Coolzey: Coolzey and the Search for the Hip Hop Hearts

This summer of 2010 from the beginning of May to the end of July my friends and I embarked on an arduous endeavor. The idea was to create a Coolzey emceed album for free public consumption with twelve songs, each produced by a different beatsmith, and each with their own music video, to be released on a weekly basis.

The process entailed a weekly phone tag / email / text session to my beat-making brethren to wrangle up the music, sifting through beats to find "the one", getting the final version of the beat in the right file format and arrangement, writing the lyrics, rewriting the lyrics, recording rough versions, taking the rough versions to Luke Tweedy at Flat Black Studios and recording the final versions, giving the rough mix to Jason Hennesy who would be orchestrating the video idea, getting a crew together for the video shoot, shooting the footage, editing the video, meanwhile back to the recording studio to finalize the mix, master the mix, send the final mix to Jason, finish editing and rendering the video, and getting it to the blogs and radio shows by our weekly deadline.

It was really a full-time job that we squeezed in between our other full-time jobs, (I was remodeling a house and Jason was landscaping), and a lot of people contributed their time and resources to the cause. We pulled it off and have been very happy with the results.

Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, we have revived the project, remixed the audio with Luke, sent it to be mastered with Carl Saff in Chicago, and Jason has reworked the videos for the pressing up of a CD / DVD combo.