Kenny Beats

22:57So cool. Yeah. It's in the sample. It only says it once or twice but it says better, better. Nobody loves me better. And it hurts so bad when you think about like a parent who fucked up, you know, it's it hurts. That one always hurt a lot. Not making it. It really did. I love it. Me too. Yeah. It felt probably the most like at ease I've ever felt playing people music when I played people with this record because I just didn't give a fuck. Yeah, I just couldn't have cared about that. There are no stakes. All that is is just this is a pure expression of love really. Yeah. There's no expectation for it to do anything.

23:39No. And it wasn't for anybody. Yeah. It was for hit. Other than for hit, man. Yeah. But the people who have spoken to me about what they've gone through because of this record is the biggest thing it's done. When people come to the studio who I should probably be like positioning to work with on the major records they're working on or the big artists they work with and they would come and I'd be like, they'd say, what are you working on? I'd be like, oh man, I just made this record for my dad. And I won't out to the person but I played it for somebody who I really look up to as a musician and as a songwriter and they were bawling, bawling.

24:18Like, we're really like, not me right now, not a little, not trying hard to get it out, but like bawling in my studio and I don't know this person. It was my first time ever hanging out with them. And Dave dealt with stuff themselves with addiction and their family has dealt a lot of stuff recently and their diet has cancer as well. But seeing that was like, I've never had anything I've done for anyone that's made millions of dollars, been a platinum plaque, got a Grammy nomination. Anything I've ever done in my career is I've never seen that happen. And like, I don't know, like I really do feel like the things I've done in my career, helping people make music is the most important.

24:57And I always say like, yeah, a song you make is not going to necessarily change someone's life. But when you see someone get to that place that they haven't been getting to because it's something you made, it's like, I'm more proud of that than any accolade, you know? And being able to stand on my work and this feeling and this thing I put out there is something I used to think I could relate to artists with. And I couldn't, I've done nothing but work with artists. I was 15 years old, I'm 32 years old. The only thing I know, it's the only thing I'm good at. And I've never truly understood what that felt like till this record.

25:33So I had to be an artist. So I had to put out my sentiment and stand on it. And like, you feel like you're so close to people. It's like, all people talk about you doing, all people talk about me doing is helping these people get through their thing. And it's like now, having to feel that myself, it's like giving me this new lease on my other job. Beautiful. You know? And I look at, I think about things. People say differently. I think about just pushing someone to say a lyric. I've been really writing songs. You haven't even talked about this yet. But I've been, I've been, I've been writing lyrics for a couple of years.

26:05Which you never really did before. Never did. And because I'm sure as you've experienced, when you're helping with a bar in a rap song, that ain't something you could turn around and say, well, I had a lyric here. And you publish it. Don't work like that. It's just culturally that's not how it works. Someone's telling their story and phonetically you might need to help them fit a syllable in a bar or telling them maybe pulling that word out could help this set. But in rap, even the times where words I've thrown into the studio, I've ended up on a record. I've never felt like I wrote. I felt like I helped someone get to where they were supposed to get to.

26:36But I started being interested in writing lyrics and it felt like, beyond picking up an instrument you've never really played and starting from square one, beyond trying a new genre, you've never tried, beyond doing something you haven't done before, songwriting. I feel like I'll be around a 22 year old to have written songs that they were 15. And they're just starting in their career and I feel like I'm talking to someone who's like 20 feet above me as a songwriter because I'm a couple years into lyrics. A couple years into really pitching my own melody and my own lyric in a session for an artist.

27:08But it makes you think differently about what you say people or what you tell them to say or what you ask them if they could say this in their song. Because it just has a whole new weight to me now. And like, I don't want to lose the sense I always had with people because I think being so open to like anything, being a possibility is something that's always worked for me. But now, whenever someone tells me what something is supposed to mean or how it makes them feel, I just take it as even more of a gospel than I ever did. Rather than in my back of my mind having this producer sense of, I know you feel that way, but what if?

27:42Yeah. Now I kind of like, when I see something in someone's face that I know people see in my face, when they talk about this record, it alerts me in a new way. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. You will only make you better producer. I had a moment with someone in really respect who I will name, Jody Gerson. And I'm signed to Jody and it's because of the respect I have for her. I've known her sons for a really long time and I've known her for a really long time. And I have this thing in my career where I've always been able to work on super cool stuff. And stuff that's done well commercially in plaques and blah, blah, blah, blah.

28:18But I've never been a hit guy. I've never been a guy you go to if you want to be top 10 on Billboard. That's never been my focus. It's not even what I'm interested in or listening to. But you always have this thing in the back of your mind is someone, especially when you're at the bottom of the funnel around all this successful stuff. Huh. Like, if I wanted to make big records or pop records, whatever, what would my angle be? And I remember a point last year where there's a song I have in the radio right now that I was playing for Jody and bunch of stuff I was working on that I was like, man, this is some of the biggest commercially viable stuff I've ever worked on.

28:51I think Jody will hear this and be like, man, like you're going to whole new lengths as a producer. You're doing stuff I didn't know you were able to do, blah, blah, blah. I played her these songs and she's like, yeah, these songs are great. She's like, I think that's all I'll do really well. I think this song's going to be great for that artist. She did a great job. Not real much excitement about it. And then I played her Louie at my house in the room. I made it, not long after I made it. And she looked at me with like a very, very strong, powerful sense to it. And she said, this will make more people want to work with you than anything you do that becomes a big hit or this format artist want to work with artists.

29:31And what she said to me at the time, I was like, man, that's so nice to hear from Jody, you know what I thought? The big songs and the popular people I was playing here was going to impress her and she was impressed by this thing I made for my dad instead. But she was right. And it's been almost one year since Louie's come out and people who never thought would reach out to me again or people who I didn't think were maybe huge fans of me or my production or people who I would dream to work with have reached out about that record. Not anything else I've done, not anything, you know what I mean?

30:02That's had this kind of success or this or that, the record I made for me. And when Jody said that to me, I don't know if I fully believe her. But she was right. And it taught me a lot about just following that feeling, you know? Do you know the Beck album morning phase? Yeah. When he finished that album, his manager sent me the album in advance and sent to me saying, I think you might like this album. It's pretty cool. This is like the set up because his next album is like this really big album. This one's more just for him, no expectations. And I listened to it and it's like, well, this is the best album he's ever made.

30:37By far, no comparison by far. And in his mind and in the company's mind, this was like a in between thing until we get to the real thing and morning phase ends up becoming album of the year at the Grammys. Well, and it's magnificent. It deserves it. Yeah. But it's funny that even the people making the magnificent thing don't necessarily know that that's what it is. Yeah. For me, I've always used the barometer of the people I know, like my network is my net worth. The amount of people I can play music for has always been to me, I think, a big strength in how I've been able to work as I can get so many perspectives on so many sides of things.

31:19Someone I agree with, someone I don't, but it's just perspective. And sometimes you get caught up in what people say about it or what people think about it or everybody telling you one thing is the best thing or everybody telling you where you could go with it. And like, luckily, because it was my first record, I never had anyone in my ear expecting anything other than me doing a DJ Khaled album. Everybody probably expected me to get every big rapper I could and every feature I could get paid for or blah, blah, blah. I think that's what you expect when she was done hundreds of rap records and they're going to do their first record.

31:48But I don't know. I didn't have anyone in my ear about it. And now I think so hard about all the people I'm around all the time. We're getting good feedback, bad feedback, whatever it is on their stuff. It's like, all of it doesn't need to be entered into the creative process. Has nothing to do with it. Yeah, none of it should be a part of that. And nothing to do with it. And it's all a distraction. All of it. But I don't know. I've just, I've adapted something from that record, which is only need to play the record for the people who are working on it. And that's kind of how I've moved since Louis in the last year.

32:21If you're not really working on the record, I'll let you hear it when it's done. I'll let you hear it when I'm confident in what it is. Yeah.

33:11So, let's get right into the next slide. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

33:41Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

34:10Let's go. Who does Ellie Ellis' name! I heard it before. That's the pick for the lid called tobacco. Now, it's like, I don't wanna think about it. It doesn't exist. Until we're in the room and it's like, okay, now we're gonna finish it, then we listen to it and make the decisions and do it, but I don't wanna get used to it at all. I wanna forget it. Sometimes I wonder if me being moment -based might hinder people at work on, because you know these great albums that take certain people three years, five years. You and I always talk about DeAngelo, and it's like the breaks between these albums might be what that artist needs to make it, or what it takes to get them there.

