INTERVIEW > AN EXTREMELY GOOD DEAL: JAE DEAL

Jae is working on a holiday album expected to be released next year. He gave us an excerpt from a song called 'Christmas Break' which was originally composed on his X3 and recently revamped with the KORG Legacy Collection. Click here to check it out! (mp3, 2.99MB)

“At the time I came on board, Mario was at the top of the Billboard charts for about ten weeks, so the energy was incredible – the music was truly great, and everyone treated us with a lot of respect,” declares Jae Deal. Regarded by many as an incredible up-and-coming producer, Jae has been working behind the scenes and on stage with some of the most well known pop, R&B, and hip hop artists, including Snoop Dogg, Dru Hill, Faith Evans and Marques Houston. He has also contributed to the works of legends such as Elton John and Andraé Crouch, and has played a part in high profile tours such as the P-Diddy World Tour and the Snoop Dogg Tour. You would think from his experience that he has been in the industry for thirty years, but Jae is still in his twenties. The reason that he has already achieved so much is due to his musical skills as both a producer and a performer.

All too often, people initially are influenced to enter the music industry by the desire for money or fame. For Jae, his faith in God and his relationship with his family were his motivation. Coincidentally, pop superstar Mario and Jae attended the same church together as young children in Baltimore; they didn’t see each other until last year when they started working together! As he explains, “Working with Mario was a pivotal experience for me, because I witnessed what hard work achieved for both of us in a surreal way. The last time we saw each other as children we had no idea the next time we linked would be 15 years later in front of millions on Good Morning America! My whole Mario experience made me extra grateful for how far we’ve come and led me to expect more out of my future. Musically working with Mario was absolute fun!!”

His parents provided further support for the development of Jae’s musical intuition by purchasing a few tape recorders so that Jae and his sister could layer their instruments by bouncing between the recorders. His mom and dad fueled the fire for his interest in the life of a music producer. “When I started reading on my own, I noticed that Quincy Jones produced We Are the World. He was often lauded for his classic production and humanitarian achievements, and he was donating large amounts to good causes. I also noticed Sammy Davis Jr. doing the same, and I said to myself, ‘I want to help, too. I’m going to make big songs that go down in history and use that momentum to help good causes.’ That’s when I knew I’d be a producer.”

By the time Jae was in high school, he was already a skillful bass guitar and keyboard player. By the tenth grade he was participating in performances that aired on PBS as well as international tours and a performance for the Pope. “Right after high school, I brought my Korg X3 on a trip with my church to Philadelphia and played the synth bass with our choir there,” recalls Jae. “Coincidentally, the host church’s musical director was a popular gospel producer. He heard my playing and brought me in on two major gospel recordings. The first was Vicki Winans, Live in Detroit. It was her first live recording and it was nominated for a Stellar award. The second was T.D. Jake’s Woman Thou Art Loosed. It won a Stellar and it was Grammy nominated.”

Shortly after his work with Vicki Winans, Jae made more connections with many established music directors in the industry that all loved his work on the synth bass. He was asked to play synth bass for Tonéx’s Out of the Box multi-Grammy nominated CD and DVD recording. He seamlessly jumped from Gospel to mainstream and worked with young pop artists such as Christina Milian and Christina Aguilera, and currently with Mario, Omarion, and Marques Houston.

Jae has also toured with hip-hop and pop’s biggest names. “The P. Diddy World Tour was real cool because it had a killer budget! Every artist on the tour was super-hot – Lil’ Kim, Total, Busta Rhymes, Dru Hill, Ma$e, CamRon, and P. Diddy. I was playing synth bass in the live band for concerts,” he says.

Jae enthusiastically tells us about his experience with Snoop Dogg. “Working with Snoop Dogg and the Snoopadelics was like living in a reality TV show with a bunch of cousins! We had a lot of fun and we looked out for each other like family. The music was phenomenal.”

Jae’s innovative work as a producer stems from his creative process. He tells us the secret to his magic, “I hardly ever produce two songs the same way. If I’m composing, most of the time the piece starts on a Korg somewhere. Lately I’ve been taking jabs at projects on my Korg microKONTROL while I’m on the road with my custom G4. If I’m using my studio at home or a commercial studio, then I’ll have a Korg TRITON Extreme workstation handy, and I’ll just throw the foundation to my work in the sequencer. It’s convenient to start a whole production in a TRITON Extreme, because when someone like the songwriter, artist, or co-producer requests modifications, I hardly ever have to start all over. Most of the time I can easily get the results I need with a few clicks and slides on the TRITON Extreme.”

Jae, nicknamed “Mathematic”' by his colleagues, maintains a formula; “The main reason I like the Korg sequencers is because they allow me to uniquely ‘tighten’ up the track in the fashion that people respect and know me for. Half of my magic comes from the sequence edit pages. I quantize, shift notes and step edit each track meticulously. I can see whole pieces in a matrix form when I browse the numerical data provided by Korg’s sequencers – note velocities, note durations, control data. It’s all arranged in a way that so many producers feel comfortable dealing with.”

While Korg workstations provide Jae with the tools necessary to execute music in an analytical method, he loves many Korg pieces for various other reasons as well. Jae’s favorite pieces from the past include the Wavestation, the Polysix, and the M1 – classics that are now available as virtual instruments for use with PCs and Macs in the form of Korg’s Legacy Collection software. “The genius of Korg technology has gone full circle with the birth of the Legacy Collection. This year I found in the Korg Legacy Digital Edition more presets that fueled my creative fire than any other compositional tool I’ve ever used . . . a few clicks in the Legacy M1 browser and I hear a song half completed – really, it’s that simple,” Jae confides. “Incredible – I love it! “

Jae continues, “I’m using my Korg Legacy Collection and Korg microKONTROL on everything these days with my laptop. I play them at church services all the time because they’re so powerful and yet so portable. The first few months I had the microKONTROL I was on tour. I used it for writing and composing on the tour bus and backstage during downtime. I was loving it. But I didn’t even realize the microKONTROL’s potential until I got home and thumbed through the manual. I read how to assign the modulation sources and it got ugly from there! I easily tailored my microKONTROL to have all my favorite parameters at my fingertips. For synth bass patches, my sliders control volume, OSC mix, portamento, attack, release and tone. The microKONTROL is awesome for use with Reason and soft-synths in ProTools. As a matter of fact, I even have a nice set up for my B4 soft synth with most of the modulation sliders as my favorite drawbars. The modulation knobs are handy for real-time level balancing in Reason.”

In addition to Jae’s heavy involvement in music as a profession, he also inspires young people by participating in music tutoring programs and working as a motivational speaker. He gives credit to the people who have inspired him in the same way, and this is his motivation to pass this inspiration on to others. He gives this advice for those who would like to be successful in the music field, “Work hard and keep networking. Make everything else in your life stable while pursuing your dream.” Finally, he gives great appreciation and thanks to those who directly started it all for him – his parents and God. To find out more about Jae check out www.jaedeal.net.

Photo by Darren Young
Words by Ming Chen
Used with permission of Korg USA Inc