Exclusive: Black Spade (The Nick James Remixes)

Big ups to Tania Cuevas for making this project possible. Tania put me on to Black Spade about three months ago and while in the car she says, "I really think you can remix someone like him. I can make it happen." I said, "Dope." The rest is history. I went to one of Tania's Ear Hustle events where I got a chance to meet Jonathan who works for Om Hip Hop and had access to the acapellas. I gave him one of the oldest external hard drives known to humans. My ex-girlfriend gave it to me about 4 1/2 years ago and it's only 100 GB. Now 100 GB external hard drives are the size of my pinky. Anyway, he took the device, placed pro tools sessions on it and I went to work. Oh, and big ups to DJ Phatrick for extracting the vocals from pro tools. I needed that fam, can u believe I don't have an inbox? I present to you my renditions of Black Spade's music.



This remix is triumphant. No Hip Hop fan should resist this. This is my best DJ Premiere/9th Wonder impression. Of course I give it the Nick James flare so it's an improvisation not an imitation of the mentioned producers. Enjoy.

'Evil Love' was by far the hardest of the three to remix. The original isn't quantized (in short that means it's offbeat) and I rarely create unquantized notes. Sometimes I won't quantize the drums, snare, or hi hats to create a swing but I don't think I've ever arranged synths that way. The original is funky so I wanted to give it a different feel a mellow feel because at times he goes into spoken word and with the original the words can be lost in the colorful production. Since he sang according to the unquantized beat, I was forced to find a way to make it work. Thus, the drum arrangement is the closest element of my arrangement to the original.

This song is cool to wake up to, do Sunday chores to, smoke weed with a black light, or you can even have this playing when you need to breakup with your significant other.

Part 1


I originally put Lauryn Hill's 'Lost One' to this beat but had issues getting the timing right. It didn't sound bad but it wasn't perfect. The remix was supposed to be on another mixtape that got scrapped. Since I had this beat laying around I decided to try Black Spade's 'Revolutionary Bullshit' to it. Technically this should be Revolutionary Bullshit Part 2 because I made the one below first, but I liked this one better because the feel it provides. I feel it provides depth to certain lyrics and even enhances the Angela Davis sound bite after the first verse.

Part 2


So Jonathan from Om Hip Hop gave me three songs to remix and I ended remixing 'Enjoy the Experience' three times and 'Revolutionary Bullshit' four times. These two were easier to remix than 'Evil Love' so I decided to do a bunch. I originally made this beat to use as an Ise Lyfe remix to 'Get Off the Corner' off his new album (I did 13 tracks on his new shit and I wanted one more, so I tried to out do the original but Ise felt my beat was dope but too "player" for the songs content). This shit is dope. Let me know which version of 'Revolutionary Bullshit' you like the most.

Check out Black Spade: http://www.myspace.com/blackspade

Enjoy the Experience (No pun intended)

Show allShare