34:54And for me, I'm always moment -based. I made Louis in one month, because I felt that feeling, and I had to get it out. And even if there's things I could have toiled over for six months and maybe made like seven to 10 % better, it's not what it needed to be. Like me and DeAngelo Curry made unlocked in three days. And it's been a record of both of us that's done so much, and we just felt that feeling so hard. I remember when I played you, anger management and the truck and Hawaii, right after I made it. Me and Rico made that, and like a week and a half span of just, we would wake up and go back to the studio every day.

35:28And it's great. And it's like some of the most inspired me and Vince Staples, Vince Staples he paid. We made it in my garage after Vince had done a year of sessions and all this different stuff. He had great music. He just personally wasn't super ready yet. With any, nothing made him feel like I need to go right now. And we made this whole record in a month's time in my garage, same room is Louis. Almost near the same time period. And like those records when I listen back to them have a different pace. They have a different momentum. They have a different thing. Even if it's slow songs, whatever it is, like moments to me are like so important to act on them.

36:02Because when I theorize too much, it's my overthink, that's when I start to like go in on it or wonder about other opinions, or when I just have to get an idea out, it's almost like when you wake up in the morning and you have 10 seconds to write that dream down, or it's gone. It's gone. And it's like you can practice that and you can get better. If you write every morning when you wake up, you'll get a little bit better. But it's like, but it's still gonna be gone in two minutes. It's gone. And that's how I feel. That's every melody I've ever heard in my head. The people were like, oh, I hear a melody in the shower and then I go to the studio two hours later and make it.

36:32Unless you're putting that in a voice, no, I don't believe you. Because they happen to me all the time and I need to act right away. And sometimes it's bigger than a melody. It could be a, it could be a three songs on a project how they need to feel. You know? Yeah. Tell me about DJ. When did you start? I started at, I was at Berkeley School of Music. I was my senior year and I was starting to produce for some people who had to name out there and everyone was thinking I was doing really well because I had me and Mac Miller and me and Schoolboy Koo posted on my Facebook. I'm working with all these rappers.

37:05I was making about a thousand dollars a beat. Like $1 ,200 a beat. And I was about to get out of school, go to music school. I'm supposed to be figuring out a job in music. I had no idea how I was going to pay the bills. I had no idea. You do originally think you were going to be a musician? Is that what going to music school was about? I play guitar my whole life and only started making beats around 15. So I always knew like drums and guitar and music was going to be the thing. But I got to Berkeley and in the first day walked into the guitar floor and there was a kid on the floor playing something.

37:37While he was talking to his friend, I could have never played in a million years. And he's asking his friend to get him a snaple while he's playing this like arpeggio. And I'm just like, oh, I'm not a guitar player. And I just started focusing on production. And I realized real quick, like when I had friends who could play like Paco De Lucia on the Flamingo guitar and friends who could transcribe John Coltrane solo and play it perfect, beats were where I could impress those people. Those same people thought it was insane that I had done a beat that Kendrick wrapped on. You know what I mean? But I knew it was spotty and I wasn't going to be able to support myself.

38:12Is also a real difference in the head between being a technically great player and creating music. There was two different things. Well, that's why, I mean, I think it's probably why Berkeley doesn't do so much alumni stuff with me is because I talk about how often none of my friends, none of them are making music now. None of the people that I went to school with who are unbelievable players now are in music because they never wrote their own songs and then they got out of school. And there is no job to play other people's music super well besides an open mic night or something at a bar or this or that.

38:46Or to play in a symphony orchestra or something. Which to be the chair at the New York Philharmonic, there's about 100 ,000 people trying to go for your job and there's probably some Russian kid who's done nothing but play violin his entire life was going to get that job. And to live in New York City on that salary would be really hard. And I think a lot of people felt the same pressure. I felt leaving music school and not knowing what you were going to do with music to pay bills. And I had a really close friend who dropped out of Berkeley moved to Los Angeles and started just getting really deep into the electronic music scene in LA in 2011, 2012.

39:21And he would call me and say, yo, you know like those beats you made were you used like that wobble sound or you like I would try to not use an eight away. I would try to do something that was a base but it was different. And my friends like dude, these kids in LA are making rap beats using sounds from dubstep songs and sounds from old techno stuff and it's going crazy and it's just instrumentals. These kids put instrumentals on SoundCloud and I just saw this kid bow or I saw this DJ are all grime they're going crazy. It's insane. These kids are getting 10K a show. And SoundCloud's an interesting moment in time.

39:58Is there anything like that today? I don't think so. Nothing that's not already like super monetized and has like a million DMCA strikes. If you put up something that has a Drake Acapella in it, you're getting taken down to two seconds. We were in the Wild West where you go on SoundCloud, steal anything, flip anything, rip anything and it'd stay up. You couldn't necessarily monetize it but you could definitely... Nobody wasn't about monetization. The beauty of it was it really was this free play environment where you could find really cool new things. And people were experimenting and trying things and there was a lot of bad stuff and a lot of cool stuff.

40:31Yeah and I think it was so influential that there's still people who cling to it. Like Apex Twin is still uploading to SoundCloud randomly on a page that people hardly know about just because it's an outlet that's that direct. They told my friend like that's a real something missing today is what SoundCloud used to be for sure. And they met an artist now who are huge, huge artists who started there who started with that format and mentality. That's not something you can tell someone to do now. Just drop a bunch of your music and let people hear it. How? How? Through tune core I have to put it on Spotify.

41:04The kids say how? If you were going to Spotify, you're not going to Spotify to look for something you never heard of before. Exactly. You're going to search for something. It's not for discovery though. That was the beauty of SoundCloud was you knew you were looking for something different. Yes. That was its purpose. And it was as exciting. It was an alternate programming. Whether you worked in the industry or were a fan, it was equally exciting to dig again. Digging away from the roof for records. It was so much fun. And I don't think there's any less validity to digging through links than records.

41:31It's like this equal amount of tedious shit you have to go through. You know what I mean? It's like carrying crates is one thing I never had to do. But I definitely spent hours on hours listening through music aimlessly to try to just find this spark. And when you do it, there's nothing more valuable. It's worth the time. But SoundCloud wasn't something I was really on. I was on this typical trajectory path of try to sell some weed in the studio, get close to a manager, meet a rapper, get them the beats. That's how I always worked. And I put up five beats on SoundCloud. And within a week, I had my first flight booked from a label, my first meetings about publishing, my first session with a huge producer, my first time, getting introduced to Travis Scott and being on the phone with Hans Zimmer in these moments, I couldn't have fathomed in my life all happened because I was riding this fad that was the fad.

42:20How old were you at the time? I was 21 years old. And I was a senior at Berkeley. And I was trying to figure out how I was going to get on my feet. I put the SoundCloud up and instantly, if someone hits me and is like, yo, would you be able to play a show in DC next weekend? Somebody blah, blah, wants you to open for them. They've been playing your tunes a lot. Playing my tunes a lot, it's been a month. I mean, it's like, how much of you really could be playing it? But in this scene, the collateral was, if Diplo played your record, if Skrillex played your record, if one of these big DJs who has been digging on SoundCloud, found your weird little edit, and they played that on this giant stage, that's a way that you could say on your socials, here's my record getting played by this huge person.

43:04It was just as big as being on the radio in this time period, I think. Yeah, because maybe bigger, maybe. Because it was radio is not like a cosine. This is, because there's some stuff on the radio that's good for you. You don't feel like has any credibility. And even regardless of like a label and pay -oh, and all the things that work in radio, it's like, if something's going to be played on the radio at tonnets, because a ton of different people want to listen to it, and this one tasteful person going and picking your thing and saying, this is what's up next, it is almost a bigger feeling. When you made beats, what were the equipment that you used?

43:39A MIDI keyboard, a Logic Pro, an interface, nothing else. Speakers. So no drum machines or any of that? No hardware ever in my life to the last five, six years in my life. And like I played instruments, if I was at a studio that knew how to record them well, but I always felt I could never make myself sonically sound great in guitar, even if I played great. So I didn't play guitar in a lot of my beats. And then people in the studio would see me play guitar and I'd agree from Berkeley and jazz guitar. And they're like, why are you not playing on everything? And I'm like, I don't know, it's just two worlds in my brain.

44:09But all these songs are coming up. All these people start playing. I get booked for a gig and I try to figure out the easiest way to play a show. And to me, it seems like if you could get this thing called a tractor controller, it's like it looked like two kind of DJ, like a CD wheels and it had a cross fader and then volumes for each one of the two sides. And I was like, okay, like I guess we'll play a bunch of my songs, we'll play other songs and they're seeing that are blowing up. I'll play all the rap shit I like. And the one thing that I did that was a little different was my sets were really rap heavy.

