Paths of Rhythm (Formerly Once A DJ)

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My first knowledge of Jake was as a wind up merchant on message boards in the mid-2000s...fast forward 15 plus years and he's a 7 time world DJ champ, teacher and mentor, and former top 200 international poker player. Find out how everything links and what makes him tick in our conversation.

A couple of reference links:

The Mixmaster Mike part of the DMC Showcase with Qbert (the first vid Jake had to learn from)

DJ Babu's Blind Alley Beat Juggle (as referenced when Jake was advised to study some classic beat juggles)

Paths of Rhythm is brought to you with support from vinylunderground.co.uk - take 10% off your next order with the code POR10 and free UK shipping on orders over £100

Paths of Rhythm is a Remote-CTRL production. If you're looking for audio or video production, then check out https://remote-ctrl.co.uk to see how they can help.

Other ways to support the show

• Follow the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
• Any feedback or questions? Hit up https://www.instagram.com/pathsofrhythmpodcast/

This week I'm joined by someone who's really in a category of one: multiple DMC champion, Invisibl Skratch Piklz founder and absolute turntable legend, DJ Qbert. Qbert grew up in San Francisco. His parents came over from the Philippines, and his dad loved disco and only wanted music he could dance to, so he handed his son all the records he didn't like. That's how a young Qbert ended up with Ravi Shankar and classical Indian tabla music. Then Rapper's Delight came on the radio, the Bay Area electro scene took hold, and when he heard Herbie Hancock's Rockit he had no idea the sound was coming off a record. In 1985 a friend showed him how to scratch, he put his whole palm on the record, and that was that.

From there we follow the whole journey. We talk about losing battles with his high school crew and treating every loss as a lesson, an empty school cafeteria whose echo made him feel like he was getting good, and meeting Mix Master Mike at that same gig. We also get into the car accident that stopped the body tricks and made him focus on becoming a real musician, and winning world team titles with Mike and Apollo. Qbert talks about mushrooms, Bruce Lee and being one with the music, odd time signatures and Dave Brubeck, Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik, making Wave Twisters, his huge vintage sampler collection, and why studying Rakim and Kool G Rap's flows is a gold mine for scratch patterns. It was a 4:30am start for him, and he still brought so much energy and generosity to the conversation. It's one I'll be coming back to for a long time.

What we get into:

• Growing up in San Francisco with Filipino parents and a dad who loved disco
• Ravi Shankar, tabla music and inheriting the records his dad didn't like
• Rapper's Delight, four on the floor and the Bay Area electro scene
• Hearing Herbie Hancock's Rockit and not realising it was a record
• 1985, and putting his whole palm on the record for the first time
• Competing with his high school crew: win or learn
• Scratching on his dad's record-stacking turntable
• The echo in the school cafeteria and meeting Mix Master Mike
• Philosophy, mushrooms, Bruce Lee and being one with the music
• Ego, battles and scratching for the music instead of the other DJ
• Studying the New York DJs before the New Music Seminar
• Doing everything on 45 at the DMC, and Christian Marclay
• Forming the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and winning the DMC team titles
• The car accident that made him focus on what comes out of the speaker
• Odd time signatures, Dave Brubeck and scratching over Take Five
• Yogafrog, Skratchcon, Turntable TV and The Shiggar Fraggar Show
• The new Piklz album with Shortkut and D-Styles
• Disk, Buckethead and Brain from Primus
• Scratching versus beat juggling, and Jimi Hendrix-style soloing
• Going global and the scratch DJs he thinks deserve more attention
• Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik and Rap Pages
• Break records and getting straight to the good part
• His collection of vintage drum machines and samplers
• Daily routine, forever beats and making Wave Twisters
• Product design, the QFO and the portable scratch scene
• Advice from Mix Master Mike: make up your own style
• Rakim, Kool G Rap and rap flows as scratch patterns
• Sleep, spring water and happy scratching

This week I'm joined by Martin 2 Smoove — Ministry of Sound Milkshake resident, tour DJ for Eve and for Romesh Ranganathan, and a man who held down a Pacha residency alongside Trevor Nelson. Martin was born in Kerala, raised in Basildon, and spent his teens watching Trevor on MTV Base thinking that's the job I want. A night out at 17 watching the Dream Team turn a room inside out sealed it. What follows is one of the most honest accounts of the slow route I've had on the show: an economics degree taken to keep his parents happy, summers as a runner at Wise Buddah fetching drinks for 50 Cent, years of breaking into halls of residence with armfuls of flyers, and a long stretch between 2010 and 2012 where nothing moved at all while everyone he graduated with got on with their careers.

