Crate Kings Forum RIP

Crate Kings Forum was always a brilliant place to hang out. A tight, friendly community of hip-hop producers, remixing each other, battling each other, talking about wax, helping each other out.

I was a regular there up until about 6 months ago when it was suddenly invaded by spammers. It wasn't so much a trickle of spam as it was a sudden tsunami of shit.

Alas, for whatever reason, the webmasters have pulled down the forum section, and left it down for the last 6 months. Crate Kings Forum will never be what it once was. RIP.

From death, comes life of course, and that's probably the cheesiest segway I could use to tell you about my friends new project, Sample Salad, A website to download wav loops, etc.

I'll even be contributing! Watch this space.

Crate digging, beat battles, "Spanish Symphonic-Progressive-Flamenco-Rock"?

While soul, funk and disco are still main staples for hip-hop sample freaks, there is a growing trend of sampling Krautrock, Psych Rock and Garage (American 60s garage bands, not UK "reeeewind"!)

Check out Boon Doc going all psychedelic on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymBgjfGk4kQ
Pretty badass.

I was diggin for wax in a market recently and came across an old record from Triana, circa 1970s.

Not much info about them online but they are described on LastFM as a"Spanish Symphonic-Progressive-Flamenco-Rock band", which sums up their sound pretty well.

There were a few guys on Crate Kings looking for a sample for a Beat Battle, so I uploaded a snippet of one of the Triana tracks, Hijos Del Agobio
The original track is about ten minutes long.

Check out what they did to flip the sample here.
Occidental was the deserved winner in my opinion, but it was great to see the different ways people choose to flip their samples.