A Quote by Lil Tracy

I actually started making beats first and that was before 2010. I think I was like 14. They were really bad. I used to sample like Arabic music for some reason. — © Lil Tracy
I actually started making beats first and that was before 2010. I think I was like 14. They were really bad. I used to sample like Arabic music for some reason.
When I was in middle school, that's when I first started making beats. I was maybe 14, 16, something like that.
I started playing instruments before I started making beats, and I was never the best guitarist or the best pianist or the best drummer. And when I started making beats, I was not the best beatmaker, and when I started making hooks, I was not the best vocal melody person. When I first started rapping, I wasn't the best rapper at all.
I really liked punk music and experimental music that my brother was taking me to go see in the city, when I was probably, like, 13 years old. I was seeing a lot of teenagers making 'weird' music, and I think that was probably a big part of the reason that I actually started to play myself.
When I first started producing, all I had was this little crappy sampler called a S20, which had, like, a minute sample time. I was making crappy beats since I was, like, 17 or 18, using Florida rappers, where I'm from. Then I started DJ'ing because I just wanted to have a new job. I was a schoolteacher for a while, and it was the worst job.
I was like 13, 14 years old. I had a Rock Band mic, and I used to record music and put it on YouTube and DatPiff. Then I started getting to producing my own music because I didn't want to keep rapping on beats I was getting on SoundClick.
I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French.
I was sort of like a kid in a candy store, realizing it was fun making beats without the perceived burden that every track I did had to be a some progressive sample masterpiece. It was nice to blow off steam and work on those songs. For me, that’s what 'The Outsider' was about in general: forget everything, I’m just gonna follow my own music, and make the music I want to make.
A guy wrote a blog, way back when the Internet first started; the comments were so negative that it actually stopped me doing music for some time - about two, three years. It was after this one hip-hop project - Redfoo and Dr'Kroon. I wasn't used to it. I didn't like it. It lowered my self-esteem.
I started making music when I was like 14.
I started off making beats when I was like 12. Then when I linked with people who make beats full time, I was like, 'Bet, now I can focus on writing and singing.'
I definitely feel excited to be able to put really hard beats - like hip-hop beats - behind my music, more than I did before.
I used to put like, 'Yo Gotti type beats,' 'Future type beats' on YouTube. And uhh, I started getting paid off YouTube. Like YouTube started giving me Google AdSense checks.
Willow [Smith] started making music first. I was like, "My younger sister is, like, 4, and she's making all these fire songs. What's happening?" Willow was doing all these things, about to have record label deals at like the age of 6, and I was like, "I feel like I'm underachieving."
I used to play the piano, I was pretty decent, so that was the only thing I could hold onto in terms of coming up with melodies; but at the time I [still] just couldn't, so my early beats were really sample-based.
When I started making my own music I was listening to people like Erykah Badu and Elliott Smith. I think I always gravitated towards slightly more understated voices because it felt like I could really connect with what they were saying. It felt more like a conversation.
So March 2010, we launched Pinterest, and we were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't started building Pinterest actually in November 2009. And that alone wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't left my job to start a company in May 2008.
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