Do you prefer Chandler or Turbo?
Well, usually they say Chandler when it's like six figures involved, so I don't want you to get an invoice randomly. [laughter]
We'll stick with Turbo!
There you go.
You grew up in the College Park neighborhood in Atlanta. What got you into music?
I’ve always been around music. Music was in my family as far as from a consumer level like, you know? My mom listened to a lot of neo soul, my brothers listened to things like DMX, Missy Elliott, Floetry, and all of this different stuff growing up. My grandmother had an old piano that I used to always mess with. As ten-year-old kid, I used to fuck around with this piano. But I started making music at 14, and I kind of fell into it, honestly. Nobody else was doing music or knew the software. My summer, going from eighth grade into high school, I just got engulfed in it. I did it every day, and I started learning how to engineer. At the same time, I was making beats, but they weren’t good at all. In order for me to get better with producing, I started recording myself. That went hand-in-hand: I was making music, making songs, making beats, and rapping on my own beats. I was going on YouTube and learning how to mix. At the time, I was using Adobe Audition. I didn't even have Pro Tools. Then that became my little hustle as a kid. Everybody in the neighborhood, all of my homies, used to come to my house and record for $20. My little package deal was, "I'll give you a beat and you can record a song as long as it takes you for $20." Basically, it became the studio house, and then it skyrocketed from there to the point where even the robbers were bringing me setups that they just stole. That’s how I got my first studio setup.
That's amazing. With working in Adobe, how were you getting samples and beats? How were you creating with those relatively primitive tools?
At that time, it was an [Apple] Logic world, and I couldn't afford a MacBook. I was recording music on Adobe Audition 2.0 or something like that. But, as far as producing, I was using [Propellerhead Software] Reason. Reason had a few VSTs that came with it, a little drum kit that I could make a little bop to, and that's what I struggled with when I started. I was playing with Reason, and my brother, who was like my homie, and the guy that I started [the record production company] The Playmakers with, Jet, was super engulfed in the software. He was teaching me Reason a little bit. It started there. I used to pay attention to [the producer] Zaytoven a lot, and he was using Pro Tools to produce his beats. We tried Pro Tools for a second, but we didn't have the gear to be able to record the sounds to it. We were trying to use the Pro Tools sounds. That probably went on for a year, and then my cousin finally introduced me to FL Studio. That changed my life. It wasn't even VSTs back then. A lot of these kids don't even know about the time when it was just SoundFonts. In Atlanta, it was like Jeezy and Tip [T.I.], and it was that brass horn, DJ Toomp sound, at the time. If you had some trumpet SoundFonts, you was the man! My cousin gave me a bunch of trumpet SoundFonts and a few kits, and from that point on I've been glued to FL Studio.
I've seen you working in the studio with live musicians.
Yeah, it's a little bit of everything. I've been exploring a lot of synthesizers lately, so that's probably what you've been seeing. Man, we might go for 20 minutes and just freestyle. We all sit inside a room, and we make a bunch of music; we have a jam session, so to speak. If something comes to mind, my laptop is always plugged in, and I'll do the drums right there through FL [Studio]. It might be playing, or it might be looping from Pro Tools. All my drum sounds, like my snares and my percussion, are in FL [Studio]. FL is the reason why my drums hit so hard. I don't get that sound from anywhere else.
When you're talking about the sounds within the FL Studio program, is that just the way that they're presenting the samples? Do you feel like they have more impact than some other programs?
It's just certain VSTs and sounds that emulate certain synthesizers. Instead of having $100,000 worth of synthesizers scattered all around my room, and I have to take them from place to place to get the sounds, it's all inside FL Studio. I can take that anywhere. I might get inspired, and all my sounds are right there. But I've learned over time that it's a certain type of warmth that comes off the actual [analog] synthesizers. So, lately – like the past year or so – I've been getting super engulfed in sound design and what I can do with the synthesizers, because it just sounds heavier.
Are you working in a linear fashion? Or is it more beat-based 4, 8, 16 bar loops that you're arranging and creating later with the artists that you're working with?
I basically arrange and sequence whatever I do. I kind of have a rule of at least making one beat a day. It doesn't matter what's going on, and on a good day I could get five to ten beats out. I always sequence it out. I always put it all the way through, and then I can save it for later. By the end of the week, at minimum, I'm going to have seven new beats, and if I get a random call from Justin Bieber, I know that I made six or seven beats the week before, and I might have something to play [him]. Right now, I'm watching the [NFL] draft. I might get inspired, get off this call, and start making something with a bunch of horns that sounds anthem-y. I’ve been focused on submitting to the music throughout this whole process, because I get inspired from anything. When I just submit to the music, I have to complete it all the way through. I have to sequence it, I have to do the little bridge here, add this little sound there, or I'm just not gonna feel right. Sometimes I get busy, and I'll leave the beat playing, walk out of the room, leave the house, and eight hours later come back home. The damn beat’s still playing, I’ll hear it, I’ll go and add this one particular sound or whatever, and then it's finished.
Your productions feel distilled down to the essence of a feeling. Tell me a little bit about the search for that, and how you know when it's right. Is that a collaborative process, or is that something that you arrive at on your own?
It's definitely both, and sometimes I never feel like it's right. The fans have to tell us it's right, and I'm okay with that. I don't try to act like I know everything. I just trust a feeling to a certain point, and I have no problem asking questions or getting opinions from people that I trust. Sometimes, as producers, we overthink shit.
With Gunna, Young Thug, Travis Scott, and Lil Baby, were these people that you knew coming up, or were these working relationships that came about later?
Atlanta at that time was a super united front. A lot of the fans think that it was only from a perspective of the artist, but honestly and truly, it's everybody. It's the engineers, it's the producers, and the artists are almost last in the collaborative type of view. I say that broadly, because a lot of those guys I met through other engineers or producers, just from working and being in Atlanta going from studio to studio. At the time, all of those guys were new to rap, and I was new to the industry and producing. The relationships grew over time. When you sit inside the studio with somebody for as long as we sit inside the studio, day in day out, for months at a time, you grow close to people. Y'all start to get your own rapport, and you start to depend on each other. Everybody was together, everybody was working, and if somebody needed something, then either I was there or somebody that I knew was there to be able to facilitate it. You just gained trust.
How would you describe your production style? What is the essence of your productions?
I don't know how to describe it, because even outside of the music that's out that you might know me for, or the fans might know me for, it goes so much deeper. My sound is always evolving. It's never just one trap sound or, “Oh, he's an Atlanta sound.” It's evolving.
When you listen back to something like [Gunna, Turbo, and Young Thug’s] “Quarantine Clean” or other early productions, what do you hear?
It's more so what I see, you know? I remember “Quarantine Clean” – if I'm using that as the example – I remember sitting in Gunna's basement feeling, “We're gonna be on quarantine for two weeks.” We were making music thinking, “This shit is going to be over a month, tops, and we'll be back on the road, back working.” I remember that. It reminds me of a time.
That's something that artists and people in the room get to share forever. At what point did you feel like you had started to develop something that felt like your sound?
