Nick Marino

Yo. The Piece of Cake mixtape is free. All 13 instrumental songs. Download 'em while they're hot (or, at the very least, lukewarm): Piece of Cake ZIP (53 MB)

You can also check out each track from Piece of Cake individually, plus learn a little bit about the creation of the songs:

01. Amore
02. Every Woman
03. Freaky
04. Legal Green
05. No One Else
06. Ooo Baby
07. Piece of Cake
08. Savage
09. Slay
10. Slip It In
11. Tax
12. Try This
13. Unlicensed

If ya dig this, then you might dig my album full of originals -- Brilliant Shower.

This track is my instrumental dance remix of an 80s funk classic!

Well... that's a wrap for the Piece of Cake mixtape. Next Tuesday I'll post up the entire thing for download. After that? Well... uhhh to be honest, I'm running low on mixtape material and I haven't been doing a lot of new instrumentals lately. So I'll just have to wait and see what happens!!!

Ultra-classic Furious comin' atcha!!! This is actually proto-Furious, in that I made this song before I was creating digital instrumentals on a regular basis.

I would call this a 100% Nik Furious original save for one fact -- I didn't play the drums! I had an assignment in one of my audio production classes, and Try This is the result of that. The drums are sampled from a gospel song I mixed for said assignment, and then I added my own keyboards on top.

A short, punchy beat with crisp drums and crunchy guitars. I edited my loops around the original song's bassline, cause that's just how I get down.

If ya dig this, listen to my 100% original album, Brilliant Shower, for free.

I'm sure DJs and producers out there can relate to this -- you hear a chord progression or a melody in a song and it ALMOST sounds perfect to you, and you just can't resist the opportunity to try and take it to that place where you want it to be.

Well that's what this beat was for me. I wanted to take the sample just slightly off of its original course and tweak it until I thought the progression was smooth and sleek. Did it work? You be the judge.

This track makes me want to do a Christmas mixtape.

What about a title like "St. Nik's Sack of Beats"?

It happens more than I'd like -- I produce something I think is amazing, but it doesn't click with other people. Century is one of those times. And so is Savage.

In fact, as far as I know, I'm the only person that likes this song. So give it a spin and see what you think... am I wrong?

Savage samples voice and song from narrated sports footage. I love those old dramatic re-narrations of football and baseball games, and I like the unconventional quality of this sampled audio. I'm also very pleased with the drums on this one.

Basically, what I'm saying is I LIKE THIS SONG.

ALRIGHT! You know the song's gonna be good when I name the mixtape after it!!!

Well, actually, it's the other way around -- my mixtapes after named after War Machine's quotes from Marvel vs. Capcom, and then I chose a track on each mixtape to represent the title... but that's neither here nor there, really.

This is one of the few mixtape cuts I WISH I could take full credit for! Alas, it uses a sample for the excellent melody and mouth noises (I guess it's beatboxing... though it's more like Bobby McFerrin-style a cappella). I chopped, looped it, and added some drums. Nothing special, mind you, but I think the combination is fantastic.

This is an experimental beat -- part re-imagining of the original and part remix.

Personally, I think the re-imagined part is hot. It's got great energy and mood. As for the "remixed" section, well it's definitely funny. It's got that going for it.

Like I mentioned last time, most of my mixtape instrumentals are made as backing tracks for rap songs. The reason why this beat includes the entire one-sided cell phone conversation from the original is because the rappers wanted to fill in the other side of the conversation in their version.

I recommend you do the same -- fill in your side of the phone call while you listen. I promise you'll have fun.

This beat is a pretty straight forward remix of a certain modern soul track that I happen to love.

The structure is pretty straight forward too. The "no one else can touch my..." line acts as the hook and the strictly instrumental sections are verses.

When I started building beats, I was making them as backing tracks for rap songs. It wasn't until friends of mine started listening to the instrumental versions more than the rap songs that I realized the instrumentals were really a draw of their own. So that's why a lot of my stuff is built with an alternating verse/chorus structure like this one.