Dusty Fingers, Crispy Samples, Sidewalk Cracks, and Swollen Ankles

As I was contemplating late yesterday evening on what to call my blog and what it is I would be discussing and sharing with y'all on here with my main man Mr. Blue on the horn (http://www.mrbluereviews.com/), I came up with this brilliant idea of being THE center of useless information that I deem absolutely necessary.

I want people to come here and gain knowledge that they couldn't find anywhere else. If you happen to be an up-and-coming producer/beat-maker, a singer, a writer, a b-boy, b-girl, graffiti artist, skateboarder, snowboarder, chemist, conspiracy theorist, philosopher, etcetera, I will break down anything that I find that is very useful to all of you out there, and most importantly to me, and post it on here in plain sight, plain text, so that y'all can feed your mind instead of wasting your time.

Music has always been big in my life, let's face it, everyone out there would say that music has always been a big thing in his/her life just the same. I was raised on heavy metal, and I grew up listening to everything that I can get my hands on. That does not mean I condone downloading illegal albums and the like. The music that I download is almost exclusively the music that I sample when I make beats of various genres (if you'd like to hear examples of my work, please visit www.myspace.com/scarlemd).

As an MC/beat-maker who appreciates actual music, and not the garbage that you hear on the radio and see on television nowadays, I've heard about the compilation Dusty Fingers a few years ago. What I heard was that some dude compiled a very rare collection of exclusive original records from vinyl onto cd (and later to wave & mp3) to make it available for true school hip-hop heads all over the globe to chop, screw, sample, and create something new and beautiful.

Sampling has always been a fundamental aspect of making hip-hop beats since day one, so I thought it would be proper to get my hands on this collection. However, the so-called music heads that work at various music stores here in Toronto would have no friggin' idea about what I was talking about. The most intelligent answer I would always get would be along the lines of "What? Duuuuuuude, you should get the new Chingy album, it's soooooo sick. Duuuuuuuuude, you should check out the new Fort Minor man, that Mike Shinoda is killeeeeeeeer".

This is how you know you're getting old by the way, when you start hating on the new music that comes out, but come on y'all, all you gotta do is listen to The Roots - Illadelph Halflife ONCE front to back, or Common Sense - Resurrection and the shit that's out there right now will not even come close. Anyhow, the stores didn't have it, no one I knew had it, and the collection is like 15 volumes son! I knew that I would need that to understand the history of what I'm doing. I can make beats all day everyday, but if I don't learn the history, learn the techniques, school myself on the artists back in those days, then I would never make great beats.

In a desperate bid to find the thing I looked to the one source I knew had it all, torrents. Simply put, you go to google.com, you type in Dusty Fingers torrent, and you will find various links leading to the promised land, if you will. I found one that worked for me and downloaded the entire 15 volume collection within the span of about an hour (which incidentally is pretty slow for a torrent). This collection is an absolute must have for anyone that wants to know how to make REAL beats. There is also another collection out there called Breakonomics which is supposedly material even more rare than that of Dusty Fingers, but I'll save that material for a future blog and will show you the way.

For now you will have to be content with this knowledge, and this link to one of the greatest collections that any up-and-coming or even already a veteran beat-maker/producer can have to make hip-hop, trip-hop, drum and bass, jungle.... You name it, and you can use this material to make it. I hereby present you with this: http://www.bitdig.com/torrent/music/download-887394/Dusty-Fingers-vol-01-a-15-rar.html
Try it out, and let me know what you think of it, let me hear some beats you make with it and I'll let you hear mine.

Moving on, this is only the beginning my friends. In later posts I will break down a lot of things for you kids n' old farts out there such as:

How to use FL Studio 8 XxL Producer Edition properly

How to use almost no musical equipment and come up with pro sounding tunes

How to skateboard

How to quit your job, maintain your dignity, and get to where you REALLY wanna go


So, come one, come all!
After all, Scarblogistan isn't just a blog, it's a country, and the immigration gates are open baby!