From our viewpoint...

It's very easy to think all this has happened because of the amount of graft that we put in in the studio every day of every week, and in many ways, it has, but it's very important for us to recognise the people around us who aid us in achieving our best, creatively and artistically, but also those who really help get our music out there. In particular, we'd like to thank Andi Durrant, Andy Booth, Aniff Akinola, Anton Powers, Chris Long, Dom Keegan, Kevin Grainger, Melissa MacTavish, Mike Toner, Nick Bright, Neil Briggs, Stretch Armstrong, Stefan Kazassoglou, Stevie Mac, Tim Medcraft, Tom Howell, Zed Bias... and of course, Mike Kelly, for once again ensuring we maximise our potential as artists and individuals, on time, and with a smile on our faces.

Stamp! Beats: Publishing

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STMP009

 

HeavyFeet ft. Hannah T - Just Fall

Stamp! Beats

Release Date: 06.12.10

For our ninth release we enlisted the vocal talents of Hannah T. We had been trying to utilise Hannah on a track for a while before ‘Just Fall’ came together, to the point where we had a selection of her acapellas sat on the hard drive to be used whenever inspiration was lacking! When finalising the arrangement and mix on ‘Just Fall’ it became rather apparent, to us at least, that the track bore a rather large resemblance to Magnetic Man’s ‘Perfect Stranger’, although we can guarantee it was conceived before we had ever heard that record. At the time of starting ‘Just Fall’, we really didn’t think the idea of having trancey vocals and riffs over a 140bpm breakbeat had a such potential. With hindsight, the main fault we have with the original track was that we chose a chord progression to sit under the vocals that didn’t lend itself particularly well to getting a huge bass heavy sub line underneath, which, when you're making such a track is kind of an important factor.

We managed to combat this problem when doing our alternative version by ditching the majority of the melodic aspects of the original and only using rather sparse vocal cuts, and sticking a massively distorted, (un-tuned) 808 kick drum in for the bassline, which, as many people know, has untold amounts of low end sub frequencies. The 2-step vibe we went with on the remix is something we have experimented with in a few remixes of late, as it a style of music that easily enables us to put our own stamp on it and retain a largely musical element. 2-step remixes can also be made to fit in the often slightly awkward tempo bracket of 132-140 bpm, which can often prove helpful for DJ sets, etc.

There is very little to be said for the remix that Udachi did for this release, except that it is criminal that it took us so long to enlist his talents in the '12x12', and that he turned in an absolutely awesome, impeccably detailed monster of a club remix for us! It is certainly a favourite from the guest remixes we’ve commissioned throughout the project.

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As always, thanks for reading, we hope the post has been of insight.

M&J

Stamp! Beats: Opportunities and development

Something that we have learnt from embarking on this project, in a similar manner perhaps to say a music producer or songwriter creating a truly unique sub-genre or set of songs (say Jamie Woon?), when you create something unique, in our instance, a new way of thinking with regards to the running of an independent, artist-run, record label, opportunities you could never have foreseen or imagined will arise. Since embarking on the '12x12' journey in April 2010, as HeavyFeet, we have been offered a number of unique opportunities that had we spent a minute thinking about pre-October 2009, would have thought were highly unlikely to happen within the timeframe that they have done. We feel that the reason for these exciting developments is largely down to one factor: You get back what you put out. 

This can be related to your content and/or conduct. If you radiate fresh, original music to the world, opportunities that are also fresh and new will gravitate towards you and your musical output. If you present a forward thinking, professional attitude towards your business, it's highly likely you'll attract similar minded persons who want to work with you and your project.

Since we have undertaken the '12x12' we have completed additional production on a pop track that was previous unsigned but had label interest (it is now signed and being released this summer), presented the working model of the runnings of Stamp! Beats and the '12x12' project to the In The City music conference (more to come on this in a later blog post soon), an internationally renowned new UK music showcase and gathering of industry persons, confirmed a new project to launch with the BBC in summer 2011, completed several remixes for major labels/pop artists, and this is largely without getting started on the last few months... or wanting to appear like we're overly blowing our own trumpet, because as we keep saying, this series of posts isn't about that, or us really, it's about putting experiences we have lived and information we have gained out there for people to read about, and hopefully go and do something even more pro-actove with their time than we have.

