Soldiers Produce Beats from Trailer Studio
By Spc. Marie Whitney
122nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
CAMP VICTORY NORTH, Baghdad, Iraq— “When it was time to come out here, I knew there wasn’t going to be much going on for the year. And everyone else I knew was bringing their X boxes and stuff. So I took my tax return and bought myself a mixer, a keyboard and microphone,” said Spc. Robert Burke of Headquarters Company, 1st Cavalry Division. Spc. Adrian "Tuck" Tucker of Headquarters Company, 1st Cavalry Division freestyles on the mic in the studio of Spc. Robert "Sticky" Burke, also of HHC, 1st Cav. Div., Tucker, Burke and Spc. Bryan Clark have a rap group called Eclectic that they began while in Baghdad.With this equipment, Burke set up a modest recording studio inside his trailer, out of which he and some of his friends from HHC, 1st Cav. Div. record music for their rap group, Eclectic.
Burke is the producer for their band, creating beats, recording the voice tracks and editing to create their final products. Turning out a new beat every couple of days isn’t a struggle for Burke, who has been creating beats back home since 2000. “Everything has a certain mood to it,” he said. “One night I was going over the beats I had started in Kuwait and when we first got here to Iraq. You can hear the change in what I was feeling every time.” Spc. Robert "Sticky" Burke, Headquarters Company, 1st Cavalry Division, looks for a good beat to freestyle to from the group of beats that he has created on his computer. Burke is the producer for a rap group called Eclectic.
Burke’s group mates don’t take for granted what he brings to the group in knowledge and talent. “This guy’s a genius,” said Spc. Bryan Clark, the lyrical master of the group. “Every time we do a track he’ll get on here and find something that could be done better. So our material is always getting better and better.” But setting up the studio turned out to be a little more difficult than the members of Eclectic had originally thought. “We would have had this going a long time ago, but when we first got here we had a problem with the power situation,” said the group’s comic relief, Spc. Adrian Tucker. “We didn’t have a transformer.”But they soon got a transformer, enabling them to finally set up their studio. Now, all they needed was some lyrics. Burke said that writing the lyrics for Eclectic’s songs is a group effort. “The writing of the songs is a culmination of everybody. But each one of us is naturally good at something too,” he said. “Clark will come up with a lot of ideas. And he can come up with some lyrics in a snap. I’ll be feeling a certain way and I won’t be able to express is through words, so I’ll make a beat for it, and Tucker keeps us motivated.”Spc. Bryan "Diggs" Clark, Headquarters Company, 1st Cavalry Division, goes over his lyrics in his "book of lyrics" before jumping on the mic to record a song.
The members of the group, who have been working together for the last three months, plan to try to put out a CD of their music during their time in Baghdad. They also intend to try to get their music played in the Morale Welfare and Recreation tent on Camp Victory North. And Clark plans to perform at the Equal Opportunity sponsored talent show July 24. To the three HHC Soldiers, creating music is a definite escape from long days at work. “It’s definitely a stress reliever,” said Tucker. But Eclectic takes their music seriously. Every time they sit down to work on their music, they’re trying to improve on what they‘ve been working on for a while already. “Its always a work in progress,” Burke said. “We talk about our lyrical content. We like what we do now, but we think we could come a little bit better from our hearts. It’s not really a matter of if we can do it or not. It’s if we try to do it or not.”