Then a call from a contact at Atlantic about an American artist needing a tour DJ turned out to be Eve, and thirteen years later he's still there. We get into the craft of it too — the Leicester Square residency where the owner would ask him to clear the dance floor on purpose, six years playing 80s and 90s pop at Jazz Cafe that taught him more about music than anything else he's done, why Shazam charts are a month ahead of the actual charts, and why being easy to travel with matters as much as what you can do on the turntables. Martin's the kind of guest who makes you want to take the unglamorous gig. Really enjoyed this one.

What we get into:

• Growing up in Basildon with no music in the house, and finding Michael Jackson, MTV Base and Trevor Nelson
• Seeing the Dream Team at 17 and deciding on the spot that making a room happy was the job
• Studying economics at Keele to shut his parents up, and hating every minute of the academic side
• Why he'll still take the right gig for free, and how the long-term view has paid off repeatedly
• Being a runner at Wise Buddah, getting studio drops from Mariah Carey and Xzibit, and learning artist etiquette the hard way
• Warming up for Trevor Nelson at universities, and twenty years of Milkshake at Ministry of Sound
• The 2010–2012 stretch where nothing happened, and the digging-for-diamonds meme he wishes he'd seen then
• Two summers at Pacha, and bringing R&B and hip hop to an island that wasn't playing it
• Leicester Square and Jazz Cafe: learning to clear a dance floor on purpose, and what Karma Chameleon does to a room
• The U2 end-of-tour party where nobody danced for four hours until one request changed everything
• Getting the Eve call, messing up the second gig, and the look of death on stage
• Gumball 3000, working Mondays unpaid to learn the clothing business, and a BAPE collaboration on the way
• VJing Romesh Ranganathan's arena tour, and how to add value rather than just play a set
• Why Shazam charts beat the official charts by a month
• Running a DJ agency with Andy Purnell and Luke, and why being easy to travel with is a professional skill

Dean Bryce grew up in a council house in Catford where his dad played records so loud the single-pane glass would vibrate. His dad ran a sound system called Observer and was close to Saxon, the South London sound whose cassettes travelled so far that Wyclef Jean learned English from one in Haiti — thinking they were American. Dean spent his weekends bored in Saxon's Brockley studio while records were being made around him, and it was that DIY world — pirate radio, your own label, boards pulled off boarded-up houses to build speakers — that shaped everything he's done since. He found his own music in jungle at 13, at Jungle Magic in Peckham, then garage, then a job on Deptford market bought purely to fund records. A conversation over the HMV counter with a stranger buying an MJ Cole single turned into a job in artist management the same week he met him, and from there it's been Talking Loud, BMG, sync at the height of the Cadbury's Gorilla ad, Ninja Tune, and Boiler Room. He signed Speech Debelle and won Ninja Tune their first Mercury Prize, DM'd Peggy Gou on SoundCloud and met her for a coffee in a Pret in Old Street, and set out to make Ninja Tune a label he'd actually buy records from. He now runs Don't Sleep — a label, a management company, a club night and a CIC teaching young people the parts of the industry nobody shows them — and he's back DJing with intention, because he thinks too many people playing right now aren't really DJs at all.

In this episode we get into:

• Growing up in a Jamaican household in Catford, and a dad with thousands of records
• Red Records in Brixton, and why he ended up living there
• His dad's sound system Observer, and being raised around Saxon
• How Saxon's cassettes reached New York, Jamaica and Haiti — and taught Wyclef Jean English
• What actually wins a sound clash: dub plates, or sheer power
• Building speakers from the boards off boarded-up houses, and where his independent streak comes from
• Jungle Magic at Laserdrome, Peckham, aged 13 — and jungle as the first music that was his, not his dad's
• Tape packs, happy hardcore, and jungle splitting off from breakbeat hardcore
• Buying garage from 96, and where house stops and garage starts
• Why the girls were all in the garage room
• Learning to mix on unbranded belt-drive decks with no pitch control
• Pirate radio as the real goal — Upfront FM, and why it was "the internet"
• Working Deptford market to buy records, and never making it to the shop before closing
• Meeting MJ Cole's manager over the HMV counter, and a marketing meeting on day one
• Tuse, Roots Manuva, and hearing Witness the Fitness on cassette in his flat
• Sorting MJ Cole's Kiss promos into three piles — and pulling out an early Streets white label
• BMG in the Hey Ya era, and the OutKast party that hired out the whole London Eye
• Sync, the Cadbury's Gorilla, most favoured nations, and why a low fee isn't always a bad deal
• Signing Speech Debelle and winning Ninja Tune their first Mercury Prize
• Making Ninja Tune "the label that I would buy records from" — FaltyDL, Peggy Gou, Actress
• The SoundCloud DM to Peggy Gou, and a coffee in a Pret in Old Street
• Why A&R is all soft skills, and leaving no fingerprints on a record
• Boiler Room from iChat messages to a 50-person company, and the lockdown moment they missed
• Don't Sleep, the Doja Cat email, and building a home for artists who get slept on
• Infinite Coles, Sweetface Killa, and handling a record people read as a diss
• Artist development against the TikTok microwave
• Coming back to DJing with intention

