Mike - Just to Start It Off Right Now, This Is Home Cooking Studio, I’M Mike Mcarthur
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Mike - Just to start it off right now, this is Home Cooking Studio, I’m Mike McArthur. It’s a joint venture between Mamas Boys Mgmt., & Karma Productions. Mamas Boys Mgmt. is Jerome Hipps and Mike McArthur. Karma Productions is Carvin Haggins and Ivan Barias. And Home Cooking Production is the production house that we created jointly. And in that company we have eight producers and song writers signed to that company. We’ll give out those names as we get into it…. J Kibble - How long have you guys been together and how did it all start? Ivan – Actually, Me and Carvin met at A Touch of Jazz “Philly School of Hard Knocks” like we like to say… “Big Ups to Jazzy Jeff”… Most definitely, with out him a lot of the Philly Movement currently as we know it wouldn’t be what it is right now. So I met Carvin in 95’… We were both producers at A Touch of Jazz back when no one was checking for Philly at all... We were down there practicing on blank trax and regular people coming thru trying to demo records for us. That’s where we came together as a production duo for Musiq Soulchild’s first album… That album is what kinda set the tone for the Karma sound as we know it today. We came together trading ideas and that’s what made people check for us as a duo, while we were still down there at A Touch of Jazz… J Hipps – We found Musiq in a record store on 69th Street. I used to co. manage Coconuts Record Store on 69th Street… He would walk up and down 69th Street… He would come in and hang out with my roommate and he would come over to the house and always sing with a group of cats…. It would always be like a pack of about 6 cats always walking up and down 69th Street going to movie theaters and then coming over to the store to talk about music. He was one of those six…and so Mike was working over at Poly – Gram (PGD) at the time and we were doing parties, functions and special events together while Carvin & Ivan where at A Touch of Jazz together. We finally decided to work with Musiq and put him out there… So we took him down to Carvin, Carvin was writing with Ayinke Aaries and he needed background vocals on a song so we brought Musiq down there for Carvin. From that day forward, Carvin said “Yo man, lets do this together and let me work with him and we put them together and from that day on, night after night after night, for about a year they had been working on “Ijustwannasing” basically… Ivan – I mentioned Musiq, specifically, that was the project that kinda brought all of us together… J Hipp - Yeah that was our first introduction to the world… J Kibble – So from a producers point of view, what instruments or machines were you working on to produce your sound? Ivan – The most basic equipment in the world, man… It was something that everybody could have had… If they were looking for it… We had the MPC 3000, ASR 10, Roland JV 1080 & Esonic MRI and those 4 pieces set the world on fire… Carvin - Also we were using Q base as sequencing program and Roland 1680 to fly vocals and DA88’s to record Mike – we sure did… We did yeah I forgot all about that… lol…. J Kibble – Those pieces are like dinosaurs today, right…… Carvin – Sure enough, but we always used the UAD7 microphone… Ivan – Yeah, we always had the UAD7 microphone… and the Avalon… Carvin – Na we didn’t have the Avalon… Ivan – Yes we did… Carvin - we had the Green….. Ivan – Oh yeah a little later we had the… J Hipp - that had that little light … Carvin – What’s the, what’s the??? Ivan - The Focus Right Green… Carvin – Yeah, The Focus Right Green, as the pre amp…. J Hipp – Yeah I kept saying, humm that’s the one to uuuuse….. (GROUP) LOL………………. J Hipp - and the Yamaha O2R… J Kibble – Where did music start for you? When did it touch you and when did it start your inspiration for what you’re doing today? Carvin – PAUSE, PAUSE, PAUSE, PAUSE, PAUSE….. LOL……. Carvin – Actually, when I was a kid I used to wake up in the morning when I was going to school when I was about eight years old… I used to hear “Wake up Everybody” by Kenny Gamble, Aretha Franklin, umm, “Till you come back to me”, and then another one… it was a Cameo record, and every morning these records would come on in sequence every morning so like that music it was what got me going every morning as a kid… And from that my mom would do Saturday morning clean up, she would play every soul record known to man from “Parliament to Stevie to Marvin, to you know the O Jays, what ever was there she had it, you know… And that was like the beginning of me in music and then after that I got involved in Hip Hop, I was an Emcee for a while… From that I went into engineering, doing drops for Power 99 & Q102 back in the day for Stanley T and those cats… And then through that I met Jazzy Jeff I worked with him putting his team together… A Touch of Jazz Crew, initially it was twelve of us but from there here I am… I don’t play any instruments what so ever… I don’t sing none of that… I write, engineer… Mike – He’s being modest… He wrote Love… J Hipp – That’s his instrument right there… J Kibble – The sharpie right… (GROUP) Lol………… Ivan – The funny thing is he don’t even write… I’ve never even seen him write down a lyric… And a lot of the artist we work with he tries to teach them how to like write in there heads… get the thoughts out… and as soon as they come up with it, they go into the booth and they sing so they don’t forget… they write it down later on… Carvin – Its most just to get the true emotions and true conversation instead of trying to make it grammatically correct and all of the things you would take out that would basically water down the whole feeling of the song, I’d rather just keep doing it in my head and make it a consistant conversation and then cut it and leave it that way. J Kibble – What’s your favorite record that hit the charts? Carvin – Aww man, it’s a lot of them. Don’t Change, Love, Half Crazy, Again, Ivan – Mine would be “Just Friends” cuz it’s really what put this whole movement on the map… It had everybody who still didn’t really know who we were… Were like did you hear this record? Did you hear the record? Who is this? Ivan – Man its kinda hard for me, you know Parliament Funk didn’t play at my prom like Carvin’s… Lol… Carvin – That’s alright Otis Redding played at his… Ivan – Actually, I’m Dominican, so the first sounds I heard were my aunts and uncles playing Latin music. But I was born in Dominican Republic when I was like 7,8 years old. Then I started listening to Hip Hop like crazy… If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would have thought you were crazy… Cuz I was so into Hip Hop, I was an aspiring Emcee, I started producing out of necessity. Everything I did was straight rap, rap, rap. It wasn’t until I came to Philly in 95’ and through a mutual friend Darrin Henson, he’s a producer, we came together to A Touch of Jazz, he was friend with Jeff for many years. And when I came I saw those guys playing live instruments, they had a jam session at the time… That’s something Jeff would always do, he’d have a jam session every Friday… So all the musicians from Philly would come in and I would come in and just be blown by that… And every time I would go home I would try to practice hack my way over the keyboard. The Touch of Jazz experience is what made me listen to music a whole lot closer. I had a lot of records from sampling my tracks. I would listen to them and say that kinda sounds like what they were doing at A Touch of Jazz… Eventually I did R&B records. I always thought I was gonna just do rap beats and that was how I was gonna make my name. When Carvin came to me he said I have this kid he’s a singer he’s almost kinda like a rapper, and I heard him, I said I wanted to be apart of this project. I started giving him tracks, they were fronting on all of them, you know they was hating. Every last track I played the hated. But umm… Even after we did that, I still wasn’t quite sure if I was gonna be an R&B producer or not… I really wasn’t giving it a thought, until I met these guys… And they started managing us and we started working with our other group Aries… We went to LA for a while for one summer working with artist from Death Row and when we came back that’s when I was like were definitely gonna do this thing.