A point worth noting in relation to the paragraph above. Ewan Pearson mentioned this in a blog post recently and it rung a bell, but some days you wake up and you listen to a totally finished piece of music that you were 100% confident of a few days beforehand... and you absolutely hate it. The point to be taken from his point is, some days you just wake up on the wrong side of the bed and have a bad day, or week, or month, whatever, it happens. The really relevant point to this though is that we also have these days and if you're reading this series of posts and you've just read the paragraph above about all these amazing things that are going on with HeavyFeet at present and you're wondering how the hell you can do something similarly positive, well, tomorrow is a new day and you can make new music, decisions about your goals etc happen then. Maybe you got out of bed on the wrong side today, who knows? Everyone has days where they feel muted about what they're trying to achieve, seriously. A semi-interesting point, some of the biggest artists we know or have met doubt themselves and their ability on an alternately daily basis, having one positive day, followed directly by a negative day. Heavy!

So, to go back to the point of this section of the blog... You get back what you put out. If you go out there as a music maker and/or business owner, with a positive mental attitude about making your personal goals happen whilst always looking for new opportunities and channels to go down, you really are able to achieve whatever it is you are trying to make happen. 

Passion, positivity and perseverance (or persistence, if you prefer). It's all about the three/four P's... depending on how you see it.

Stamp! Beats: Distribution of free music

For us, 'Last Two People' was an advancement on our 5th release ('We Came To Party') in that we took the same approach to making a track with some commercial appeal, but we feel we managed to complete the release, with the vocalists we had on board, to a higher degree of success. That's not to say we feel this release is better than our 5th, merely that we think we got closer to the target we set out for it! Whilst we were extremely happy with the outcome of 'We Came To Party', the vibe of Kovas' vocals gave more of a party/club/hip hop slant to the track, whereas on 'Last Two People' any similar vibes were limited to Kid Bliss' guest 16 and middle 8 rather then being laced throughout the track, and the main vocal hook from The Real Dolls' Rod Hotly was a pretty hype, catchy set of lines. 

We first came across The Real Dolls through listening to BBC Introducing Manchester (every Sunday night from 10pm). We contacted their production team, who linked us with their management, and we went through the motions to get their lead vocalist involved in our 12x12 project. Initially, there were no plans to have Kid Bliss feature on the track. However, we had made the instrumental in the same period we created 'We Came To Party' and a commercially influenced track was always our intention for it. Once Rod Hotly had delivered us the hook we realised there was some space to play around with the arrangement and incorporate a second vocalist. Kid Bliss is an artist we discovered through Mistajam's website (who had featured his brilliant mixtape, Autopilot), and he delivered us the perfect complimentary vocals for the track. They definitely added the extra dimension we desired as well as managing to play up to the cheeky commercial style of the track.

For our club mix we had a similar situation to many that we've done in that we knew large parts of the vocal could not really be used if we were to turn the original into a credible track we could play every set. Fortunately, there's a wicked synth part in the original that we based our remix around, which with some added keys and the rolling beats and bassline, gave us a quality big room house tune. It is definitely one of our favourite, most well-executed remixes of the entire project. As for remixes from other artists, we sincerely hoped that the vocal and parts would have enough appeal to others for us to get two remix artists on board for the first time. They fortunately did, and DCUP (yes, of 'We No Speak Americano' fame) and Two Fresh turned in two very different (and exceptional!) remixes that complimented our ethos for the project of not really caring about the genre of music we release as long as it is of the highest quality, and we love it. We do enjoy blasting DCUP's remix when the sun is shining, but haven't really been able to give it a huge amount of support in our DJ sets due to the style and tempo (not to detract from its quality though), whilst the Two Fresh remix has become a staple track towards the end of sets.