44:39And I didn't know that because I was just figuring it out from seeing people slowly and getting booked my first gig. Because when I was figuring it out, I didn't practice at home unless I had a gig. And so I would go to these places and see like, oh, well, they're playing Skrillex songs with the fucka Skrillex. Like, oh, they're playing these songs. Like, who is that guy? And I had to learn about the scene because I only cared about rap music. Yeah. The reason I was making the beats I was making was to get them to rappers. Yeah. People telling me, put them on SoundCloud, put me in this whole other world of electronic musicians.

45:08Yeah. I don't know these guys. I don't know the lyrics. So if you were 21 today, this couldn't happen this way. I don't think so. And I think also when you're a lot of kids today, when you have the ability to decide what you want to make and make it and all the tools are there for you today, I don't think I would have stayed with the conviction of now I'm a rap guy. I'm a rap producer. And I would never went over and worked at these electronic guys. It was almost a financial thing. It was from my bro mentality of growing up with no money. Of like, man, if I can go over here and still just be making my beats, but be making money, I don't have to go get an A and R job.

45:41I don't have to go do something I don't want to do after college. I can be working in music, still making beats, doing what I want to do, but I just got to use these kind of sounds. I just got to use like something more techno leaning. I got to learn about these dumpstep wobbles and whatever. And that's all I thought it was. The truth of the matter was, at 25, whenever I flipped it around and became the Keti beats people, no, now I started to realize I got really deep into a scene that I didn't wholly love with my whole heart the way other people did. I love the rap part of it. Well, that's what made you special.

46:12The most interesting music is rarely made by the people whose whole life is dedicated to that style of music, because ultimately that's usually one dimensional. Always the most interesting dance music was made by people who we became from punk rock, yeah. Or hard rock, yeah. Or some other kind of music that they were putting through the filter of dance music, because if all you did was grow up on dance music, you're making the same things everybody else. And it was boring. So that was my leg up. And it was like even just what I had on my computer was different than other people. So like if I was two years earlier before this happened, I was interning for Nipsey Hustle's manager, long live Nipsey Hustle, and I had a ton of Nipsey Acapellas.

46:59And I was making this electronic music for the first time. I would chop up these rare Acapellas that I had from studios, old songs, right? I had worked on some, I had school, WCUE vocals. I had certain things people didn't have. And I put them in our songs. And people don't realize this, but one of the first songs I ever did as a DJ was with ASAP Ferg featured on it. And that was what was different about us. We were actually kind of rooted in rap music and doing rap stuff. And that's why we got so much love from the bigger guys. But it went from playing that first show to playing shows weekly, to playing 100, 150 shows a year.

47:36And right, early 20. And you're still producing the whole time. Yeah. Welcome to the House of Macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood. Sustainably sourced directly from farmers. Macadamias, a rare source of Omega 7, linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamias are healthy and bring boosting fats. Macadamias, paleo -friendly, G -Tool and plant -based, Macadamias, no wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no GMOs, no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar, a house of Macadamias. Thy roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips, snack bars come in chocolate, coconut white chocolate, and blueberry white chocolate.

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49:02Did you think of them as two different careers or as two aspects of the same? It just felt like doing anything you could do to do music to get paid. And to me, it was like, oh, I got a DJ now. Oh, I got a past. And by the way, if you weren't getting paid, you'd still be doing it. Yeah. You just have to get paid doing something. Well, I need to pay rent. There's no rent. So you have to get paid. Yeah, I need to be able to support myself in some way. Of course. And I don't think I would ever have been able to go and make something I truly didn't love. It was fun. And what would you rather do in your early 20s and make the newest weirdest thing that everyone's on, travel around with your friends, DJ?

49:39What a way to spend your early 20s. I was lying to the school I was going to saying that I was doing an internship and I was on tour. And the guys who were the company that was sponsoring the tour were writing fake internship slips, saying that I was out doing something. I was an intern at Def Jam while I owned it to get school credit. So I'm saying like, I was doing anything I could just to like keep above water. So I could go back and graduate because my mom needed me to graduate. I'm disowned if I don't graduate. And so I had to get school done and I had to get on my feet and I had no help.

50:10And this was the way to it. And it just happened to be that like, whether you were deaf punk or Swedish house mafia or the biggest acts in the world, these dudes were playing trap snares and 808s from 2012 to 2014 because it was just the coolest thing in dance music. Same way rap has, and hip hop is slowly overtaken what you hear in Ariana Grande song has the same high hats as a Drake song in 2023. It's like, hip hop is having this major influence on dance music and that was my way in. I knew way more about hip hop and rap beats and the average kid making dance music for the most part until years later and kids got hip.

50:44But this has been such a hard thing to always talk about for me because it felt like I was doing something that I was learning on a really big screen. And at 25 I was able to sit back and say, what am I really going for? And what do I really wanna do in music and how do I wanna approach that? And this whole new portion of my career I've always been super open book about the bad parts of it, the good parts of it, but that era felt to me like, huh, maybe that jump into something that yes, succeeding in is making music and is close to what I wanna do, but isn't quite what I love. It keeps me exciting in that scene, but do I really have the passion to be around those people?

51:28And are those fans really like getting from it what I'm putting out and this and that? And to me what I loved about rap so much was being a part of someone who had this story or this point of view on the world or their life that to me was just so far from me and so interesting. And that's why I always loved about rap is like working with someone who like, I can help them tell this thing to the world that the world's never heard before in this way. And there's a bit of the electronic things started to feel like, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Rap lyric, rap lyric bomb bomb and it's like, you guys don't love this.

52:06I don't know if you guys love this the way I love this. I don't think rap for me is like the fad right now as much as it's like a thing I care about and truly love. You know what I mean? It has a fan and it's been lucky enough to work in it a little bit. And so I had this like notion of myself is like, yeah, I've done it in Mac Miller, I've done Kendrick, I've done these rap records and now like I'm this DJ, this and that, but years went by and I hadn't made a rap beat in years. I've been making electronic music because that was my job now. And at 25 I sat there and was like, am I really the rap producer and rap guy?

52:42I think I am in my brain or did I do some beats in my late teens, early 20s? And then now this is who I am. If I get hit by a car tomorrow, I'm leaving behind these dance music songs. Yeah, I got to play Bono Root and Coachella and some of the biggest sets in the world, the biggest DJs in the world playing my stuff. I do not take it lightly. I'm very gracious of that. I'm still friends with most of those people, but like, man, to have that feeling of like, is this what I want to be putting out there? There's no amount of money or there's no amount of success that you know what I mean, can override that feeling.

53:14And was it a clear decision like a line in the sand to locate now, I'm going to do this other thing? Yes. And the only reason that it wasn't just like, all the socials went dark and the shows immediately stopped was because there was zero money coming in from this new venture. I was about to start up, me going back into producing rap music and I had to play those shows to keep the lights on. And there was a moment in January of 2016, if it could be 2017, 2016, where I had a thousand dollars to my name total. My father was in a coma and I just had a really nasty like business split. And I was really not sure how it would have been to pay rent, pay car payment, pay whatever it was I had to deal with at the time.

54:00And I just got a beat to this rapper from Atlanta. It was one of the first beats that I had made in this batch of like, okay, I'm coming back to do what I want to do. What I was planning to do when I was 19, and we come back through to 25. And that check came in just at the right time where I could get out of payment plan for my rent. I could get someone to wait a month for the car payment and I made it through. And then that person got signed to Gucci man. He had to set another artist to me boom. And then to the year after that, then your 100 songs produced by me came out. And once I got one, I just didn't let go and I would not leave that studio.

54:35And that's the cave. And it's the studio everyone knows from the show and everything. But I would stay in there 14, 16 hours a day. And I was managed by this big management company that manages Steve Aoki and Blinkwin 82 and all these huge people. And I told them like, I'm done. I'm not doing electronics stuff, not doing dance music. I have this whole other vision for it. And I'll talk to my best friend. And I would tell him about this idea. And he would give me these little ideas and he'd say, well, what if you did this? What if you did this? And then I would go back to my team and I would say, what if we did this?

55:06And they go, that's a great idea. And I was like, I'm out. I'm gonna go work on my best friend. I'm just gonna trust these convictions. And that's the most successful portion of my career. That's what's gotten me to this conversation right here. And it's like, do I want to take it back? Never. Never. If I had the same fork in the road at that same time, I wouldn't have gone to LA and just tried to be Mr. Rap producer because that informed who I am now. And it's taught me so much. And the fact that I can go play a show in the middle of Europe, you know what I mean? And then come back to a record with an artist, be able to release my own music.

