“Mr. 17.5” by Jeezy

This is the record that made producers start calling. "Go Crazy" got Don Cannon noticed. "Mr. 17.5" got him hired. It was his second placement ever as a professional producer, made for Jeezy in 2006, and in this episode Cannon goes back to Patchwerk Studios in Atlanta, the room where it happened, and rebuilds it from scratch on the exact equipment he used the first time.

The machine

Everything Cannon made in this era came off an Ensoniq ASR-X Pro. He tells the story of how he ended up with it: 17 or 18 years old, walked into Sam Ash to buy an MPC, and the store didn't have one. The salesman talked him into the ASR instead, told him RZA and Alchemist were using it, and Cannon refused to leave the store without a beat machine. It became the tool behind every classic in this series.

He also walks through the rest of the setup: a stack of floppy disks with handwritten labels (an elaborate beat could take 7 to 10 floppies before zip drives came along), a Technics DJ mixer and a Technics 1200 direct drive turntable. That's the whole rig. That's what "Go Crazy" and "Mr. 17.5" were made on.

The sample

Cannon wanted a high energy record. He was a DJ first, and he talks about watching old Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye footage with full horn sections and wanting to build something that moved a room like that. It took him about 6 months of digging to find the right record. It turned out to be The Miracles, the album they made without Smokey Robinson, and a song called "Give Me Just Another Day." He didn't expect it to have horns like that. Once he heard the drum rolls, the horns and the eerie string underneath, he knew where it was going.

He samples it straight off the vinyl into the ASR and chops it across the pads. Very simple. His words: he wanted the club to ring off at 2 in the morning, and he wanted the beat empty enough that a rapper could get in and do their thing without fighting the production.

The drums

Ask Cannon about drum selection on this record and he'll tell you it was a normal kick he always used, most likely from the machine. The clap came out of a TR-808 he'd sampled into the ASR. That's it. No layering, no elaborate programming. Same approach he used on "Go Crazy," and he says so directly: he was duplicating what already worked and keeping it moving.

Those are the drums in Cannon's Revenge V1. The ASR-X vault. The kick, the sampled 808 clap, the hats, and 38 loops and breaks from the same era. If you want the drums under "Mr. 17.5," that's the folder.

Tracking out on 2 outputs

This is the part most people have never heard. The ASR-X wouldn't lock to MIDI clock, so Cannon couldn't just plug it into Pro Tools and press play. It had 2 outputs, not 8. So every sound had to be tracked out one at a time, for 3 minutes each, and the machine would start about half a second late every time.

An engineer at Patchwerk named Mike Wilson showed him the fix: add a 4 bar metronome click at the top of every track, record everything in sloppy, then line up the clicks in Pro Tools by hand. Cannon says he'd do 10 beats in a 12 hour session and track every one out that way, then walk out with a burned CD with the Patchwerk label on it. Compression came later, from an engineer, to glue it together. "Go Crazy" was mixed by Leslie Brathwaite at Patchwerk. "Mr. 17.5" was mixed by John Frye at Stankonia.

Jeezy hears it

Cannon burned 4 or 5 beats to a CD and handed it to Jeezy. Jeezy recorded in a little closet booth in the A room and told Cannon not to let the beat go anywhere. After "Go Crazy," people said whoa. After "Mr. 17.5," the calls started: I need one of those. Cannon says Jeezy never asks for a "Go Crazy" or a "17.5" today. He asks for that energy.

Analog vs now

Can he still make this sound? Yes, but he's honest that the digital version isn't the same. The ASR had a grime to it. Plugins can dirty things up, but the original files feel different. That's the reason the vault exists. The sounds off that machine are the sounds in Cannon's Revenge V1, and they're not recreations.

Also covered: the chocolate chip cookies and lemonade at Patchwerk that every artist from Jeezy to Ludacris to T.I. remembers. Cannon insists this is important. He's right.