This week I'm joined by DJ Melo D — a beat junkie, a world champion, and one of the most technically gifted scratch DJs to come out of Southern California. Melo D was born and raised in Cerritos in the early 1980s, right as hip hop and electro were landing on the West Coast, and he grew up hooked on KDAY airchecks, pause-button mixtapes and a friend's older brother's turntables. He got his first Technics 1200 for Christmas 1987, taught himself to scratch by ear on his dad's home stereo, and cut his teeth doing high school dances and quinceañeras as a mobile DJ before linking up with DJ Curse, Rhett Matic and J Rock — the crew that would become the Beat Junkies.

While studying sociology at UC Irvine, Melo D was quietly stacking up battle titles: a Vestax USA and World Championship, a DMC USA final with Babu, and an ITF World Championship with the Beat Junkies crew. That same run of form landed him a job as Quincy Jones' on-air DJ for the late-night talk show Vibe — a gig he says he only got because he had the nerve to force a James Brown routine on Quincy after his first set of battle routines fell flat. Alongside years on LA radio with Julio G at 92.3 The Beat, Melo D went on to co-found the Beat Junkie Institute of Sound with his crew, where he still teaches today.

We get properly nerdy in this one — the maths behind scratch technique, why J Dilla's swing breaks DJs, how the crab scratch was actually born in a Tokyo hotel room, and what it's like being handed a job by Quincy Jones on the spot.

In this episode we cover:

• Growing up in Cerritos during the first wave of West Coast hip hop and electro
• The KDAY Mixmasters and the birth of the West Coast mix show
• Getting his first Technics 1200 for Christmas 1987 and teaching himself to scratch
• Mobile DJing quinceañeras, high school dances and SoCal house parties
• Linking up with DJ Curse, Rhett Matic and J Rock and forming the Beat Junkies
• Balancing a sociology degree with Vestax, DMC and ITF world titles
• The golden era of turntableism and why vinyl forced so much creativity
• The origin story of the crab scratch, told first-hand
• Becoming Quincy Jones' DJ for the Vibe talk show
• Building the Beat Junkie Institute of Sound and what's hardest to teach beginners
• The vinyl renaissance and the case for BPM-labelling your records

Paths of Rhythm is brought to you with support from vinylunderground.co.uk - take 10% off your next order with the code POR10 and free UK shipping on orders over £100

Paths of Rhythm is a Remote-CTRL production. If you're looking for audio or video production, then check out https://remote-ctrl.co.uk to see how they can help.

Other ways to support the show

• Follow the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
• Any feedback or questions? Hit up https://www.instagram.com/pathsofrhythmpodcast/

This week's guest is a Yorkshireman I'd heard whispered about by more than one person in the scene before I ever got him on the mic — David Piccioni. Born to an Italian father and South African mother and raised in Huddersfield, David got his real education in a punk scene that had him sneaking into soundchecks before he'd even worked out he wanted to DJ. A few years later, economics and politics at Liverpool University led him straight into throwing his own parties and playing American import records at Liverpool's Wednesday night club nights — and by 1986 he'd saved up for a one-way flight to New York with £300 in a bag and no contacts waiting for him.

What followed is the kind of story you can only get firsthand: getting schooled at Paradise Garage under Larry Levan, soaking up David Mancuso's Loft, and becoming one of the biggest DJs in the city within two years. When he came home to London, David co-owned Black Market Records with Nicky Blackmarket — the shop that helped break UK jungle and drum & bass upstairs while he ran the house side — before founding Azuli Records, a label that got away with pretending to be American for years, broke Afro Medusa's "Pasilda" and Spiller's "Groove Jet," and put out the Late Night Tales and Choice compilation series. When digital killed the vinyl business, David didn't look back — he moved to Ibiza and built a restaurant instead. This one's full of stories you won't find written down anywhere else.

