Fresh from his Jam Hot a couple of weeks ago, Sam Frank speaks to MistaJam.com about his musical past and what he’s currently up to.

How did you get into music?

My father was a session rock drummer throughout the seventies and eighties and my mother was a music teacher in London and L.A. where I grew up. She got hold of Steinberg Pro24 on an AtariST 1040 when I was about fifteen and I was hooked on music production immediately.

I started playing sax when I was nine and drums at around the same age as I could hold the sticks. I started gigging when I was about seventeen and got published by EMI when I was twenty five. I’ve basically been working in music since I was a teenager and been obsessed with making it since I was a toddler.

What’s your musical past?

Over the past number of years I have tried to keep my music career as varied as possible. I’ve worked on a cruise ship for five months, toured with the Rocky Horror Show in Germany, worked with Jay-Z on stage at Radio City and the Albert Hall, played with Parliament Funkadelic, busked, taught music BTEC and AS level in inner city London colleges and remixed under three psuedonyms.

I’ve been hired and fired from a million function bands, arranged and recorded fifty piece string sections at Abbey Rd, written tunes like Little Man for Sia and Crossover for Magnetic Man, got music on ads, done track production for acts like Emeli Sande and Jess Mills recently, played festivals in Iceland and done all nighters at Chung King studios in N.Y. with ex NSYNC singers.

How did Anticipation come around?
Skream had a kid on the way, mine had just been born. He sent me the track which I thought was a) outstanding, and b) perfectly suited for an upbeat song about the exciting period leading up to the birth of your first child. He agreed.

What do you make of the reaction to it?

Everyone seems to love it. It isn’t released for a few weeks yet so we’ll see how the buying public react, but the radio and Twitter love has been phenomenal. It seems to connect with a hell of a lot of people which is what most songwriters want to do I’d have thought.

Do you use talkbox on all your tunes?

The tracks I’m getting together and getting airplay for that are under my own name as an artist are all using voice technology. The talkbox is just one of a plethora of tools I use among vocoders, pitch shifters, formant shifters, hardware and software, Melodyne, Antares software, time stretching techniques and text to speech applications.

The important thing for me is that despite using voice technology I keep all the emotion and energy in my vocals and lyrics in the same way that people like Teddy Riley, Herbie Hancock, Roger Troutman and Andrew Frampton did. It doesn’t have to sound like sterile Autotune pop just because it’s a synthesised voice.

Apart from Skream, who else have you been working with?

Artwork, Toddla T, Zed Bias, Stinkahbell, Kito and a host of others who have some absolutely amazing tracks for me to write on top of. I do work as a track guy for other artists as well as a top liner, but for my own thing it’s a mix of my own track productions and those from other producers.

What’s next?

If only I knew that. Is it a label deal for my own project? Is it writing more top lines for other artists? Is it track work for signed acts? Is it going out live with my own gig which I have just started doing? Is it scrapping all this and learning how to price derivatives three days a week while spending the rest of the time lending a hand to the rodent control authorities in Sheperds Bush?

I try to take it a day at a time.

Simple Life is out independently on 4 December.