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Anthony Gilmour, otherwise known as Bay Area hip hop producer ToneCapone, has enjoyed an accomplished and varied career in music spanning more than two decades. Best known for being the producer behind mid 90s hip hop anthem ‘I Got 5 On It’, his extensive production credits range from successful crossover acts to stalwarts of the hip hop underground. We caught up with Anthony to discuss his inspirations, his reputation for an uncanny ability to replay those all important hooks and his experiences of twenty plus years in the production business:
Introduce yourself for our readers. How would you describe the place you occupy in the musical landscape?
I go by the name of Anthony “Tonecapone” Gilmour a native Californian. I would say that I have done a fair amount for the hip-hop and rap community but most of my work was done for the underground artists.
Let’s start with your early career. Many will be familiar with your name from its appearance in the credits of some very high profile releases around ’94 / ’95 but your story goes back some way before that. What was your introduction to production and how did your career take shape prior to those higher profile releases?
’94 / ’95 was when other artists took notice to some of my work but I had my first records released in 1991-1992 with SWV and Capital Tax. I also did a remix for ‘Casualties of War’ by Eric B. & Rakim. At the time I went by DJ G or DJ Smooth G.
In ’95 you produced the single ‘I Got 5 On It’ for the Luniz, a track that was a major mainstream hit in both the US and worldwide. Looking back, that record was released at a time when it’s probably fair to say New York and LA held a lot of the hip hop press’s attention. How did it feel to be behind what you might say was the track that put Bay Area rap on the map at least in so far as the media was concerned.
We recorded the record ‘I Got 5 On It’ late in 1993, got a deal with Virgin in 1994 and it was released in 1995. To tell you the truth I felt like MC Hammer had put the Bay on the map and E-40 was making a lot of noise because he had just got a huge deal with Jive and of course I couldn’t forget my late great friend Tupac Shakur who had just got signed to Interscope a couple years earlier. I was very surprised at the success of ‘I Got 5 On It’ because of its worldwide appeal, I knew it was a good record but I didn’t think that people would still be sampling it today.
And how was the success of that track viewed by your Bay Area contemporaries? How did having such a huge hit quite early in your career affect your expectations and your career trajectory?
After that song I started receiving a lot more phone calls for production work and I started being known as a ‘hit-maker’. When artists contacted me, they expected me to make a platinum single for them. They also looked to me when they wanted a song replayed. I really did change my production style after the Luniz, I started sampling less and concentrating on the sounds I was using in my music.
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Around the same time, you were producing other Bay Area acts like 3X Krazy, The Click and E-40. Was this just business as usual or was there a sense of ‘this guy is making hits, we need him producing for us’?
I was directly involved in the making of the group 3X Krazy, I was part of Dollars & Spence with my partner Lance Spencer. The pleasure about working with them was they would rap over whatever I made and there was no fussing about what beats I gave them because they knew I always gave my best in producing songs. E-40 actually contacted me prior to the release of I Got 5 On It, he asked me about it and I told him that I thought it was a hit. He still reminds me of that conversation to this day when we talk! A lot of people may not know that when we introduced 3X Krazy to E-40 is when ‘Fasheezy’ was born. 3X Krazy had some homies in West Oakland that used to use that lingo all the time, 3X Krazy passed it to E-40 and Earl Stevens made it popular to the rest of the world.
Moving on a couple of years, we see your name appearing on production credits for a number of Houston / Rap-a-Lot artists including the Geto Boys and Scarface. That relationship, in particular with Scarface, seems to have endured over the years. How did the Houston connection come about?
While working with 3X Krazy I was introduced to the legendary Seagram Miller who was signed to Rap-a-Lot at the time. I did a couple tracks for Seagram and when it was time to mix the songs I flew to Los Angeles. Mike Dean was mixing most of Rap-a-Lot’s records, Mike said he really liked my production and asked me if I wanted to help him on some records for Scarface. That was the ultimate compliment especially since Mike Dean is such a great producer and musician and Scarface is one of the greatest lyricist of all time. I started working with Rap-a-Lot on various projects from that day on. I have a lot of respect for Brad Jordan and Mike Dean, they really helped expose me to the world.
We were interested to see your name come up on a few New York / East Coast releases too. You produced a track for Shyheim at a time when a lot of East Coast artists were flirting with the West Coast / Southern sounds (Jamal working with Mike Dean being another example). Some years later you worked with Black Moon, an act who for many typify the New York early 90s sound. Did you feel a need to adjust your sound to suit these vocalists or was it more a case of them bringing you in to provide a sound different to that which they were typically associated with?
I have always loved the sound from the East Coast. They have always been a symbol of quality music and a work ethic beyond compare. I can honestly say that the East Coast was a source of inspiration for a lot of the music industry, including myself. I was always amazed at the records that Marley Marl, Pete Rock, Teddy Riley, Large Professor, Premier and Diamond D were making. They were the standard and that’s what you had to compare your own work to. I was approached by Shyheim’s management to produce a record but I didn’t have to really alter my style because there was always a touch of the East Coast in my music. I think I started out with a sample from Bobbi Humphrey called ‘You Make Me Feel So Good’ and the label didn’t want any samples used so I had to rebuild the track from scratch. When Dan the Man reached out to me to do the Black Moon record, they wanted a track they had heard so it wasn’t about me changing anything to fit them.