55:42All these things are part of my specific story. And I look at producers not even in a competitive way, but just producers I look up to or producers on peers with. And a lot of them would love to play shows and do these things, but they need to figure out their way through it. And I got to fuck up in my early 20s and kind of find what worked for me when I was younger. You know what I mean? And I already had those embarrassing moments of 23. And now at 32 on stage, I feel confident about putting on a show. And that's a beautiful thing. And that only came out of those years. You know, I don't think I would have ever had a live focus.

56:14Did you ever, did you ever think about like, oh man, I'm working with all these different records or all these artists. I want to put together something where there's a festival where all these artists will play. I think so. I don't really like to leave the house. Yeah, same. I think I'm too antisocial to ever do anything where there's people. Same, but you never really have this thing where you're like, oh man, I made this beat for someone or I did this thing for them. And now at their show, I want to stand up there and play the drum machine. And it's like, as a producer, that path isn't normally carved out for you.

56:42You make the music, and then you see the music enjoyed. And to be able to be on stage and kind of be this orchestrator of how your music gets enjoyed, that's a beautiful feeling. Two sort of versions of that that I had was, in the early days with the Beastie Boys, when I was a DJ, I got to be on stage, then that was cool experience. And then I remember the chili peppers played five shows at Hyde Park in England. And it was the biggest audience at that time. I don't know now if it's been broken. It was the most people to ever see a rock concert. Five days in a row. And I sat on the stage and watched those shows and they played for more than two hours.

57:22And I produced every single song they played. And the energy from whatever it was, 80 or 90 ,000 people, it was just unbelievable going from being in the room and watching these things come to life. And remembering, you know, specific decisions we made and watching those decisions play out and get somebody to cheer. 100%. It's a wild feeling. It is. And kind of, I guess the internet now is what you think about when you think about, when people hear this and they react, where are they going to react, how are they going to react? I don't know if people think about comments, conversations that they have in real life shows, but a show to me is one of those pets on the back that can keep you going for years.

58:09And you see a song that you performed and there's 300 kids, 3000 kids, 30 ,000 kids, screaming, it's singing, it dancing to it, emoting in any way in these large, large groups. It's like, I always use the example of like, when you're a young kid in a teenager, it tells you're cool. It's like, that can last you three years, that compliment. You know what I mean? It's like, just playing a show and seeing how your music affects people can teach you how you want to move forward with it and what you could do differently. And they can also teach you like, really what impact you're having. When you see a kid cry and sing in your lyrics back, you know, it's like, and I would implore anybody who makes music from the producer side or the artist side or whatever to like, figure out what your show is and fail now.

58:53You know what I mean? So you can. That's a great idea. And a couple of years. I'll say another thing that's almost the opposite of that, but we're discussing if I'm meeting an artist, I never want to meet an artist at the show. An artist wants to meet with me like, oh, we're playing at the stadium. Come see the show at stadium, we meet backstage after the show. Never. I never want to do that. And the reason is the nature of being in front of a lot of people, it's such a unnatural experience. It's a heightened experience that's not normal or natural and to try to talk to someone in a normal and natural way, anywhere related to that environment, it's not realistic.

59:37Yeah, it's too much. I've made that mistake before. I've like the before or the show meet. It's like, you're not really connecting with a person. No, this is already a vehicle for this other bigger thing that's about to happen or has just happened. And very rarely is anybody inside that vessel at that moment? 100%. It's almost like you're in like survival mode in a way, whenever you're about to play a show. It's like, if you've really played shows in your life, whether you're any type of artist, the number one thing you know is things go wrong with travel, with sound, with audiences, with venues, whatever it is, things go wrong.

1:00:16Like things break on stage and you need to play that show. And it's like that feeling in front of no matter what amount of people it is, is always something that if you really care about it, you take deathly serious. And I don't know how you could discuss your ambitions about other things or really even meet a new person. You know what I mean? When you're in that mode, if you're someone who is in that mode, the way you should be. Yes, you're preoccupied completely the day before even. You don't even mean it might even be like, if it's someone who's playing a stadium, it could be a week, you know, I mean around that where their head is there.

1:00:47You know, but yeah, there's a group I work with that the first time we met was at a show and we joke about it always now because I was like, dude, I left that show being like, what the fuck is up with these guys? Because they weren't themselves. It's like them at the show is not. It's not R -I -R. No. So I bring that up in terms of, I don't know if I have the right chemistry to be in those positions on regular basis. I never thought I did. If I didn't have to go make 800 bucks, you know what I mean? When I was first getting booked for a show, I wouldn't have learned a DJ. But because it's like, it's so natural now.

1:01:24I'm playing five festivals this week, you know what I mean? It's like what you learn about music and different parts of the world and what you learn about crowds and what you learn about things. It's incomparable to statistics online. You know what I mean? You're getting put on to different sub -genres and trying to assimilate, you know what I mean? The slaying and what it is that makes that niche thing. What it is, like when you go to a show, it's obvious. It's obvious in the outfits, it's obvious in the reactions, it's obvious in like, the staff, the setup of it, the lineups. You know what I mean?

1:01:53You learn so much about the opposite of what's happening on Twitter and social media. We're like, everyone hates this thing. Everyone loves this thing. When you go to a show, you see what's really going on. You see people really loving something that's getting all this hate and it makes you go, whoa, whoa, what's happening in real life and I grew up very lucky in the sense that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, none of that happened until I was already a senior in high school. So I lived so much of my life not knowing what party I wasn't at. You know what I mean? Not knowing what's going on with everybody all the time and the reviews of everything and what's cool and what's not.

1:02:31And then now, you know what I mean? It's social media for someone who's just starting to make music. It's a completely different thing. You grow up with comment sections and the biggest issue that we have because of all the social media and the saturation on social media is media literacy. The problem is when a thing comes out now, whether it's a book or a movie or a song, there's so many people criticizing and commenting on everything that a new Travis Scott album comes out tonight and you either have to say it's amazing or it's trash right away or you didn't get the first or two. When it's really impossible to even know how you feel about it.

1:03:09You need to, you need, it's like there's people who don't even tell you what they're lyrics about until years later. How can you really have a feeling about what they said in this song? Yeah. It's the artist likely doesn't know what it's about. I mean, it's now that the three genres are like 10 out of 10 mid trash. That's all the genres are now to kids. And you never see in a comment section or under something about some new music really, someone saying, well, compared to their last release, I feel like they're still harping on the, there's no nuanced commenting. It's, this is the shit. This is terrible.

1:03:44And that's all kids see now. And like whenever you're putting out your music, yeah, you're gonna have people reacting to it good and bad. And yeah, you should have haters if it's really pushing in some way. But while you're making your music, you shouldn't have to think about documenting and what people are gonna think about it or telling people how good it is along the land. No, but like when people, when kids talk to me about like a great, when they talk about Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, someone who's great, that we all agree, agree. Those guys were not at the same age as this artist going, hey, check me out, look how good I am, come to my show and look how great I play.

1:04:23You know what they tried to do? Get around miles and play better. Get around people who played better. Try to make more music practice more. There's a certain amount of I suck, I suck, I suck, that you have to tell yourself to push to this next level. Even if you're great. Five being around people you're inspired by. But being in people smarter than you. Be the dumbest person in the room every day if you can. And like now someone makes their first song. They feel like, oh, I should make a TikTok and I should show how I made it. I should post it down and then it's like, it's just, that's not gonna help you get better.

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1:06:24I had a conversation with a basketball player, someone on the Gold State Warriors. And he was saying there's all of this pressure on the players now to create all of this social media content. And it's completely distracting from playing the game, focusing on the game, being the best account in the game. And I said, well, but if you tell these people you want to win and in order to win, you need to focus on the game and not do the social media stuff, wouldn't they say, well, of course you have to win. He said, no, they want the social media stuff. Yeah, that's what's important now. That's mind -blowing to me.

1:07:01I mean, it's a monetary issue. It's the same with music. It's like, there's 100 ,000 songs a day uploaded to Spotify. And it's more now. That's as this stat is old at this point. 100 ,000 songs a day. When I was entering at labels when I was 18 years old, they used to say the thing, good music will get heard. If it's good enough, someone will hear it. It is categorically not true. To know. It's impossible. It is not true. Where did you intern when you were a kid? First internship was at J Records and RCA Records. It's a minute. It turned out that I went to kindergarten through 12th grade with the daughter of the president of Sony Music and never knew this.

