www.VanRomaine.com
Naughty by Nature
Naughty by Nature
Tommy Boy Records, 1991
This was a very different experience for me. Although I had been listening to
a lot of rap back in ‘91, I hadn’t recorded any. I got a call by my old
friend Dave Belochio to do a session at his studio with some guys neither one of
us heard. The first thing I had to get used to was doing 8 second takes. Kay
Gee, the producer would record the drums through the mixing console straight
into an Akai s900. Since they were looking for loops we only needed to get one
or two good measures then move onto the next groove. At first I just played some
grooves I was feeling at the moment with no song in mind but most of the loops
that were used were ones we replicated off old Jackson 5 and Meters records. If
Kay Gee liked a groove from a record but didn’t want to loop the music, I’d
just play the beat. Another funny situation is when I had 4 or 5 rappers in my
drum booth. They’d take turns making boom box beats with their mouth and I’d
have to play it back to them. Well after the session was over I went on tour for
3 weeks and came back home to hear every other car in the east Village of
Manhattan playing O.P.P. with massive sub woofers. There was also a feature in
Rolling stone about Naughty’s success where they gave a lot of credit to Dave
Bleach and myself for coming up with the grooves that inspired the CD.