Alright, here’s mine:
1st— Track 1. Great use of the hook and lyrics. No notes.
2st—Track 7. Really enjoyed the bassline and the finger drumming. Also a good and varied “B” section.
3st—Track 6 Another loop that clicks well with the lyrics. Might’ve taken 1st or 2nd place but feels a little baggy at 7+ minutes; at least too much to crack the top 2.
Not gonna vote as the host who can see behind the curtain, but a few comments:
1 – Incredibly smooth and polished. My favorite bit of this beat is the push-pull between the high strings and the low end and how the beat builds tensions trading off between the two
2 – As said before, extremely classic AS bumper sound, that effortless cool. Kick pattern doing hero’s work in this one
3 – Really fun mix of menacing and silly. Bassline and drums are killer, and love the Brak outro
4 – Appropriately trippy sounds, like pulling Aquemini back to the ATLiens days. The mixed-grid groove does a lot to propel this track, but the phaser pads are my favorite
5 – No need to be coy at this point 
6 – Piano and strings are lovely, great job leaving sonic space for the MCs, and those drums lock in with the bars. Wish there was a little more variety, but that loop goes a long way through such a long song, so kudos
7 – Kaleidoscope beat that really hits that 00s underground feel, like everyone’s floating in a phantom TV space. Favorite bits: the TV static in the first third, the snare rolls over Big Boi’s section, and the bassline in the outro
There were some close races, but we have our winners! Congratulations to:
1st (tie): @looms and @Yabba
2nd (tie): @djdriver and @aarb420
3rd: @sleepside
Full list of folks:
1: Yabba
2: djdriver
3: King Duppy
4: flipinfantile
5: sleepside
6: looms
7: aarb420
Thanks everyone for getting weird with me on this one. Great tape, and hope y’all keep topping yourselves. Look forward to seeing the track breakdowns from everyone!
Well done everyone, this was a great one.
Here’s my notes on the HM. Didn’t want to write notes on my own… it was fun trying to work it out for those that did!
2 - Sick production. A great fit of the music and lyrics. Very Adult Swim sounding!
3 - Heavy. It’s got a kinda El-P vibe to my ears so having Killer Mike is fitting. Very creative.
5 - Drums are so good and the samples are choice. Sounds like the music and the lyrics were born to be together.
Congratulations to the winners! 
Thanks to @sleepside for the great concept and hosting and Well done again everyone for killing it, I will post up some notes and a couple of rejected beats tomorrow on my day off
My beat was #5. As usual, assembled on my Dirtywave M8
Weirdly, getting the acapella I found to line up right was the hardest part for me, and nearly sunk the beat. After spending an embarrassing amount of time on tempo adjuments, I finally fixed it with a micro-nudge on the starting step. 
I set a personal challenge to pull samples from an AS original show, an acquired show, AND a Williams Street release for this one; and the Kanno song and Los Bitchos beat formed the backbone of the track.
Outside the more involved drum chops, this was a pretty simple combo of repitching, sample rate reduction, and layering. I’m not happy with all my choices, but the spirit is there. Plus I got to play with Wolf’s Rain, Home Movies, and Outkast, all very important to high-school me.
Some notes on mine 
Main piano and a few background/textural sounds from the Big O - A bit from the link @aarb420 posted and bits from this (I think, it was a bit of a rushed blur) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96ouCiqGCNE
Strings/synth sound from Trap in the Dark on the Lupin The III soundtrack @sleepside shared ran through stemroller to take out the drums then EQ’d.
Drums from Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit - Squidbillies Theme. Country breaks for the win haha.
Mainly done on 404mk2 with some Ableton Live rough sample prep recording them on to the 404 for chopping etc and warping the vocals
Didn’t have much time so only had two main patterns of piano and drums. I recorded it live in one take from the 404 into Live changing up the patterns and bringing in the strings and other sounds occasionally, adding the odd extra rim shots chopped from the drum break, and muting out the drums. Nothing like a deadline to ‘finish’ something but it could have done with more variety for sure and there’s no bassline! I was digging all the verses on the Outkast track so much I couldn’t bring myself to cut it down.
The melodic sounds had the 404 Isolator on them pushing the bass and taking out some mids. And the 303 compressor (possibly twice ha) on everything then a little mastering in Live.
Thanks again @sleepside for hosting and the great theme. This was such a good listen!
Congratulations @everyone for such a 
tape! This was such a fun but lite tape, and I really hope all of the OGs that used to frequent are able to stop by/ are doing well in their walks of life 
I used to think, and I’ve told both on numerous occasions, that @Yabba and @looms were the same person with alternating accounts, because they both always have such a phat clean punch vs others posting anywhere I hang out online. But I came to learn they are two distinct phatnesses, and that’s why I was beginning to write the following: wouldn’t it be great if both members created a production duo like Showbiz & A.G. 
Maybe somethings are better left in the head lol and hopefully my youthful dreams do not offend anyone.