1:07:40Her and I would talk about my chemical romance and science class. It was the only girl I knew who I could talk about bands with. Actually, only friend I knew. My homies played sports and shit. We're listening to like Cisco in the thong song. They were not paying attention to like taking back Sunday or whatever. This girl, Anna and I were so close, always talked about music. And senior year, she said, you should intern for my dad. Her dad ended up being quite a powerful guy. And my internship was very sweet because people knew it wasn't just like another random intern. It's blah, blah, blah. I got him the internship.

1:08:14And that just luck. It was just luck I just went to school with her. Public school. I don't know what I mean. It's just like I just know her for literally since kindergarten almost. And she told you, yeah, you should go into her for my dad. So I did for like high school credit. And was around all the label stuff. And was like, oh, this is not for me. This is not for me. Being in the label is not for me. There's no artist here. An artist would walk by once in a while. And actually Mike Posner walked into the office to have his first label meeting. I had been sending him beats on Facebook. And he had a rap thong one when I was like 17.

1:08:43And I stopped him as an intern. And I was like, yo, Mike, I'm Kenny Beats. I can see that beat. He's like, oh, what's that man? Like that was one moment of this whole long internship. But my assistant I worked under was a guy named John Eman. And John went on to manage a step rocky sign, line of Delray. I'm a people guy. Still a great friend. And then his boss, who I would have to answer the phones for, was Larry Jackson. We became Larry Jackson. Yeah. And it's unbelievable when an internship turns into, you know, even if it was kind of a tough one. Those were the two guys I talked to all day.

1:09:17Who better? I've talked to all day. It's 17 year old. And then my next one I wanted to be next to artists. I started to go to studios in Latin New York City and shut up about Austin Rose. And you used to give me a ton of studio time as a young kid. And currency would be at the studio. Nipsey Hussle would be at the studio. All these different rappers. I was huge fans of. I was like, I'm going to be there for there. And I used to bother this one manager and be like, go, I sell weed, I make beats, I'm always in the city. Anything you need at any time I'm there, I know one knows more about your artist.

1:09:48No one knows more about your label. Just let me know. I'll do whatever I don't need money. I don't need anything. Just let me come through. Was that always your thing? Was that you just knew more than everybody? After 13 years old, there's a specific moment that changed me. After 13 years old. The hottest, like alternative girl in middle school. Was this girl named Whitney? First girl to like draw on her commerce. You know what I mean? Like, only girl who had like a studied belt. She was in seventh grade, I was in sixth grade. My mom bought me a Bob Marley t -shirt because I was playing Bob Marley in my guitar lessons.

1:10:16I love Bob Marley. I go to school and this cool older girl walks up to me in her like hot topic outfit or whatever. And it's like, you like Bob Marley? And I was like, yeah, I love Bob Marley. She goes, name five songs. And I was like, sure, yeah. Redemption song, Buffalo soldier, Jammett. Fuck. Couldn't, I just blanked. She goes, you're a poser. And she walks away and her and the other girl like laughed and walked away. And I was just like, cut me like a knife and my homie next to me. He didn't explain, I didn't know a poser meant. I was like, what the fuck? And he's like, she said you can't skate.

1:10:52You know? He explained it in his way. But she was like, why are you wearing a t -shirt? You don't even really like that artist. If you asked her about any punk band, she'd tell you probably the producer and the studio they made it at. That day at 13, I decided I would be the liner notes god. You would never stop me again. I would know who played the tambourine, you know what I mean on the record. Like, I was googling Airto, you know what I mean? 14 years old to try to figure out who played congos on a fucking Billy Cobbum thing. Then my dad, I was doing anything I could to be that kid. And what's scary is now the average 18 year old knows more music than I could have gathered.

1:11:32Just with the access they have now. Kids have had their dilla phase, their Elliot Smith phase, and whatever. They're a Rick Rubin phase by the time they're 17 years old. And then they're like, nah, nah, I don't know what to make. Everything is referential. I was digging just to know everything. And it was annoying. It's like you'd bring something up, and I'd have to tell you, ever. Well, no, actually Mitch McConnell, Jimmy Hendrix drummer. He played a double bass drum because his left foot used to, I was so annoying. I was so annoying. And that carried on. And if I think it's still carrying on Whitney, shout out to her.

1:12:04Never wanted to be a poser ever again. So funny. That's so funny. But I went to this guy, Johnny Shipes. Is it funny how little things that happen in your life, insignificant, even it may have felt big in the moment? Yeah. But in the course of your life, these are insignificant things. Yeah. But these momentary things end up changing the way you live and impact your whole life. 100%. I can remember when I was a little kid, I was probably five. I went to my cousin's house, and I had an older cousin, and my older cousin had an older sister. Also my cousin, and the older sister had a boyfriend who was a drummer in a rock band.

1:12:49And I'm five, so in a, you know, maybe a little, you know, early 70s, let's say. And they had a little turntable and some albums. They had different albums than the albums that were in my house. So I would, anytime I would go to their house, I would just hang out and listen to music. That's all I would do. But usually by myself in the room, just listening to the music. And there were her records, and then there were his records. And I would go to each place and listen to the different music that was just because it was available. And another cousin who had really cool taste in music, I would listen to his when I would go to his house, just sitting listen to music.

1:13:23Because it was hard to get in those days. I used to buy CDs based on what had more songs. Yeah. Because they gave me more to listen to, because I buy that one CD. If I had 18 or 16 songs, that's a hungry. It's more for me to come to. So this guy in a rock band, he was probably in his 20s, I would guess. And he made a comment about, because he's a drummer. He said, when I listen, I like to turn the treble up. Second here, the high hat. See what it's doing. Like, okay. And turned it up. But somehow, at five years old, what got implanted in my head was, it's good to be able to hear what the high hat's doing.

1:13:57Yeah. And in my life as a record producer, I wanted to make sure I could hear what the high hat was. Yeah. Off -handed comment by a 20 year old kid in a rock band to a little kid. Seed planted, saying, I'm a messaged hip boy on my space at 16. And I sent him a bunch of beats. And he said, your ideas are really good, but your drums are trash. And drums have been my focus, my entire career ever since. Everything about the record can be whatever, but if the drums are unbelievable, I can make that record work. And it's like, yeah, it's ever since 16. Yeah. I had a revelation just recently. I would say in the past few weeks that all it's about is rhythm.

1:14:39And when I say rhythm, I don't mean the beat. I mean, the little internal relationships between whatever is playing, the feel between those things. I don't think anything else matters. The way the sounds interact on a micro level to create something is the whole game. Yeah. I mean, you said something to me probably five years ago about Chris Dave. And about how Chris Dave could play kick, snare, kick. The simplest beat in the world. And it would make it ten times more interesting than anybody else playing it just because of his feel. And Robert Glassberg has said the same thing to me about Chris Dave.

1:15:21Yeah. You mean like ThunderCass said the same thing to me about Chris Dave. And it's like, it's like a miracle the way that guy plays. Yeah, but it's something like, I always thought it was just special about Chris Dave. And I realized it's everything. Chris Dave's the master of it. It's for sure. But it's not just Chris Dave. It's what Dilla is Dilla for people. You know what I mean? It's why it's, but even while like slayer is slayer. For me, bounce, swing, groove, any feel. These are things that it's a very weird conversation when you grew up making beats on the laptop versus grew up listening to music, recording music to tape, whatever.

1:15:55I see swing and bounce visually. Yeah. I grew up with a grid. I grew up with visual music. That's the thing whenever like, I'll work with producers who are from another era who can really track straight to tape, who can do a whole song without a computer, which is the people I'm the most interested in working with in my current phase right now. But I grew up with a grid. So for me, I always knew there was something that felt like off or felt like, the lack of a better term white, or felt like kind of just like, not right when it came to certain drums. Like if they're too quantized or I knew there was something not good about having everything perfect.

1:16:31I knew that even young, but then I started to have my phases with madlib or have my phases with like records you produce, so many different things that I would put the song into my DAW, into my program, and then look at the drums against the grid. So I look at the tempo. I put the song in the right tempo, and then I look at where the snares and where the drums sit versus where the grid is. And if you look at what people call Dilla swing, Dilla swing is in between what people used to call straight feel and swung feel. And swung feel is dependent on a triplet and straight feel is dependent on a straight forecount.

1:17:08Dilla is somewhere in the middle where there's certain things that are on and there are certain things that are late. But for me to understand how to create Dilla stuff, it wasn't always like, let me sit with an NPC and play until I got the feel, the way he actually did it, I would look at his drums and say, okay, if I zoom in to where the grid is now, 1 -128, that's the amount I'm seeing of like subdivisions on the grid. If you zoom all the way out, it'll be 164th. If you're looking at the entire song in a program, you're probably looking at like a 1 -2, 1 -1 ratio. When you zoom zoom in, 1 -128, 1 -256, one, there's a reason I have these memorized.

