“Cannon Remix” by Lil Wayne

"Cannon" was supposed to be a Trick Daddy record. It became a Lil Wayne record, then a Busta Rhymes record, then a T.I. record, then the DJ Drama anthem that put Don Cannon's name in the title. In this episode Cannon goes back to Circle House Studios in Miami, the room where he made it in 2006, and rebuilds it from the sample up.

Why Miami, and why 80 BPM

Atlantic Records sent Cannon to Miami to work with Trick Daddy. He never actually got in the room with Trick, but the assignment shaped the beat. His whole goal was a record that could work for East Coast and the South at the same time. He talks through the tempo math out loud: East Coast records lived at 90, 95, 100. Southern records lived at 70, 72, 75. He split the difference and landed at 80. Not too fast, not too slow, a tempo Trick Daddy could rap on either way.

He couldn't travel with turntables and a mixer, so he brought a MiniDisc player loaded with his hardest samples: Curtis Mayfield, Barry White, Love Unlimited Orchestra. The one that hit was from a soundtrack called Together Brothers, orchestrated by Barry White. It's the same source as "Come On Ride This Train," a Miami classic, which is exactly why he picked it. How do you take a Miami record and give it East Coast bounce? That was the whole mindset. He spent 4 or 5 hours going through samples before he found it.

The chops he got by accident

Cannon admits something here he says he's never told anyone. Some of the chops on "Cannon" landed by accident. He was working the sample and certain pieces just fell in the right place, and with Detroit Red and Fiend in the room reacting, he kept them. Fiend, the New Orleans writer, started mumbling a hook on the spot. That's how the beat got finished.

The ASR trick that made it sound dirty

This is the technical heart of the episode. The ASR-X only had about 24 seconds of sample time. Cannon's workaround was to sample in mono, in pieces, 8 seconds at a time. Sampling mono meant part of the stereo image dropped out, so depending on which side he grabbed, he'd get horns and strings, or vocals and drums, but not the full mix. Then he'd pan those pieces left and right, not all the way, around 40 to 45 percent, so you still got some center. That's why the record sounds the way it does in headphones. And he says it plainly: you can't do that on a computer.

No time stretch, no warp. Every piece had to be chopped so it sat on beat. The intro is the sample played straight so people knew what it was, because he'd been winning beat battles by playing the source first and then dropping the beat.

Drums, and why they're simple

A kick he made. A normal clap. A tom that ended up on Cannon records for about 6 years. And barely any hi hats, because he felt hats were a rhythm thing that got in the way. Then a gunshot, because Fiend's hook mentioned an AK and Cannon wanted to amplify the beat.

The reason his drum patterns are simple is the same reason across all 3 Cannon episodes: he's a DJ. He watched people dance and noticed busy drums disturbed the flow of the lyrics. So he gets out of the way. Open drums, hard sample, room for the rapper. That's the whole philosophy.

The kick, the clap, the tom, the drums off this machine, they live in Cannon's Revenge V1. That's the ASR-X vault, the same box this record was built on, 38 loops and breaks included.

How it got to Wayne

The beat went to Trick Daddy's camp, then to Rick Ross's people, then Cannon and DJ Drama sent it to Lil Wayne. Cannon says he didn't know what Wayne was going to do with it. It came back within an hour. 3 minutes straight, no hook. And the rest is Dedication 2.

Also in this episode: Fiend joins Cannon to talk about the energy in the room in 2006, and Cannon plays the drum pattern back from memory 17 years later and catches himself remembering a sound called "Crazy Radio." The magic, he says, is in the mistakes.

This is the third Cannon episode. See Go Crazy and Mr. 17.5 for the Patchwerk records that came before it.