finally got turntables and started getting into vinyl. At first it was all hiphop. I tried to get all the classic stuff (to me that is) that I've been listening to for so long and loved to death on vinyl. I didn't really follow the new stuff that came out but was more into the late eighties to mid ninetees hiphop.
I also got into skratching alot. Not really turntablism since I never got much further than some basic beat juggling patterns.
After a couple of years I really got bored with hiphop as it was and pretty much still is today. I know there's good stuff out there but I don't want to wade through so much really bad to average stuff these days. This is what lead me to the search of where it all came from. In the meantime I organised some hiphop nights where people could come together to do their thing whether they were mc's, dj's or turntablists. I did it all with no budget and help from friends who could provide the location and such. After a while I quit doing this because of me putting in all the work yet getting nothing out of it financially. It really wasn't about the money but I didn't wanna put in money and get nothing when money was made.
So I started buying more and more other music on vinyl (soul, jazz, funk, rock, ... ). After a couple of years I had a very modest collection of music I could sample but I didn't really buy it for that purpose since I wasn't into production. So I started organising nights in bars where we would play a mix of hiphop, soul, funk, jazz and all kinds of other stuff. This was a nice outlet but again, it took a lot out of me.
In the meantime I was approached by a group of three mc's called AMOK that perfomed on some of the TrueHipHop nights to be their dj. I accepted so to this day I'm occasionally their dj on stage and I do the cuts on some of their tracks.
A lot of people said they really enjoyed my taste in beats and said to me I should get into production. When a friend of mine was gonna sell his MPC I couldn't resist and bought it. At this point I quit organising the nights because I wanted to focus on production in the future.
If you want to hear more, there's some more stuff up on my soundclick account .Thanks for checking...
