Chopped and Screwed

Slowing it down while Raising it Up

Houston Hip-Hop artists have elevated the chopped and screwed sound froma popular Houston music style to a worldwide music form.

    For some people, it is difficult to actually hear the lyrics of most songs. This usually is because artists sing the lyrics too fast or the song pulsates at a rapid beat. The problem was solved when a Houston DJ developed a remedy to actually listeners to truly listen to the lyrics. The late DJ Screw, whose real name was Robert Earl Davis Jr., created a music form where the pitch of a song was considerably lowered so that the lyrics could be understood by the listener. 

    These mixes became known as “chopped and screwed” or “screwed and chopped.” Either title is considered to be correct.

Break Beats Break Out
    Houston Hip-Hop artists Mike Jones, Paul Wall and Slim Thug have elevated the chopped and screwed sound from a popular Houston music style to a national and even worldwide music form. The artists each released a solo album in the past year, and each album placed in the top three on the sales charts in its first week.

    Chopped and screwed no longer remained a style embraced solely by Houston residents, but became a style enjoyed by many listeners on both the East and West Coasts. Baltimore DJ Glenn Brand, aka DJ Technics, credits the Houston DJs who developed the uncharacteristic chopped and screwed flavor into a mainstream style of Hip-Hop.

    “In the last two, three years a lot of artists coming out of Texas were getting notoriety and were building up,” says Technics, who operates an Internet radio station showcasing his club mixes. “It’s (chopped and screwed) extremely large now, even in the North.”

    The 34-year-old DJ saw the soaring popularity of the chopped and screwed sound and decided to come up with his own flavor.

    “I brought the slowed down ‘Carolina Crunk’ style to Baltimore club music,” says Technics, who still is experimenting with the new style with his associate DJ Carolina Slim. “I decided to go ahead and screw and chop anything.”

    On Technics’ Web site, baltimoreclubtracks.com, the beat of “Carolina Crunk” is described as being “pitched down a few octaves” (the bass gets extra, extra deep when slowing the track down) and “sliced to make the track stutter.”

    The tempo descends from 130 beats per minutes (bpm) to a range of about 89-70 bpm.

    Technics hopes to accomplish this in his general studio using Reason 3.0, Live 5.0, Recycle, Sound Forge, Vegas Studio and an ASR 10 sampling keyboard.  Technics says he has more than 100,000 records to play with in order to come up with a good track.

    “The industry is pretty much open to anything, and it’s just a matter of blowing up commercially,” Technics says.  NCB