Fuse City!

Hailing from the Hip Hop Mecca that is Bexhill-on-Sea in the South of England, Fuse! is an amateur producer/professional strongman, trying to hold the fort down for plain dope music.
All of my work, past and present, has been made on a select batch of hardware, mainly revolving around a sampler called the SP-303. No weak laptop sequencing here... Essentially, this has done nothing but slow me down and force me to work that bit harder, so I hope you appreciate it!
More information on the gear I use, along with photos, can be seen further down the page.
If you're an MC, or singer, of any kind and would like to work on something together, get in touch. I'm down to work with anyone, so long as you don't own a mink coat.
If you like what you hear - let me know, I really appreciate it. If you don't - do your thing, I'll do mine kid, stay outta my way. Peace.
Fuse City est. 1986, still bringin y'all nuthin but the really real since day one! Fuck the fake shit.
Weapons of Choice:
Boss Dr. Sample SP303:
Go to any music forum and ask what hardware you're gonna need to make hip hop – 11 times out of 10 your answer will be something from the Akai MPC range.
Starting out, I was close to buying the MPC 1000 and being an extra £500 down. Fortunately, (or unfortunately for you) someone (cheers bro! ) said I should check out a Madlib interview where he points out that a lot of his stuff is made on an SP303. Being easily swayed and pretty tight, Madlib’s approval and the fact that a new 303 costs about 200 quid had me set.
Now, go to any music forum and ask for people’s views on the 303 – people hate the thing. Now that I've been using it for a while I can see why – only 8 pads and four sample banks, two of which are so small memory-wise that they’re pretty useless on their own. Only four stereo sounds can be played at once, making complex tracks basically impossible without a multi-track. Add to this the fact that my model has a tendency to randomly ignore the cut-off points for samples, playing the parts that I’ve purposefully left out right in the middle of recording, and you get a good idea why it ain’t so popular.
Somewhere in my stubborn mind I decided this would simply make me work harder and that in no way did I regret buying the thing.
Shit… If you’re convinced that the SP303 is junk, go listen to Rhinestone Cowboy and suck it.
Boss BR-900-CD
So, you've gone and bought your SP303 like the excited cheap-skate that you are, you got your samples loaded onto it and you're ready to go.
Now, as you may have already noticed, the marketing department at Boss are gonna tell you that your SP303 is all you need to make 'professional-sounding songs' from start to finish. Uh huh. Then what? What are you gonna do once you’ve painstakingly finished your song? Well, they forget to mention that you’re gonna need a whole new piece of equipment just to record it.
I realise now that I was pretty naïve to have not realised that myself, but Boss certainly do their best to hide it. It took about five e-mails to Boss' Customer Services for them to admit that the 303 is not all you need in one handy little box.
It took a while for me to accept that there was no easy (a.k.a. cheap) way of getting around the issue of recording my finished songs, but I finally admitted defeat a week or so later and bought the Boss BR-900 CD from some other website. It cost around the £380 mark I think. Unbeknownst to my purchase, Boss went on to e-mail me recommending the most expensive piece of recording equipment that they make. Now, who the shit is gonna spend over £3,000 on equipment to record songs from a £200 sampler? That’s like Peugeot telling me to put gold spinners on my 106...
So, with a User Manual about an inch thick, I was put off the idea of learning how to use the machine inside and out. For a long time I didn't even use the multi-track function of the machine; instead I ended up recording entire songs straight from my sampler to the BR-900, all onto one track. My mind boggles when I think of this now, seeing as tracks like '3 Flavours' were done this way, meaning I had to play each and every sample in one sitting and hope that I got all the timings right (in the end I chopped '3 Flavours' into four different sections, recorded them separately and stitched them all together afterwards. Wah.)
Anyway, there are a ton of functions on this machine considering the low price. There's a whole slew of preset effects, which I'm only just starting to tap into; a lot of useless ones along the lines of vinyl simulation, but some of the more subtle ones can give your samples a different sound without being too over the top. You can EQ each individual track before bouncing them all together, and there's also a Mastering function which again I've only just started using. Up until this point I've had to 'master' my finished songs on a £20.00 piece of software called Xoom, so hopefully there will be a noticeable improvement on my newer stuff.
So overall, I can't really give this thing a mark out of 10 seeing as I've never used another piece of recording equipment, but it's never failed on me. The memory cards have never messed up, which I thought they would, and there haven't been any faults whatsoever. Only issue is that it seems to give all recordings (drums especially) this annoying, subtle echo sound. It's not overly apparent, but I try to EQ it out of each song at the end. Other than that - if you've got the cash, I would definitely recommend forking out that little bit extra for a few more tracks: it's a pain when you're really getting into a song but have to stop to bounce everything after every third sample. Anyway - 6/10.
MicroKorg:
"Hey, you watch Friends, right? Well you remember the hilarious episode with Ross playing the keyboard....? No, not the prom episode you dork! The one where he’s making all those cool noises with his voice? It was cool, right? Right?! Well that’s what this keyboard does!!!”
This was the sort of response I got EVERY time I asked people about the MicroKorg. People make out like the sole function of it is to give you a cool robot voice, and the synthesizer part is just a bonus. I’m not really up to Ross’ standards when it comes to being a cool robot, so I haven’t really touched the vocoder function yet. In fact, I don’t use this piece of kit too much, but when I do it’s normally for basslines and simple melodies, but that’s all I need it for right now.
Not much to say about why I bought the Korg – it was either that or a Moog. I guess sometimes you have to listen to your wallet. C.R.E.A.M.