Born to Righteous 1️⃣2️⃣

Masta Ace x Mo Beats

Song	Born to Roll	Righteous
Artist	Masta Ace	Mo Beats
Year	1994	2022
BPM	97	82
Part	Acapella	Instrumental

Final Cut

I was browsing YouTube and came across a #shorts vid. It had background music that made me go “what is this?? I need that beat!!” I learned it was a mashup that was trending heavy on TikTok starting in late September 2023. Man, this beat hits hard! Of course, my mind started going through all the 90’s hip-hop library in my brain. And very quickly, Born to Roll came to mind. Snap! I instantly knew, “That’s the one.”

The instrumental tracks of Born to Roll and Righteous have quite a few similarities, like heavy 808 bass drums and pre-chorus buildups. Also, they both have an extended opening that doesn’t have a bass drop until after the 32 bar intro.

I love me a good ol’ fashioned remix, and this one was really fun to make. My nostalgia hijacked this mix in several ways.

1. I hunted down an 808 bass drop sound effect on YouTube, and added that to various places on the track. I tried to mimic the original Born to Roll mix with the periodic brief fade outs to highlight some rhymes during the track.
2. My favorite part of this mix was chopping up the beat to have it play like original Masta Ace instrumental. Putting the pre-chorus in place, I had to loop that to stay on length with the verses. For the hook, that utilizes the crazy 8-bit type sounds that Mo Beats laid down on his track.

Balancing the volume of this mix took several iterations! I thought I was done on version 3, but at the last minute realized the vocals were a bit too loud. So I took the vocals down about 0.5 dB’s and took the instrumental up about 0.2 dB’s. I liked it! Just noting, that after I make a track, I try to listen to it on four different devices, plus my car stereo. It’s a great way to ensure it’s as balanced as can be.

I kept the track length the same as Born to Roll. I didn’t shorten any verse or chorus, though I did extend only the ending chorus by repeating it half a time during the final fadeout. I also used Mo Beats’ original fade out, unaltered at the end as well.

This track was one of the toughest mixes to make. First, the BPM difference is 15, which is large! Born to Roll was taken down 7 BPM, while Righteous was taken up 8! Another trouble I had was getting Masta Ace’s acapella properly Beatmapped. It was really tricky, and took a lot of patience to match up the metronome. While it would stick for the first verse, it eventually got out of sync midway through the track. Correcting the second verse then derailed the first one. It see-sawed like that for far longer than usual. So I got it as close as possible, and then ended up cutting the acapella up, just a tiny tad here and here to help it stay quantized with the instrumental beat. This one probably took 8 hours with all the iterations.

In order to make this mix, I had to use the following software tools:

1. My HP laptop running Windows 11.
2. Nero Downloader Ultimate to convert a few YouTube tracks to MP3’s.
3. Acapellas4u to snag the acapella.
4. Magix ACID 11 to arrange, Beatmap and mix all the audio files.

Fun Fact: The acapella track is from the original version of Ace’s song, called “Jeep Ass N***a”. It’s the same lyrics, but with the profanity you might not be familiar with, and the completely different hook. Were you expecting to hear the “Check it out baby, check it out dawg” chorus? I so badly wanted to include that, but an acapella of that version was never released. I wasn’t able to find it published anywhere yet. But don’t be surprised if it eventually comes out, as AI and other technology is making it easier and easier to extract never-before released acapellas. We live in exciting times!