Topics covered:

• Growing up in Huddersfield and sneaking into gigs during its punk scene
• Missing the Sex Pistols at Ivanhoe's on Christmas Day
• The move to Liverpool University and falling into DJing by accident
• Saving up for a one-way flight to New York in 1986
• Getting schooled at Paradise Garage by Larry Levan, and David Mancuso's Loft
• Coming home to co-own Black Market Records with Nicky Blackmarket
• Building Azuli Records — and the fake American label trick that fooled the industry for years
• Breaking Afro Medusa's "Pasilda" and turning down Spiller's "Groove Jet"
• Curating the Late Night Tales and Choice compilation series
• Why Azuli couldn't survive the shift from vinyl to digital
• Trading the dancefloor for a restaurant on a clifftop in Ibiza

Paths of Rhythm is brought to you with support from vinylunderground.co.uk - take 10% off your next order with the code POR10 and free UK shipping on orders over £100

Paths of Rhythm is a Remote-CTRL production. If you're looking for audio or video production, then check out https://remote-ctrl.co.uk to see how they can help.

Other ways to support the show

• Follow the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
• Any feedback or questions? Hit up https://www.instagram.com/pathsofrhythmpodcast/

This week I'm sitting down with a guy whose name might not be as famous as the records he made, but whose fingerprints are all over some of the most important hip hop of the last 35 years: Scotty Hard.

Scotty grew up in Vancouver on a diet of classical guitar, jazz camp and free jazz shows, then fell hard for punk, no wave and the Ornette Coleman school of harmolodic funk before Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions convinced him New York was the only place left to go. He landed at Calliope Studios — the 24-hour home base for the Native Tongues, De La Soul, Stetsasonic and Queen Latifah — with almost no formal engineering training, learning by the skin of his teeth on sessions that ranged from editing Tone Loc's mink-coat 900-number ad to filling in on De La Soul Is Dead when the regular engineer didn't show. That one shift turned into a decades-long run with Prince Paul, which led him into the orbit of Gravediggaz, RZA and the Wu-Tang Forever sessions, New Kingdom, the Stereo MCs and PM Dawn.

We talk about how he found his footing as the guy trusted to give creative input rather than just push faders, the eleven-minute Lisa Stansfield remix that became bigger than anyone in the room expected, and mixing the second Gravediggaz record and Wu-Tang Forever in neighbouring rooms at the same time — including the day RZA walked in and asked him what exactly he was doing in there. We also spend a good chunk of the conversation on his long, deeply loyal relationship with Ka, one of the most singular and uncompromising voices in hip hop, and on the accident that left Scotty with a spinal cord injury and how he's kept making some of the best music of his career since. We close out talking about his new record with Steven Bernstein, Ultra Resonance / Resonation Trio, which takes the hip hop chop-and-flip approach and applies it to acoustic jazz.

This is a long one and every minute of it is worth your time. Topics covered:

• Growing up in Vancouver: classical guitar, jazz camp, and opening for Ornette Coleman
• The no wave and punk funk scenes that pulled him toward New York
• Landing at Calliope Studios and learning to engineer with zero formal training
• His first-ever session: editing 2-inch tape for a Tone Loc ad
• Getting the call to fill in on De La Soul Is Dead and starting his run with Prince Paul
• Making beats on the SP12 and S900 synced to 24-track tape
• Knowing when to offer a creative opinion and when to just be the engineer
• The Lisa Stansfield "Been Around the World" remix that blew up bigger than anyone predicted
• New Kingdom and being "too ahead of its time"
• How Gravediggaz came together and meeting RZA
• Mixing the second Gravediggaz record and Wu-Tang Forever at the same time in LA
• What actually made Gravediggaz sound so dark and eerie
• The challenge of mixing records you didn't record yourself
• His parallel life in jazz: Teo Macero, Medeski Martin & Wood, and Sex Mob
• Working with Ka on Days with Dr. Yen Lo and why Ka refused to compromise his art
• Remembering Ka and the Legacy Open Studio celebration of his life
• His car accident, his spinal cord injury, and adapting his life and work around it
• Surprising mic choices that worked for rappers who didn't have "perfect" voices
• His one piece of outboard gear he'd tell any beatmaker to buy
• His new album, Ultra Resonance / Resonation Trio with Steven Bernstein

Paths of Rhythm is brought to you with support from vinylunderground.co.uk - take 10% off your next order with the code POR10 and free UK shipping on orders over £100

Paths of Rhythm is a Remote-CTRL production. If you're looking for audio or video production, then check out https://remote-ctrl.co.uk to see how they can help.