1:17:44Like, it's because whenever you get that far you see, okay, the kick is exactly on the grid. The snare is 1 -256th ahead most of the time, categorically. And the hi -hat is 1 -128th behind, or two grid spaces when I'm zoomed in to 1 -128th. I know this is getting very math. That's how I learned swing. That's how I learned from my drums to have a certain feel. And I learned if I'm doing crowd rock or I'm doing Memphis trap, like certain things need to push, certain things need to pull for you to really get that artist to be like, oh, you get it. And I would be around producers sometimes, where like certain producers would be doing all the beats for a certain person from a certain region.

1:18:28Or there'd be the producer that everyone wants to work with. And I would make a beat with them, and they would do the drums and send me the drums, or I would do a melody. And I would see their drums, and there was this one kid who used the same hi -hat on every beat. And I was going to work with the rapper that he always worked with that week, and he was like, bro, you use his hi -hat, he's getting on anything. And I was like, what do you mean, though? Like, there's so many other factors that could turn someone on or off from an instrumental. And he's like, trust me, if this hi -hat's in it, he's getting on it.

1:18:55He sent me a beat that we made that had the hi -hat in it, and I realized his hi -hat just had a bunch of space before the actual sample. So his sample, when you press space bar and you play the sample, it didn't just wait. It went, there was a little pause that gave him swing. His hats were late on all his beats. His hats were always a little bit behind the grid. He always used the same hi -hat, and it wasn't perfect. There was a little bit of air. It was like sampling a drum -breaking, the loop being a little bit off, but it's why that BG's record has that feel. It's not perfect if you look at it on a grid, if you look at it.

1:19:28It's almost never perfect. If it's perfect, it's not interesting. None of the iconic ones are. And even when you're talking about categorically things are rushed, or categorically things are ahead, if you look at funky drummer or Clyde Stubbafield, if you look at the A -Men break, which all drum and bass is based on, if you look at these breaks, the way I look at them on a grid, you'll notice there's one outlier. There's one kick that's a little too late or too often. Every break that we all know well and love has that to it, and that's going to be in the playing, that's going to be in the programming now.

1:19:59So if you're trying to program something and you're wondering why your drums are hitting, it's not always the volume of them, like you're saying, it's not even. It's the feel. It's the slight imperfections in the rhythm. Yeah. Interesting talking about singing. I remember it was working with me. Metallica. And one of the rules I had in the studio was that they weren't allowed to look at the screen, because they had gone from a band that played organically to doing a lot of work on the computer. And then they started like visualizing the music and putting it together that way. And it seemed like sound did like it was put together that way.

1:20:44Well, their best music was not made that way. Yeah. So it was more of a... Can I ask what record that was? I worked on it. Yeah, the one you were talking about. It's called Death Magnetic. Okay, yeah. Man, for me, that's been my strength with bands is a lot of bands that I've worked with at this point have always played together in a room. Yeah. That made it this paramount thing of like the take of all of us together is go away. We make the magic. Right. Like you're saying, it's this thing between us that's intangible. Yes. That's going to be what makes this great for us, because some of the bands I work with, no one's particularly a virtuoso player.

1:21:20It's not like it's just the way they combine that. Yes. It's the mad that's what it is. That's what makes any great band. But for me, it's like now knowing that that's the magic. And then talking about swing and feel and stuff the way I do, it's like I've been able to go in with bands who have only ever recorded in that way all together and say, Oh, like, dude, like the bass player is always rushes. But this song, you guys are trying, you want this song to drag. And he's just excited when he plays and he's always a little head. And then you put him in a pocket on the screen, but be able to look at it and say, look where he's at, look where the kick drum's at.

1:21:53Put him behind the kick everywhere. And then all of a sudden his bass hits harder. It's louder. It's a different pocket. You know when you shift things and everything gets louder. And then all of a sudden, because things are like, a kick can be this far forward and this far back. You know, it's like they're combining to make up. They're making something new when you put two sounds together. It's like, I mean, like obviously phasing is whenever like two things are making the same noise, but it's there a little off. So it creates that fucked up kind of like weird zone. But when they're perfectly in sync, it's like swing can do that.

1:22:22And sometimes it's not always even them hitting together, but it's leaving the room for the kick to be massive and the bass to be right there. Like Pino Paladino on Voodoo is so late. And look, just look anywhere on that record. Look at the stems of it. Look at that. On Voodoo, he's late. One of my very favorite albums. One of my very favorite. It's part of three. Yeah. For life. Yeah. Doesn't get better. No, it doesn't. It just really doesn't. And that's the record if you want to teach anybody about swinging, feeling anything. To start there. You know, it's like, I hate when people take what Quest said out of context though, because there's moments we speak about.

1:23:01They're able to say about it. You talked about playing drunk. And I don't know if you've seen Dan Charnis's book, Dilletime. Yeah. But Dilletime debunks the whole theory that this feel in a lot of great hip -hop stuff and neo soul stuff. And this and that from this 90s 2000 era is this drunken thing. It's this laid back playing like a child sloppy. And then you make it super beautiful and super artistic. But it's not that. It's much more designed thing. It's like when people say reggae is loose. Reggae is one of the tightest things on earth. It's tight. It really is. People think because the feel of it is laid back.

1:23:39Because there's things about it that drag that it's not a tight thing. Or because other connotations with the culture of reggae and this and that. It's like, oh, it must be chill. It's not. It's tight. And like, I think when you talk about voodoo and stuff, people hear those swings and it's like things are so late. If you try to play drums to that, you really learn how good you are at thinking of you. It's nearly impossible. Yeah. But it's, but because it's always on the verge of not making it. What's exciting to me when I listen to it is it sounds like it's about to fall apart. Yeah. But it always feels like that.

1:24:10Yeah. Very difficult to accomplish that. Totally. But I think it's, it's, it's much more of like a deep science than it is this drunken thing. And Quest can say that because he made the record. But I think what he's saying is compared to the way he learned to play like a drum machine. Yeah. Totally. To him, it's drunken style. But in the same way that in, you know, kung fu drunken style, that doesn't mean drunk. No. It just means it's not where you expect it to be. Yeah. He could say whatever he wants. It's when people who go to like make something and that's not approach it without the respect.

1:24:44You know what I mean? And approach it with just like, oh, it just needs to be kind of all over the place. And then it's not that. It's not that at all. It's never that. No. But mix wise, sonically, the songwriting, the feel. I think that's a big part of it too. The hip hop understanding is a big part. It's not even the sounds of hip hop or like I know that when I started making rock records, the fact that I had made the hip hop records that I made before them, had a huge impact on the way I made rock records anyways. Couldn't help. Well, to, I mean, drums are paramount, right? It's like to, in a lot of the greatest rock records, you listen to them, you'd be like, oh, this record hits really hard.

1:25:23But if you think about yourself doing it, I would have the drums way louder. On so much stuff. Same. And I would get with bands and they'd be like, well, you know, this producer we work with would tell us, like, you could get the guitars loud or you could get the drums loud. And I've just never had rules like that. I've just never like, when I'm making stuff, it's like everything can be equally loud. And when you make beats, it's like, if the drums are knocking, it wraps up. It's just not, it ain't going to work. And most of, most things. The very first rock record I made was the cult, the cult electric.

1:25:50And I remember I was working with an engineer, a much more experienced engineer. I was a kid in school. Yeah. Andy Wallace was mixing. And he would get the mix together. And we would work on mixed together. He would mainly get the mix together. And then when the mix was finished, I would turn the kick drum up maybe 60 beats for every song. It's like, okay, now it's done. Yeah. And 60 beats is a lot. You know, they say that people, the human ear can't perceive less than a decibel. But I think that's absolute bullshit. Yeah. Absolute bullshit. For sure. It feels like major in certain circumstances.

1:26:27For sure. I've heard that, though. They say a lot of things. They say you can't hear over 20 ,000. And clearly, if you hear something, if you cut off everything above 20 ,000, the sound changes. 100%. Yeah, I mean, one of the tricks I learned a long time ago is if you have a lot of stringed instruments, a lot of guitars and strings, there's a lot of harmonic and build up from the fingers rubbing in the in between noises. And if you cut all the 18K, 20K, the super high dog whistle frequency, all of a sudden the guitars get way bigger. Everything, there's a prominence to it. It's like, you can feel 30 hertz.