Stamp! Beats: Media Interest

It's going to be hard to not make this appear like a name dropping exercise, but we wanted to mention how the media reacted to the '12x12' project over the initial few months of it going live. The music magazines (namely Mixmag, DJ, iDJ) we service the singles to were initially quite good at picking up on the releases and reviewing them and despite us not really getting much coverage in terms of column inches on STMP001 (ft. Virus Syndicate), we were rewarded with a 'Killer of the Month' feature in DJ Mag for STMP002 (ft. Jenna G), and as we moved through the release schedule we begun to see regular reviews (a few of these that we have scanned are available to see on our new 'Biog/Press' tab on the heavyfeetmusic.com homepage). As the releases picked up and we got the hang of which journalists at which magazines like what, we were able to target people a bit more specifically, which we feel certainly helped confirming reviews. Comparing this situation to being a DJ, there's nothing worse than being carpet bombed with every promo from a label. We'd much rather receive music that the label owner thinks we're going to dig and support, generally with a personal note attached stating this, than receiving every release and having to sift our way through them to find one decent track. It's a similar idea, once you know a person's tastes, be personal and don't spam them with so much music that they're overwhelmed. It'll just increase your chances of them sweeping your CDs into the nearest bin upon arrival.

Throughout the '12x'12 project we'd been keeping a pretty close eye on our radio airplay, and whilst this would often require us to scour various tracklists across multiple websites each week. We were genuinely quite surprised at the support we begun to receive however. Our radio airplay had gone up (looking at it from a year on year basis) on BBC Radio 1 (Kissy Sellout, Judge Jules, Annie Nightingale), BBC 1Xtra (DJ Target, Mistajam), BBC Asian Network (who off the back of them supporting a few singles, asked us to do them a guestmix), Galaxy (now Capital, we continue to receive their support), Kiss and BBC Manchester, who deserve a special mention as they have, to date, supported every release from the '12x12' project on their weekly BBC Introducing show. Considering we were not using a radio plugger or PR company with radio contacts, we felt pretty positive about this airplay increase.

STMP005

 

HeavyFeet ft. Kovas - We Came To Party

Stamp! Beats

Release Date: 02.08.10

'We Came To Party' was one of the first beats we constructed in the summer or autumn of 2009 when we first toyed with the idea of setting up Stamp! Beats. As we'd often discussed making beats or tracks with a commercial sound, not necessarily for commercial exploitation but more because we're both heavily influenced by what we hear on daytime radio, the basis for the track was born through that. So, with some nicely verging-on-the-side-of-cheese chords we initially set about rinsing the synths through all the hardware in the studio till they came out the other side twisted beyond all recognition, then did the same with the drums, and managed to finally concoct the first vaguely commercial track for a HeavyFeet release. 

For vocals, Kovas seemed the perfect choice for us. We'd wanted quite an obvious and familiar sounding vocalist who could deliver some wonderfully standard Americanised lines (no disrespect intended!) similar to those heard in the charts. He managed that perfectly, although we did choose to get Hannah T (of 'Just Fall' fame) to double up on the chorus at the last minute to give the whole track that extra dimension in the chorus, and lift the necessary sections.

When it came to remixing 'We Came To Party' we knew that a considerably more underground and less divisive version would be required from us. By taking some choice parts of the vocal we managed to give them an entirely different meaning and effect within the track, on what was essentially an original club tune. The club mix we released was certainly a manifestation of our growing forays into producing house music for the main room, and we managed to sort out a remix from Tom Stephan that complemented ours with a very similar playability, whilst his version took on a much darker persona. We'd received support from Tom on a few of the remixes we'd completed early in 2010 and were very chuffed indeed when he agreed to be part of the '12x12' project. For us to have an artist remix one of our tracks who made tunes we had grown up to in the clubs was rather special! The only downside in the entire release was that Tom wasn't able to deliver us the remix in time for us to send it out (he's a busy man) with the first wave of the promotional campaign, this was however, the only real hiccup we had in the entire project when it came to actually putting the music out there, which we feel is quite an achievement.

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Check out blog instalment number six next week! 

M&J