Grandmaster Flash Poetic Techniques

Joseph Saddler, who has an alias as Grandmaster Flash, is an American hip hop recording artist and one of the pioneers of hip-hop, Djing, cutting, and mixing. His family migrated to the United States from Barbados, in the Caribbean. He grew up in The Bronx, New York where he attended Samuel Gompers High School, a public vocational school. There he learned how to repair electronic equipment. His parents played an important role in his interest in music as he was fascinated by his father’s music collections which actually reminds me of myself. It’s amazing how the life style of a parent could go a long way in charting a child’s future.
Grandmaster Flash carefully studied the styles and techniques of earlier DJs, particularly Pete Jones, Kool …show more content…
Early New York party DJs came to understand that short drum breaks were popular with party audiences. Aiming to isolate these breaks and extend them for longer durations, Grandmaster Flash learned that by using duplicate copies of the same record, he could play the break on one record while searching for the same fragment of music on the other (using his headphones). When the break finished on one turntable, he used his mixer to switch quickly to the other turntable, where the same beat was cued up and ready to play. Using the backspin technique (also referred to as beat juggling), the same short phrase of music could be looped indefinitely.
Punch phrasing or clock theory is yet another of his creations. This technique involved isolating very short segments of music, typically horn hits, and rhythmically punching them over the sustained beat using the mixer.
Scratching which may not necessarily be one of his creation but he so perfected the technique although the invention of record scratching is generally credited to Grand Wizard Theodore. Scratching, along with punch phrasing, exhibited a unique performative aspect of party DJing. Instead of passively spinning records, he manipulated them to create new