Keeps It Real & Soulful

By Lily Moayeri
Published in the November 2004 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 17 - Number 11



Roy Davis, Jr., has a studio just about anywhere he turns. He has one at his Southern California home. He has one in a nearby location. He has one in Chicago. He has a set-up at his parents’ home. Although not all of these are being utilized at every moment, Davis still has some kind of involvement in all of them.

After moving to Los Angeles from Chicago a few years back, the 33-year-old DJ/producer decided to scale back. Knowing he would be returning to Chicago frequently, he only brought his Macintosh G4 Dual Processor (hooked up with Logic 6.4 on OSX Panther for sequencing), Propellerhead’s Reason, and his Digidesign Pro Tools rig for mixdowns. Whatever he didn’t leave for his younger
brother in Chicago, he sold. Turning completely virtual, Davis has found that way of working to be as productive, if not more so, than the full-blown studios he used previously.

On the latest full-length in his 18-year career, Chicago Forever (Ubiquity), Davis focused a great deal on vocals from Terry Dexter and Jeremy “Ayro” Ellis. Using a Shure microphone with Avalon mic tube pre-amps, Davis recorded them and used very little processing. Doing these recordings in various studios around Los Angeles—not in either of Davis’ set-ups—the musical ideas start out, he says, in Reason.

“The bass sound is a live bass I played,” says Davis of “If You Wanna,” the hit vocal track performed by Dexter. “Then my guitar player came and laid down a few riffs. All of this is in Reason, then bounced over to Logic for whatever extra sounds I need to have—the EVD6 [vintage clavinet] for that track. The Pro Tools file after the vocal was laid was sent to Chicago to one of my guys that does R&B. He put a string arrangement on it for me, samples from real violins, but played in a different pattern. I did a couple of tweaks to it in the studio, sent it to my engineer and he mixed it.”

A great deal of Davis’ influences and styles are heard on Chicago Forever. Although he uses a house template, Davis puts large infusions of soul and R&B into the mix—and that takes the deep tunes well beyond the dancefloor. “I still want to keep my foot planted in the stuff I started in,” Davis explains. ”But I also do R&B and hip hop, so it’s a little bit new to some of the people. When it comes to programming my beats, I use the [Akai] MPD-16 drum pad as a controller so I can still get the MPC-type of feel ’cause that’s what I started on. I would use the [Native Instruments] Battery [drum machine software] to get that punch as far as all the drum sounds because I can use my own drums stacked. I got every drum machine sound already sampled to my liking: MPC factory kits, 909s, 808s, R8s, all these different drum machines. Most of the hand claps on Chicago Forever came from me clapping my hands and stacking them three or four times or a stylus on one record creating claps and snaps.”

Unlike most dance-music producers, Davis is deft at playing several instruments, including bass, guitar, and keyboards—drums and percussion were his first instruments. Although he modestly says he plays “a bit” of each of those instruments, he is adept enough at them to have his own creations be the starting point for most of his compositions.

“I will play a guitar chord and then stack it with a piano guitar chord with the Phazer or effect of some sort to make it sound different as a patch,” he says. “Then I might sample, but I sample myself. I usually like to tweak a lot of stuff through Phazers or filters or distortion to get the keyboards and string sounds a little bit rougher edge. It’s all about tweaking each instrument to your liking, different EQs, a Waves bundle, and all of their effects to come up with something different. As a DJ, I do play samples and I respect all of that. As a writer, how am I supposed to get paid by sampling everything? I’d rather be a writer and get what I’m worth at the end of the day.”