Interview with Orig the DJ Part Two: Get Got

This is part two of my interview with Orig the DJ. If you missed part one where Orig discusses the origins of Mashville, you can click that link to read it. In this section, he discusses Get Got.

QE: Tell me about Get Got

Orig the DJ: Get Got is my band. That’s Skyler Glover, Gary Hundley and myself. We’re a three piece. We’re like a trip hop funk rock turntablism electronic just melting together. And That’s what WE are. Skyler plays the drums. He’s got an acoustic kit as well as a pad kit. So, he can get the 808 sounds and other samples he can trigger. And Gary is just playing bass guitar with no effects. He works really hard to fill in sound where there’s no guitar or piano or any other high to mid range sound. I’m more of the soloist with the scratching the vocal samples and scratching other instruments. Also I play synthesizer but I don’t use a keyboard. I use a midi controller. The MPD 24 which is basically like an MPC drum machine but without the sounds. It just controls my computer. My computer has all the sounds. I use Ableton Live to launch all my sounds with the pads. I use Traktor to scratch my sounds.

Orig: So anyway! This is how Get Got happened. skyler and Gary and I were working at Whole Foods Market. At the time, Whole Foods had a month where if you were an employee and you were a musician or had a band, WF gave them an opportunity to play their music live in the lobby area. We wanted to play together but we weren’t a band or anything. so we figured we’d just come up with 4 or 5 songs. That way we could play. So, we took a couple of weeks. We came up with 4 or 5 songs. We didn’t even have a name. We weren’t Get Got at the time. We just called ourselves the Three Amigos. We were just three friends you know. anyway so we performed that day. And people really liked us. We got such a great response from the whole store. The store wasn’t really crowded around us but the sound system allowed our music to be pumped through the speakers through the whole store. A lot of the employees really liked us. Some of the people who stuck around and watched us. They asked what’s our name and do we have a CD. We had to say “No, we’re not even really a band.” So we went home with that. We just said to each other “We work really well together. We should just keep jamming.” I think the thing that solidified us as a band, I think it was Spoken Nerd…

Orig: Right, so he had a monthly night at Cafe Coco called the Holla. He wanted to book us. So we had to get back together and practice our songs. That’s when we came up with the name Get Got. That name actually came from when we were taking a little break from our practice. We were still tossing around ideas for a band name. I had the idea: let’s call ourselves The Entertainment System or The Sound System. Skyler didn’t like it, he thought the word entertainment was too long to be in a name. Entertainment is a long word…

QE: HAHAHA!!

Orig: Yeah whatever. Yeah it’s long. So anyway, we were just chillin outside. And I had to refill my dog’s water bowl with my hose. Skyler was standing right next to the hose. The hose had some holes in it. So if I turned the water on; it was just squirt from all the holes and so on. So I told Skyler “Hey watch out before you get got!” And Gary said, “Hey, that’s a cool name for a band. Let’s call ourselves Get Got!” And yeah that’s exactly how it happened.

So we played that first show. Things just started happening from there. You heard us, you booked us for the next show. To this day, it’s still a side project for us. That’s been what, 3 years now?

Orig: Yeah we had no true intentions of being a band. It was by the demand of our friends and our peers that we continued the band. We did release an album. I’d love to talk about that.

Orig: So Skyler and Gary are in another band called Cheer Up Charlie Daniels. With Neil O’Neil. That’s not his real name. but that’s what he goes by. Good friend of mine. Once again, another person that worked at Whole Foods. Anyway, he worked a part time job at Welcome to 1979 studios. He called Skyler one night because the studio was hosting the NAMM show. They had a microphone company at the studio one night. They were showcasing their microphones. But they needed a drummer, so Neil called Skyler to come set up his drums and be mic’d up. So Neil said “hey if you do me this favor I’ll help you out.” So Skyler did that, and in return they gave us some studio time. So we took that opportunity. We had about 7 or 8 songs at that time. We came in for a studio session.

Orig: The cool thing about 1979 studio is that everything is analog. Tape Machines…the only thing that was digital was my turntable setup. My laptop and the DVS. They were going to give us 10 hours. which would have probably cost $2500 or more. So it was a huge blessing for us. We really only used 5 hours. We basically just set everything up. and we performed like we were performing on stage. Bert Stone was the Engineer. it felt so good for me to be an artist in the situation. For a long time, I’d always been the guy recording and on the mixing board. This time, I was the guy on the couch. So I would have an idea and he would get his guys on it. We literally just re-did one song. We only punched in one part. They gave me the multitracks. They recorded everything to tape. But then we had them find a way to give me a DVD of the multitracks and I put that into Ableton and I mixed and mastered the album. It sounded so minimal. So we took time to add in sounds. All the while, I still had all these other projects I was working on. So it took us a while to finish this album. We released it in December of 2010. It’s only 7 tracks. We had an album release party. You were there.

Orig: You, Spoken Nerd, 247. It was great. Lot of love that night. With having an album release party, and having all these visions of where we want to go. We’d been realizing more and more that this is more than a project. But Cheer Up Charlie Daniels, they got real busy. They’re heavily involved with the scene. Neil is a super busy guy. He’s probably out there as we speak. He caused his band to get really busy. We had to put Get Got to the side for that. And I got really busy with Big Smo. So we had to push Get Got to the side again with that. So we decided to let’s not worry about it. It’s not like we pushed really hard. It’s not like something that’s going to fall apart. Despite pushing it to the side, Get Got is still performing. Still getting calls… We have a show coming up pretty soon.

Orig: Yeah It’s still happening. It’s been effortlessly happening. I’m really excited about it. It’s awesome. It’s rare that bands can just happen from nothing and continue going with hardly any effort. We want to get another album going but we have a lot of work to do…