Grandmaster Flash’s Clever Trick to Protect His Drum Breaks from Copying

Grandmaster Flash, the renowned DJ and producer, has revealed a clever technique he used to safeguard his unique drum breaks from being copied by other DJs.

Flash gained fame for his Quick Mix Theory method, which involved extending drum breaks using duplicate vinyl records.

In a recent interview with Music News, the DJ, who is also credited with inventing the slipmat, shared the secret hack he employed to protect his work. He explained how he searched for breaks on records by examining the vinyl’s shine: “The way I would look for a break on a record is I would buy one copy and I would put it up with a light. And the area where it was the most shiniest was where the least band members were playing.”

He continued, “Now, if there wasn’t a turntable in a record shop, I would look at that, I’d go and I’d say, this is probably a drum break because this area of this composition is shiny. And I would buy two of these and I would take it home. And the sh*t might be someone on a violin. Them sh*ts was called my stiffs.”

Flash further explained his technique, saying, “So I had crates and crates of stiffs. So what I would do is, for example, Take Me to the Mardi Gras, I would take two stiffs that I couldn’t return back because once you break the shrink wrap, you bought it. And I would soak the two copies of the stiffs in a bathtub and then sink and then put Take Me to the Mardi Gras in the bathtub until the labels came off. And what I would do is switch the labels on it, so if there was a person from another DJ crew that was trying to see what I was playing, the label was wrong.”

This clever tactic allowed Flash to have the last laugh: “They like, ‘Flash, we let the record play, we cleaned our house, and we just let the whole sh*t play from side A to side B, we never found it.’ It’s because I switched the label.”

He concluded by sharing how this secrecy added an element of fun to his DJ career and expressed his willingness to reveal the secrets now.