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Let’s go back a little and talk about use of samples in your work. From early in your career, you were using a combination of direct samples and melodies replayed on keys. ‘I Got 5 On It’s use of Club Nouveau’s ‘Why You Treat Me So Bad’ is an example of a track sometimes mistaken for a direct sample but in fact replayed. Talk us through how your sound developed in this way.
The Luniz brought the idea and the hook to me and I was working with Michael Marshall from the Timex Social Club at the time. I looped the Club Nouveau record first and it was too fast, I slowed it down and it sounded good but after I analyzed it more I felt like I could replay it and control the breaks of the song better. After that is when I really started to do more replays, I also found out that we didn’t have to pay for the master usage of a sample we just had to negotiate the splits of the publishing. I started treating the production game like a science and really studying the instrumentation of the music I liked such as Parliament / Funkadelic, Ohio Players, Zapp, Bar-Kays, Kool & the Gang and anything produced by Fonce and Larry Mizell. All the information I needed was on the back of the album or on the inserts. I started learning the names of the instruments being used and I would test myself by identifying every instrument I heard in each song I listened to such as: the Arp String-Ensemble or Solina that you hear in all the P-Funk songs (‘Intro to Dr.Funkenstein’, ‘Children of Production’), Scarface (‘Maryjane’) or in the Ohio Players songs (‘Alone’, ‘Sweet Sticky Thing’) or maybe the Fender Rhodes electric piano that Bob James played. I also had to learn what effects were being used on these instruments because that’s how you give character to the individual sounds. This technique has proven to be worthy because now artist might sample the version that you create rather than the one you got it from such as ‘I Got 5 On It’ instead of ‘Why You Treat Me So Bad’ or maybe they sample your original work as Ashanti did for ‘Baby’ by using Scarface’s ‘Maryjane’. I also learned how to take melodic ideas and re-write the words as in ‘Smile’ by Scarface feat. 2Pac where I took the idea from S.O.S Band‘s ‘Tell Me If You Still Care’ to come with the hook. There has been a lot of mistakes made with people thinking that I sampled something but in actuality I replayed it such as ‘Girl’ by the Luniz in which I replayed ‘Left Me Lonely’ by MC Shan. The sounds are out there but you have to do your homework to find out the information you need to replay a song that sounds authentic, it is an art in itself. If and when I did use popular samples I always tried to chop it up differently than it had ever been used before.
How do you feel the wider availability of affordable home studios, computer software and so on has affected the concept of what it is to be a producer? What sort of equipment were you using when you first set out and what is your preference now?
I think its great that better quality equipment is available but it does make producers a little bit lazy because they’re do it all machines and software. Back in the day 10 seconds was all the sampling time you had and you had to be creative with what you had, now there’s unlimited sampling time and the software will chop your samples up for you, very few producers actually do homework and look for new sounds and unique drums because the software lays it all out for them. Dr. Dre, Neptunes and Timbaland are the last of a dying breed of producers that care about originality and quality.
I have been a DJ since 1981, back when we used to make mix tapes by using the pause button on a cassette player. There were no samplers yet, I remember using a 4-track and having to scratch and cut the records to create the loops before doing vocals. I used to make beats on a Roland 808 and 909 and scratch and mix records into my beat. My first time using a sampler was when my manager let me use his SP1200 overnight. The first sample I used was Curtis Mayfield‘s ‘Future Shock’. I stayed up all night using it. I then knew I had to have one so I did what I had to do to save up $2300 to buy my own. For years I was just sampling different records, but I realized that there had to be more to it. I felt like samples limited you to how much you could really arrange the track so I developed a sound with more keyboards and instruments involved. Now I use Protools HD but I haven’t stopped using my outboard gear such as the MPC 4000, Roland Fantom, Triton Rack, EMU Orbit 3, Roland 5080, I also use software synthesizers. I apply the science I learned from having very little to my creativity so that I don’t become to dependent on the software that does everything for you.
My message to up and coming producers and artists is even though a lot of today’s music sounds similar, don’t be afraid to be different just because you see a specific style having success! Break the chain because creativity is suffering which will eventually lead to the demise of a great art.
Any final words, thank yous, plugs?
I’d like to thank everyone who inspired me to work hard on preserving the quality of the art: George Clinton, William “Bootsy” Collins, Fonce and Larry Mizell, Junie Morrison, Rick James, Larry Blackmon, Dr. Dre, Marley Marl, Pete Rock, Diamond D, Teddy Riley, Sugarhill Records, Roger Troutman, Marvin Gaye, Willie Hutch, Leon Ware, Showbiz, Prince Paul, Tribe Called Quest, Extra P, EPMD, Timbaland, Neptunes, Easy Mo Bee, Big Daddy Kane, Snoop Dogg. These artists, producers and musicians have provided so much inspiration to me that I would never have even got into music as deep as I have without the blueprints of quality that they provided. Its hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from. Study the legends!
If you ever have any questions about my music or production subscribe to my Youtube channel and send me a message – TONECAPONE5ONIT!
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