1:27:02You might not be able to tell you what note is playing in the speaker, but 30 hertz rumbles certain parts of your body. You know what I mean? If you're not in control in that part of a mix of a song, you play it on a stadium level speaker side. It's going to sound insanely fucked up. It's like, it's almost like you can feel them as much as you can hear them sometimes. But yeah, I don't know like that hearing test is a real scary thing. You ever done the... Yeah. So I was getting to 14K and things are getting real quiet. It's maybe you should have worn more earphones than some of these DJ gigs.

1:27:33Yeah. I think there's a way to get them back. I was just recently researching because clearly I have some high end loss. It's actually not your ear. It's your brain. And you can train your brain wearing headphones to be able to hear things that it's losing. I worry about some of my friends being AS I think it's cold. I was talking to Zach Hill from Death Grips. And Zach uses Texas headphones on stage. So two giant monitors next to each ear. It's the loudest rubber you've ever heard in your entire life. He's been doing it for 15 years. And I worry about buddies of mine. You know what I mean? Yeah.

1:28:09Because it affects how you make stuff. And I've had people complain me stuff before. Where it's like, yo, you're not hearing this well enough. I'll leave the sounds and saying it was so tinny and sharp. And like, man, it's smartly. Get slower. I just made my managers get in ears. Like protective ones. Because them walking me up on stage is being on the stage. And it's like, you guys aren't any less in front of giant monitors than I am. Yeah. And you're not protecting yourselves at all. Even if you're not a music -making person, it's like you're going to want that. We used to listen so loud at the studio.

1:28:44I don't really do that anymore. No. I might do it for a test like to understand what it does loud. Yeah. But then immediately, she doesn't have the capability to get super loud. Anyone really? No, on purpose. Yeah, you also have to be able to focus on it. What is Discord? Discord is a chat server. So for any topic or artist or thing in the world, there basically is a Discord server. There's a Rick Rubin Discord server. I'm sure that it's just people discussing you, your book, the things you're working on, this podcast, albums you've done, pictures of you that are coming out, a new update of you working with Bubble Blah.

1:29:19It's just like the ultimate fans of anything are in the Discord about that thing. So someone had started a Kenny Beats Discord without me being involved in it. There was a couple of thousand people or whatever. And whenever I started to do streaming on Twitch, how it was explained to me is usually people who have big streams have a coinciding Discord, so that when they're not online, all the fans are in there interacting and talking. And whenever you update on your social media, like, I'm going to be on stream at this time, everybody alerts the Discord and then you have a ton of people that show up for your stream.

1:29:54So we just started my Twitch stream and my Discord at the same time and took control of them. Tell me about Twitch as well. I became the number one music streamer on Twitch in quarantine. We were having upwards of 30 ,000 concurrent viewers in one sitting, so I'd be literally laughing. How often were you doing it? Up to four or five times a week for a couple hours at a time. I mean, yeah, there was nowhere to go. There was COVID. There was no sessions to go to. You know what I mean? Before I got to go to England to work on crawl or with idols, there was nothing to do. And I had to do a hundred tests and things just to get to that studio session.

1:30:29So I was at a fear trying to like do this thing I never wanted to do, which was long form, unedited me just being me content. Because we had such a success on YouTube doing this 10 -minute thing. I make a beat, someone wraps, but it just worked for years. It did so much for my career. It did so much to like create other opportunities for us that weren't just doing songs for artists and it was a beautiful thing. But I never wanted it to be really people seeing how they still do those as well. No, not even doing the YouTube. Yeah, I've never said I won't bring it back, but we've not done it in years.

1:31:06And have you not done it since the Twitch and Discord? Well, your Twitch took over. And it wasn't plausible to film episodes of the K because we couldn't have someone come be in person for two hours in film and it wasn't possible. So I started the Twitch really not wanting to show people like how the doughnuts are made. I didn't want people to know everything about me and my personality and my mannerisms and how I work. But I started it because we had already set up the idea of doing a Twitch in 2019. And the week LA went into lockdown. I had the cameras. I had the thing I had a deal with Twitch.

1:31:43Everything was I just hadn't signed the deal. So we signed it. We set the cameras up. And before everybody else could make this leap to like, oh, I'm going to stream. What we're going to do concerts at home. We were on it. I was on it a month, two months ahead. By February 29th, I had my streaming stuff set up. So like we were not even sure what lockdown was going to be yet. But I was like, I know we're going to be stuck in the house. How much of Twitch's music versus video games and other stuff? 3 %? 3 % is music. 5 %? Yeah. Anything else besides video games? Are there other 3 %? Yeah, there's just kind of...

1:32:13There's like, there's, there's, there's, there's, to talk about politics on there. There's women who stream on there who just do like, like, there's NPC streaming. NPC streaming is now this huge thing. Now we're like, you send gifts. And as you send gifts, they emote differently. There's all these weird little pockets of Twitch where things go on that are just like, they're sleeping. It's people sleeping on Twitch or people watching that and sending them donations. It's like, exercise, marathons. And then it became during the music thing, every concert, everything that wasn't versus on Instagram was on Twitch because it was how you monetize.

1:32:42If you go live on Instagram and do a concert, you don't make a dollar. On Twitch, you'll make subscriptions, you'll make money. And so we started doing the Twitch and me not knowing how to do it and like, breaking my stream and kicking the power cord out, kids loved it. They loved it. They didn't get it. They loved it. I didn't know the slang. They would send me money. And every time they sent me money, it would make this weird noise. And I'd be like, guys, I don't fucking know what this noise is, but please stop making the noise. And they're dying laughing because it's me making money. And I didn't know that it was a donation sound.

1:33:12And I was like, please, whatever you do, just don't fucking make that beep. I had the speakers on and the studio really loud and it keeps beeping. But they kept doing what's on there. They're sending me money to be funny. And the kids are sending me hundreds of dollars to troll me. And I was just like, okay, this is a weird place. But we started doing beep battles on there. So the idea was, let's help out a kid in the middle of nowhere who's making music, who's stuck now. Now these kids can't get out there and all the advice I normally would give you, it doesn't comply in COVID. So it was like, I have kids around the world watching me.

1:33:45There'll be 30 ,000 people in here. How can we help these kids out? And so the idea was like, I'll give you a sample. You have one hour who can make the best beat in one hour. And whoever makes the best beat in one hour gets a synth, gets a drum machine, gets a plug -in. And so we gave away over $300 ,000 worth of gear on Twitch in the beep battles. If you won the season ender, the first season, $10 ,000 prize, second season, $20 ,000 prize, third season, $30 ,000 prize. And it was just to help young producers and all these companies. And also turning people on to these kids. Totally. A kid got signed to Excel records who was 17 years old who had four t -shirts to his name, who got the demo version of Ableton and learned to make beats from watching my stream, signed to Excel records.

1:34:33His name's DVR. A kid named Not Charles got a publishing deal after he won a beat battle. And there was an ANR watching the stream and hit him up. Got a publishing deal. And these are all things that I have no part in. I'm not taking a piece of kids' deals. I'm not coming in and saying, well, you know, the kids are just winning from a stream. And awesome. It created this thing for me where it's like, I'm winning during quarantine during this scary time by giving back and by helping people. And brands are starting to come to me because our discord got to be $80 ,000. And $100 ,000, $135 ,000 people, the only discord bigger than my discord was Travis Scott.

1:35:10And it was not run by him. It was just untenable. Just fans. And so our discord is a safe space. No racism. No sexism. No homophobia. No drain. Who checks that? I have a moderator staff that gets paid over $5 ,000 a month in total between all of them. Because literally we have to have people from every time zone, from every walk of life, and from every part of the conversation. Because a white cis male from America can't make a comment if this trans thing that happened on a different server is okay or not. He can't say that. We need someone who's part of that community to let us know how to talk about these kinds of things.

1:35:46I mean, I even just want to... And is there a service you can hire that does that? Not that I know of. You got to just find the people. Fans started coming to us like, I'd love to mod for you and mod for other discord. And luckily the first couple of people we found were really savvy and really solid. And those are some of the people now who are like the head of our mod staff. And we have people from literally around the world in all different ages. Because like whether you go into a voice chat or you can talk to someone or you're in the just mostly discord is all text. They're just typing and posting pictures and stuff and links.

1:36:15No matter where that is. If I go talk about this right now with you and some kids like, man, this sounds like a great resource to like collaborate, get some free sounds, meet other producers, whatever. And they go in there and the second they go in there, some derogatory happens, some awful happens to them. I can't have that. So like I need to have people that are policing those situations at all times. And you need to pay these people to do this. These people are just going to log hours and hours a week protecting your server without any kind of incentive. So we had to develop a mod staff of people of all types of people who were able to talk about all types of issues.

