aN interviwe with da man, da legend, da rapper…..VIPER
by Cisco “da beez kneez” Haywire and David “where am i” DeMark
No Fidelity: I’ve noticed you have hundreds of thousands of albums on Spotify. How do you do it?
Viper: Man just hard work you know, working in the studio! I’m working on an album right now with a dude named Cali Cash Flow. He’s doing five and I’m doing five: we doing five together. And I’m working on an album right now, The Jaminiest Album You Ever Heard. I’m doing two version of it, a regular version and a chopped and screwed version, so that’s two albums right there. All my music is original music, I just work hard. I’m blessed because I have my own studio at home, so it’s very cost effective for me. I can do 10 or 20 songs in one day. Because of the way that I rap, and I’ve got so much material. When I was in jail I wrote like 500 songs, man, lyrics for 500 hundred songs, and I dip into those when I am doing stuff. A lot of product, and you know I make my own beats, I can make a beat in ten minutes and flow on it in five, and then before you know it you got a song in fifteen minutes, and then I go to the next one. If I set a goal to get two albums in one day I’ll do it. If you got three hundred and sixty five days in year and I’m making two albums a day, all new material, it shows how I’m doing it.
NF: That’s…That’s intense as fuck.
V: I set the Guinness Book of World Records, for the most albums released by an artist in a year, 2013.
NF: Wait, is that documented?
V: It’s not documented, but, if anybody out there wanna get it written let ‘em know.
NF: You said that when you were in the pen, you wrote a lot of lyrics. So that’s obviously influenced your work, but are there any other life experiences that you draw on to craft your sound or lyrics?
V: My music is constantly changing. When I first started in the rap game in the mid 90s, I was a freshman in college. And basically, you know, I was a lot younger, and I was in a situation where I was just trying to figure everything out, as far as the industry. I was in enrolled in business school as well as real estate school, and I had all these different things going on. So, if you look at my music then, you’ll see that it’s changed from now. Now I am a lot more financially stable. So I don’t wanna say that my music back then was erratic, that’s a strong term, but it was more all over the place. And I think that relates to a lot of the younger people. I think I that a lot of the younger people can grab some of my older music and really relate to it. And they can relate to my new stuff, because it’s pertinent to what’s going on today. I address a lot of issues that you see going on in the media, but I address it on a broad scale. No real specifics, I kind of just address it from my stand point and where I’m seeing things.
NF: You mentioned how you spent some time in college trying to figure out the music industry. What conclusions did you come to?
V: Well, I was very fortunate man. I came across a lot of luck. And in the industry, it takes a lot of persistence, and it takes a little luck too. You see these guys, with major labels with major deals, that’s like the handful out of the millions. The odds are extremely against you. It takes a constant work ethic. I was constantly just making music man, just all the time. Regardless of what I had going on, I would come to house and make a song. Come to the house and make a song. I tried to get at least one song a day. When I did that man, it kind of made it to where I was learning as I was going. I was fortunate because I learned Pro-Tools when I was real young. I played for my dad’s church, I was a pianist, an organist from age 7 to 17. I already had the playing ability to make music, but at the time in the early 2000s, there was not as much technology as there is now, so my music sounds a little different. Cuz back then, I was using a lot more keyboards, kind of had an R&B-ish swag. Now, it still has an R&B swag, but its going more to an R&B-Trap swag cuz I’m using fruity loops, and I’m using different things, a motif keyboard, bunch of different things. But it’s good to be a one-band-man so to speak, everything goes through me, I do my own tracks, I create my own tracks, I write my own lyrics, everything. Everything is Viper. So when you hear a Viper product, it’s good because you know that it was 100% me, and you know that there was no other outside influence, and you agree or not agree with what I’m saying based solely on me.
NF: What are you using now to produce? Have you been doing any sequencing inside FL or have you been configuring the Motif to drum things in via MIDI?
V: Basically, what I’ll do is, I’ll play a patch on the motif, you know, keyboard. Then I’ll slide in through MIDI, as a line, and then sync in the fruity loops, because fruity loops is good for the beat part of it, your hihats, your kicks, your snares. I got a MIDI keyboard, but it has a limited amount of sounds unless you buy a bunch of patches. So I just use the Motif, because it has a variety of sounds. But I still try to keep my sound basic man. In certain situations I’ll give a full fledged R&B swag rap track something that will really touch the heart as far as the depth of the chords and music. It all depends on the message I wanna bring on the song. On some songs, I won’t do that, because the human ears can hear certain things. If the track is really really good, it’s gonna hear the track. If the lyrics are really really good, its gonna hear the lyrics, so depending on what I got going on for that particular idea, I balance those two.
NF: You mentioned earlier that there were gonna be two versions of your new album. Is that something you do often?
V: It’s a new concept. The chopped and screwed movement is really hot right now. I’m really tapping into that. A lot of people will download a chopped and screwed album just because it’s chopped and screwed and not even care about who the artist is. So when I heard that was happening with this particular genre, with these two albums I really wanted to make that available. And that’s the new one, The Jaminiest Album You Ever Heard, and then my new album that I’m dropping with Cali Cash Flow is called Haters Make you Famous. Those two albums, I’m working on right now. Actually, I’m gonna be shooting 15 videos for The Jaminiest Album You Ever Heard and five with Cali Cash Flow, for the five tracks on our album that we putting out. I’m really trying to make myself a househo
ld name now. I’m at the point where my royalties and the money I make from my other businesses are getting big enough to where I can make some substantial moves. It’s really just a matter of time, I really think my tipping point is gonna be the end of 2015 to the middle of 2016. I think that’s when you’ll start seeing me on MTV.