Personal dispatch #12

I posted this remix of Van Morrison's "Slim Slow Slider" nine months ago. I have listened to it roughly two dozen times since then; it hasn't lost its luster one tad. Here's what I originally wrote about it:

It's constructed from simple parts: bleats of John Payne's soprano saxophone, snatches of Van Morrison's acoustic guitar—bits of vocals, such as Morrison's murmuring of the song's title, the line "tell it everywhere you go," and his purring of the word "morning" during the two occasions in which he sings "down by the Ladbroke Grove this morning." This remix is simply glorious—like an old, treasured plaything put in crisp, shiny wrapping paper and then tenderly presented as a new gift.

The remix's producer, Adam Hooczko, took a few moments to tell us about its creation.

I'm from the Chicagoland area and I am 26 years old. The "Slim Slow Slider" track was actually made a few years back when I was at Northern Illinois University. I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a musician due to respect for real musicians out there. I pretty much make sampled hip hop beats on a part-time basis. I make beats part-time, but I mostly focus on in-studio recording and engineering.

The track, like I said above, was arranged a couple of years ago in my home studio in Dekalb, Ill. I don't think it took me too long, as I just sampled the track into Logic Pro 8 and added some drums on it. I was just listening to the song when I decided to loop the main loop that I use in the beat. I was really digging it, so I decided to go forward with it. From there, I took some vocal chops and added some reverb/delay and filtered out a lot of the high end. For the hook, I was really digging that flute, so I just matched it up and looped it for a few bars with some more vocal chops. That's pretty much it.

I pretty much decided to make this beat because at the time I was on an Astral Weeks kick and thought those guitars were too smooth for me not to mess with them. And in my opinion, Van Morrison has one of the best singing voices ever, so I knew I wanted to throw some vocal chops in there. One of my homies actually did a song on this beat called "Casualty of Gravity." Maybe I'll dig it up and post it up.