My track was #7 and the main sample was surprisingly found at the end of a Sealab 2021 episode (I believe it was 16 or 17). It’s actually a sweet sample and didn’t even really use it much because the levels were so low (didn’t think to amplify them before using). The drums were Black Nasty - Party on 4th Street/ The Bamboos - One Man Entourage. I really appreciate that you all enjoyed the bass sections, and I’m sorry to disappoint some in saying that those were samples from an older challenge using Tarika Blue - Dreamflower, but the end Slim Shady-ish section was from Roy Ayers & Wayne Henderson - No Deposit, No Return (which was a contender for the last Bi-weekly vinyl challenge, but wanted to also remember an old homie in a positive light).
Here is the “phat” track that sprouted the day before the wedding, but didn’t feel right uploading as there weren’t any AS samples. After hearing your guys tracks, it’s substantially less phat than what I had remembered when making it haha, anyways hope it finds you all well 
This was a seriously fun and nostalgic battle to venture on and seriously I’m happy to be a part of because it’s easy to forget how much talent exists when getting caught in a loop! Thank you so much to @everyone for the positive words, and to @sleepside for creating a subtle Georgia trip for us all to embark on!
Agreed. Also would be up for a challenge like that, where we work in pairs 
Haha well I love @looms beats so I take that as a great compliment.
Thinking about it though… although I’m currently in Kent, we’re both South Londoners and when he PM’d me his beat for The Doors battle recently we had a brief exchange about our trouble with having a bad back, so now I’m thinking maybe I am looms in a Tyler Durden kind of way 
If I find a hidden sp404 around the house I’m gonna freak out
Wait a minute, I’m in Kent right now! 
Back at you mate.
@aarb420 that track is definitely phat, sounds great!
I made mine all in Ableton using the last track on the Lupin The Third playlist.
And the horn sound was from an earlier track on the same playlist.
Drums were onehits I’ve got in my drums folder in Ableton and bass is from Vstation Vsti
Acapella was Aquemini, which is a track I absolutely love.
Before that, I made this one originally on Digitakt, it sounds ok to me now, but for some reason if I work on something that sounds a bit more hyper, I get fed up of hearing it too much when I’m making it so I abandoned it and made the one I submitted.
Thanks for the awesome feedback, everyone! A first-timer couldn’t feel any more welcome.
I’ve been an MPC guy for years, but my current Live II workflow feels so similar to a hybrid/DAW setup I figured I might as well try Maschine (I already use Kontakt for many instruments), so I picked up a used Mk3 and limited my work on this battle to Maschine in an attempt to learn it better. I’ve always wanted to make a beat to the acappella for “Babylon”, so I actually started with the rap and built the instruments around it.
-Drums are sampled one shots that I’ve had forever, can’t recall where I originally got them from.
-Bass is a slightly tweaked Maschine preset called “Adrenaline”.
-Sample doing the heavy lifting is “Face Up" by Washed Out, from Adult Swim Singles 2018. I think being unfamiliar with Maschine helped me just focus on the sample itself and find good chops, on MPC I probably would’ve messed with the pitch and tempo right away.
At this point I was in the zone, tweaking drum timing, playing some adult swim playlists in the background looking for sounds to add, and heard an old school xylophone or chime maybe? I grabbed it, turned it into a one shot, processed it with EQ/reverb/delay, then wrote some melodic riffs with it, and when I came back to it the next day I realized I had closed the browser and now I can’t remember what I sampled it from 
I swear it was an adult swim playlist! Once I had the main ideas down, I moved Maschine stems into Logic for mixing/mastering.
I really loved hearing everyone’s acapella choices - a good reminder of some Outkast collabs that I hadn’t heard in a long time. The moment I heard Slick Rick’s voice I had a flood of high school memories haha.
Eagerly awaiting the next battle!
Probably my favorite challenge so far, so big ups to @sleepside for the inspiration!
Mine was track 3, “the silly one.” I guess I was trying to see if I could make a comedy track. I think it succeeded.
I limited myself to samples that I already had on vinyl, cd or disk, which was easier than I expected but still annoying. And I wanted to record it all in a single take, which was brutal.
Drum programming and live performance were done on the AR1, all synth, no samples. Everything else was performed/programmed on the SP404 MKII:
“The Whole World” was ripped from the 12"; everything else was WAVs/MP3s of wildly varying quality, bitrate and provenance.
So, yeah, my track was pretty involved, with heavy use of Pattern Chaining on the SP404 . . . the 404 only gives you 16 patterns per chain, so since I wanted to do it all live, I actually had to use 2 chain(z) and incorporate a rest into my performance to give me time and brainspace to switch seamlessly from the first chain over to the second one. Never done that before.
I don’t know if @looms wants to host the next one? I’ve only just hosted the one before this one.
Or if anyone else fancies stepping up of course
I’d like to but I’m still slammed with my day job at the moment so if anyone wants to do one please do!
@Yabba that second beat you shared is such a heavy hitter that appears to be criminally slept on. Vocals going through the filter is a sweet touch, awesome “runner-up” man
Cheers man 