1:36:49So it wasn't like me, this like random white producer doing me. Like I don't think that anti black comment, I can't, it's not up to me. It's up to people who are part of this community. So our community got so big we couldn't even handle it ourselves. We needed help from the community to run itself. And once these brands started seeing what was happening here, whether it was like a teenage engineering or like waves and UAD or sure microphones, whoever it was who was sending us stuff, they would start to talk to me about like, hey, I'm working on this. This product or hey, we're developing this piece of software.

1:37:26Do you think you'd ever use it on Twitch? Do you think you'd ever show it to the discord and see how they felt? Do you want to give away 20 instances of this new product to all these great young producers? And you start to realize like, whoa, like consulting for these music companies is like, how much money people make on pub deals for their music? It became this whole other thing where now like teaching is this real business that actually can like set me up to make whatever music I want to make because the Twitch is earning money, the discord is creating opportunities. And you're turning people on to equipment that you like because you tested all and said, I would do this.

1:38:02Or I hate it. Of course. I was super honest about it. Like when Reverb and I first spoke, it's like the eBay of music stuff. They came to me and they were like, we've seen you like break stuff by accident on your stream, like use something the wrong way and mess up or like, what if we gave you a bunch of like really sick old gear, but like what are the two of the things like you didn't know how to use it for you? Got it. They liked the fact that I was learning through it. Kids love to see me learn even though there was an all just like, this thing you do stuff. And would you talk to the audience when you do this?

1:38:32Yeah. I was just talking to them the whole time. And to be honest, I'll be getting feedback. Non -stop thousands of comments a second. Just would you read them as much as I could? Yeah. And it got to the point where you have these like paris social relations. You know kids names by their screen name and they're always in there talking about the same kinds of things. And you know people by name, I'd be calling kids out and know who they were. And it was like, we still have this unbelievable community. I just got off of streaming. I got off of a lot of the content stuff because the music I'm working on, the music I'm making needs my full attention.

1:39:04And when I'm on there, whether I'm making music on a streaming thing or I'm just talking about music or whatever, seeing thousands and thousands of comments while you're in your creative process for me is not a positive thing. And the first time the day I decided to get off was the time I was in the studio. And I went to reach for a sample and go to put it into something I was working on. And in my head I saw like a chat that was like, that sounds sucks. It didn't happen. No, no, I spent the week reading so many kids evaluating stuff while I was doing it that I literally went to make something and I was like, oh, this is what they're going to say.

1:39:40Oh, this is what someone's going to think, which is something you and I've talked about. It's not how I make music. No, and it's dangerous. Dangerous. So I first time I felt, oh, I've watched so much of people's opinions on me for a month that now I'm factoring in their opinions when I'm working. I'm out. I cannot be on there. And let's be frank, like, twitch me a lot of money. I don't have to lie and pretend that like, oh, yeah, it was this cool little thing. It was all about I could make my mortgage in one stream, you know what I mean? And that made me feel safe as someone who didn't grow up with money and someone who in music industry, these things.

1:40:12And it's during the lockdown as well. It's my employees worked out. My best friends who I work with, like they're getting races and quarantining. I mean, we're all winning in this together. Like my friend, he always designed my twitch who designed the cave and would change the e -mouts out and handle the disc where it's like we built this thing altogether. And once I started realizing that it was hindering the music I was making, I'm doing them a disservice by staying on. Because the only reason kids care about what I'm talking about is what I've done in music. No one's going to come in there and listen to me talk shit about anything if I had made all the records I've made.

1:40:46That's what the validity is. The music I've made sets me up to give you advice. You know what I mean? It's the same reason I listen to you. It's like the work. If I can't do the work and continue doing the work, then I'm just like talking about what I did. And so that's what got me off of there. And you can hear the guilt in my voice because it was like no song I make does anything for anyone in the way that like you're changing one kid's actual life by showing 20 ,000 people their music, getting them a whole bunch of new followers and opportunity a publishing deal from free stuff. That changes someone's life.

1:41:21Whereas I make a great song today, a great album. Someone might love it, it might inspire them. But I was directly helping people in a major way and I'd never used any of the stuff I built up in my career for that. And it made me realize that you don't get to pick what you're the best at. I want to be the best piano player in the world. You know what I mean? I want to sit down into instrument like Blake Mills and someone here we play guitar and go, oh that's the most unbelievable thing I've ever heard. But my strength is making people want to make music. That's what I learned through all this is what I'm the best at.

1:41:55And my current peer group, when I look at the people I'm competitive with in a musical way or the people I look up to, what I can do that I think no one else can do in the level is me is take someone who said I love music, but I'm not sure I can I can make that can make music. I know that now. And I learned that through quarantine and through Twitch and that was the most important thing about it. And it's such a beautiful gift to be able to share that with someone. I want to fish. I never do it. What's better than that? That's really what I realized about anything that has happened with production I've worked on with people these close relationships I have with artists I've worked with and stuff.

1:42:29That's what it is. It's helping people stay in the fun place or the prolific place like that's what I've always done well more than a beat I've made a guitar I've played a drum thing I've programmed. It's that you know what I mean and that's why you've always been such an important friend to me and stuff is because like I've always been so focused on making the music but I've won being able to relate to the people you know and being able to talk to artists and stuff and being able to actually see a kid go from zero followers in the middle of Belarus you know what I mean going through it with family and don't barely have the extra money to spend on Twitter.

1:43:09Get to 5 ,000 followers overnight and have all these people collaborating with me messaging me six months later like yo man like I have my own studio now like I did this has happened in the last few days and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been doing this for a long time and I've been usingtrack for this whole series of sets, cases, cars, cruise events, Orlando System, clinic titles.

1:44:07So that opinions are very efficient and that's very amazing. So directing these characters shadows all Earthquake is often enough trans -coderant to talk about what what a longGraven person could do with just the model and change everything they want be. So in an example, you get different opinions that line up about the screen that line up, the screener that line up is often a drawback, saving the audience's distance for hours and you actually think that it's something you'd be interested in. Is that right, guys? I think there's no point in screaming or saying that stuff, man. And everything that's left is being like a great question, man, it's sort of tight That's not what I'd say.

1:44:22That saying female reduces people to their reproductive abilities. Like these kids helped keep me sharp, whether it was a technology thing, a way of speaking, a plugin, a new drum set I'm not using. I would go to make music and kids would say, Kenny, press Apple Z or whatever. And you do it and you're like, never knew that, did that. You know what I mean? Like they taught me so much. So whenever a kid would reach out to me and say, you all really fucked up over this or like, I'm really uninspired or Kenny, how do I make it to the next step if I don't live in a place where there's any type of resources that I would really take the time to like read these things and try to answer as best I could because it's like, you know, you all just gave me four tips yesterday that literally got me placements or literally I was in a room in some studio in LA yesterday and I did that thing and everybody was like, whoa.

1:45:10And it's only because I'm tapped in with 130 ,000 producers who are all doing their thing and I gave them back so they gave me back. We gave away $300 ,000 worth of shit. Like never took a dime from these kids other than the subscription to the Twitch channel. Like they literally were happy to share what they knew and so was I. It just became like this mutually benefited thing. And now I wonder from the months I've been off what I'm missing sometimes. I wonder like, is there some plug -in or some trend or some fat or some song or artists that be that I would have known about in two seconds had I been on there.

1:45:43There's artists I've produced for in the last two years that I found out about Twitch. You can see the moment where they told me about Paris, Texas or literally to the closest guys to me now. And you can see the moment on Twitch or some kid goes, Kenny, you heard Paris, Texas. And I play it and I'm sitting there and I'm like, this is fucking sick. And I off screen was DMing them on Instagram and be like, yo, you need to hang. And then I produce a song on their next record and now it's like, literally no matter what they're doing on with those kids. And that was from Twitch. You know what I mean?

1:46:14It's like they did so much for me that me getting some companies to give you all some players and nothing. So at this point, it's like, I've been able to speak at NYU and speak at USC and been offered to speak at Oxford and these great things. And it's like, that's awesome. But I would have figured out my own channel to directly help people all around the world to make music. And that's like where this all goes next. Does this core go from this app to a real creative agency? Does it turn into something way bigger? You know what I mean? It's like an institute. Why is the billboard chart the only way that we can quantify who's really killing it everywhere and why?

1:46:52Why is that the only way? How could we set up our own thing to show worth for all these people and all this town around the world that isn't just their sales or their Spotify plays or whatever? And like, that to me is so interesting. And I found it off a fluke of like, you all do this content thing because quarantine is fucked up and it turned into the most important thing I've done to music. Yeah.