Barritz Gives Fans a Glimpse Into His Creative Process
When it comes to attending a local live hip-hop show you never know what you’re going to encounter until you see it. While good live performances do occur, more often than not the presentation may not be what you were expecting. The live performance is the culmination of all the hard work musicians go through in creating, distributing and presenting their product— music. These live shows can share with you much more about the artist on the stage, how they approach their profession, and how deep their talent truly lies.
For Barritz the live show is the most important part of the music creation process. “When you perform live all the hard work you spent creating that record is on display,” Barritz explains, “after you have spent countless hours creating a good song, mixing it the way you heard it in your head, and sharing it with the world by promoting it, that performance is the end game for each and every song you’ve made.”
“Many artists performing simply rap over their song on stage,” he continues, “that isn’t a performance to me. When the backing track is loud enough that I can’t hear if your delivery is hitting all those lyrics and bars you recorded in the studio—I lose focus as a spectator with what’s going on up on the stage.”
This is a common notion among fellow artists and attendees to these shows. Music has always been about the performance, from instrumentalists playing a solo piece to vocalists alone with a microphone. In those cases the instrument or vocal is fully on display. With hip-hop a lot of that performance has been lost. With the aid of modern recording processes it is easy to punch in vocals in a recording session to help artists complete their lyrics cleanly, but then translating that “polished” recording to a live performance can become problematic.
In hand with that performance metric is the quality of the equipment a venue offers to the artists performing. State-of-the-art sound systems are far and few between with these venues, and more often than not these systems are out-of-date or not capable of meeting the demands of multiple microphones or maintaining proper levels for feedback and amplification.
“I picked up on the state of these sound systems fairly quickly after doing my first shows,” Barritz says, “with only one wired mic at times, or damaged mixers without proper inputs, or systems that weren’t EQ’d correctly, you never knew what you were going to encounter until it was show time. It was after those few encounters that I decided to make it a point to mic check every venue beforehand, to rent equipment to supplement the system to make sure my performance and those who I performed with had the proper equipment, or just started to rent out venues myself to have control of the audio experience.”
Barritz noticed early on that if you were on stage your presence, performance and sound were vital to the audience. If you didn’t meet those professional standards, what was the point of you being up there in the first place? The DJ could have just played your song in the mix instead.
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