Scribe - Not Many

Time for another back-in-the-day favourite! It's a slower beat at 70bpm grooving a fairly syncopated drum pattern. The pattern works on three long notes followed by three shorter pairs of notes. The two bar loop takes a while to come back each time so it doesn't get too tedious.

I should focus on the hyper-important vocal element of this track. Here's some broad observations:

• Doubled and tripled vocal in chorus sections. It sounds to me like the main vocal is doubled at one pitch and there's another voice taking an upper harmony. Three vocals at the same pitch would be very thick and possibly very messy sounding. Listen to 1:58 and you can hear one really high voice blended in. 
• Group vocals on the "Canterbury shout-outs" make the audience involvement vibe that I feel makes an exciting impact on most studio recordings. 
• Use of human voice for effects like howling wolves, nitrous gas. These are really cool, there's a bit of beat boxer aesthetic in this I believe. 
• Backing vocal inserted to accentuated particular words. There's use of effects like delay to help them fit behind the main vocal and fade without sounding too much like cutting/butting in. 
• Call and response "Check it out" etc fits convention and style. 

More on the beat:, it sounds sample based with some synth mixed in for solidarity. Interestingly, the only indicator of this for me on first listen was the audio tail at the end of the song. It sounds like a string synth or something similar. There is possibly also some extra software bass blended into the baritone brass instrument that leads most of the beat. I only suspect this because of the consistency of the sound and the extreme sustain that would leave many players out of breath or in the position to waver the notes a bit.  

Scribe is for me my marker for the New Zealand rap sound. This album came out in 2003 on Dirty Records and was produced by P-Money.