started out in seventh grade breaking with my friends from school. Listening to planet rock, and many other classic b-boy tunes... Hammer was the shizzle at the time just to give you a time frame... One day on the school bus heading home I found a cassette tape on the floor. "Sheeeit, a FREE tape! I am gonna take it! " I pick it up and it says " GANGSTARR " on it. " What? I don't want any GANGSTER ish, eff that..." I placed the tape back on the floor... Little did I know Gangstarr would become my favorite group of all time! So the moral of this paragraph is do NOT judge a book by its cover! There can be some dope sH!t inside! As I progressed in breaking I joined and left various crews from Oceanside, ca. up to LA... As I grew in size, all the rest of the breakers didn't, and were able to freak crazier shit than i could EVER DO! Humbled, I started to look into the person behind the turntables. While at a friends house one day he broke out his moms record player and tried to scratch... " I can do better than that", I said. We ended up battling for his 6 piece record collection and I WON it from him... haha So then begins the start of my now HUGE record collection and the venture into DJ battles. I entered a few battles, won some equipment , lost some battles here and there. Some of these peeps out here are just CRAZY with the cuts. Where I would often look to Dj Premier's style for that clean butter cut thats perfect for the hooks of songs... They used elbows & feet to do tricks... My elbow was the size of their leg! Regardless, I started looking at swap meets for the turntables with the curved tone arm feature which supposedly helped with your cuts EHHH!! (buzzersound) , re-wiring them myself at times... , Over the years I saved and upgraded slowly to the legend of a turntable " the Technics 1200 ". Often I would imagine with other friends about someday owning a pair of them. With my beat, old, matching pioneer tables and a coufin I made out of plywood, I deejayed house partys weekly, & eventually hooked up with FRANK Z of Chop Shop records. He helped me obtain my first set of Tech 12's by trading a video game system for one. He let me listen in during the creation of the now legendary, second Chop Shop album. At that point I started deejaying a lot of the high school dances and parties in oceanside. I used to mix " Jeru the Damaja, and Gangstarr songs in at those micky fickies too. I wanted to hear them & no one minded at all, they just kept on... (a light comes on in my head) I had a Gemini mixer with the 12 second sampler in tow, I started looping things and adding them to my mixes. EVEN deejaying parties with ONE turntable by looping instrumentals and mixing the vocal song in, back to the inst ...! " The best deejay on ONE turntable " was a quote my friends used to say... Good times... This got me started into creating the music from loops of random things. I didn't really know much about recording at all, but I knew I had ONE sampler, and needed to layer sounds some how. I figured out to have 2 tape decks, one playing the previous loop i got through the mixer while the other recorded me layering the sounds. I repeated this until i had some rugged ish.... I became the DJ / producer for several groups, Creation Rebels with Bozar 1 & J.A.Y. the fallguy ,Undersound Experiement with J.A.Y. the fallguy. Now Joint Response, & Supa Unknown. Eventually working up to now where the process is much easier to get a quality recording, even over the internet in some cases. I moved on to record songs with Blame One, & Deja-vu of Mysterys Extinction, Swoop, Y tess, Oohwee, Shux wun, the Icons, Blest, Dannu of the Visionaries / Writers Block crew, Pumpkinhead, The Others & Madwreck the emcee, Capital D of All Natural, Icon the Mic King, Future Shock. All talented people that were cool enough to work sight unseen... Music is one side of me... Art is another... I am currently the Art Director for Mad Engine, an apparel company that creates apparel for major brands such as OP, Marvel Comics, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, ME-87 and many many more....I create for retail fronts like Bloomingdales, Wal Mart, Target, etc... So its a deadline based business. I coordinate with 15+ very talented artists on a daily basis and create T shirt art , I create Ad print work , Fleece operations, Spec sheets, and even more stuff that would take forever to list ! So as you can see I am a very busy person! Sometimes too busy. I enjoy spending the most time with my wife Shannon... Who for real supports me more than ANYONE... Enough with the BOOK I am effin writing here... Sorry, but some people like this stuff... Please enjoy the Art and Music... Peace! Dj Shag | Gary G! |