Other ways to support the show

• Follow the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
• Any feedback or questions? Hit up https://www.instagram.com/pathsofrhythmpodcast/

This week I'm joined by KnowleDJ — and this is a slightly different one for the show. He's the first Canadian I've had on since about episode two, and he's built a career that doesn't really look like anyone else's. He grew up in Kelowna, a small city in British Columbia, started out as a hip hop promoter to pay his tuition, and got talked into DJing by a club owner who wanted him to do college nights. He was a "hip hopper for life" who couldn't stand the idea of playing anything else — until the money, and then the music, changed his mind. From there it's cruise ships playing to wildly diverse crowds, an economics degree feeding into how he thinks about the whole game, and eventually opening for the Backstreet Boys, Ice Cube and Ariana Grande, and running the after-parties for No Doubt's Sphere residency.

What I really wanted to get into was the thinking underneath all of that. We talk about cultural deference and why you have to prove you've done the digging before a crowd trusts you. We get into ADHD, diet and the idea of conscientiousness as a cheat code. He walks me through the worst gig of his life — a Vegas set he says was sabotaged, which blacklisted him for years — and the fate-tipping opportunities that came after. There's a genuinely moving stretch about Fat Man Scoop, who mentored him and passed away the very night Knowledge told him he'd played "Be Faithful." And we finish on the economics of it all: why he built himself a "category of one," what blue ocean strategy and ikigai have to do with DJing, and why, with his book The DJ Diaries on the way, he still believes music is the answer.

In this episode we get into:

• Growing up in Kelowna and going from hip hop promoter to open-format DJ
• Reading diverse crowds on the cruise ships, and learning that people hear music differently
• Showing cultural deference — proving you've dug deep before a crowd trusts you
• Rebuilding the No Doubt set from scratch, and the real story behind "Don't Speak"
• ADHD, diet, and conscientiousness as a cheat code (the OCEAN model)
• The brain science of doing hard things, and telling yourself a realistic story
• Learning the mic, the art of the warm-up, and getting over stage fright
• The worst gig of his life and being blacklisted in Vegas
• Opening for Ariana Grande, Backstreet Boys and Ice Cube — and reading GA crowds
• Fat Man Scoop's quiet, huge influence on hip hop — and a tragic full-circle moment
• The economics of DJing: supply and demand, a "category of one," blue ocean strategy and ikigai
• The DJ Diaries, what's next, and the idea of the "otrovert"

I thought I'd re-publish this one for any of the heads who missed it first time round.

He doesn't really need an introduction round here — one half of the production team behind Jurassic 5, and honestly one of the best DJs I've ever seen live. I got Nu-Mark on to talk about his new book Amunu, which is part Persian cookbook, part memoir, part travel guide, and really a celebration of togetherness — family, food and music all woven together. What I love is how much ground we covered getting there.

He told me about the mum who raised him with total freedom (and who, 24 years ago, told him to start making Middle Eastern beats — advice he's only just taken), about growing up half-Iranian in the States during the hostage crisis, and about buying 20,000 records for $500 as a teenager, a haul that ended up powering 85–90% of those early J5 productions. We got deep into the group: how it became Jurassic 5 when there were six of them, why he refused the single deal that everyone else signed, the fact that the UK recognised them before the US would, and the whole first EP being made on an eight-track. He's wonderfully honest about confidence too — something he says he's still working on — and about losing his father, and how it was putting his dad's old records on that finally let him cry. We finish on Lesson 6, two record collections meant to meet, and the kebabs-on-site book launch in LA. A proper one, this.

In this episode:

• His mum, Nowruz, and the Middle Eastern beats advice he ignored for 24 years
• Growing up half-Iranian during the Iran hostage crisis
• The alphabetised 35,000-record collection (and the $500 haul of 20,000 records that built J5)
• Making peace with a tough upbringing, and music as therapy
• Losing his father, and the records that brought it out
• Drumming, Brazilian rhythm, and house parties that ended on slow jams
• Bum Rush Productions, $2 on the door and the 40 ounce posse
• Why it's Jurassic 5 when there were six of them
• Turning down the Blunt single deal — and signing Kanye at Correct Records
• The chemistry with Cut Chemist, and the art-first philosophy
• Breaking in the UK before the US, and touring like a rock band
• Retaining the publishing, the long life of "What's Golden", and a surprise Pandora hit
• The whole first EP made on an eight-track
• The Interscope era alongside Dre, Eminem and 50 Cent, and the Scott Storch sessions
• Going solo with the toy set, and building his own ecosystem
• How Amunu came together — and the LA launch