A Quote by Mike Shinoda
In high school I was making beats for my friends and for myself and rapping over them.
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I started rapping towards the end of middle school. In high school, with a lot of my friends, we would make beats and just start rapping - beating on the wall, beating on the table and freestyling.
I like challenging myself. I like the challenge of rapping to fast beats, rapping to beats that are super slow, whatever. I like the challenges, so I'm not afraid to take on any piece of music and create a song to it if it feels right to me.
I was making all my own beats, and I really liked sampling stuff, like old '50s and '60s pop and soul and doo-wop records. I was chopping those up and putting loops and drums on them and just rapping over them.
I definitely pride myself on suffering through a real high school. A lot of my friends are homeschooled, and I love them for it, but I really wanted that high school experience.
Around the time that I was in high school, a lot of rappers were coming out with mixtapes of them rapping over other people's instrumentals, specifically Young Money.
I started making beats in high school.
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 had some really early recordings when I was 16 or 17. I was rapping over jungle beats with my friends. We used to do pirate radio stations in my area, down near Brighton. They were pretty terrible.
At the beginning I wasn't really rapping. I had poetry, so it was a spoken word vibe. Then I found beats that you could sing over - lo-fi, ambient stuff. So I was singing over them and trying to put things into practice.
When I started making beats in the 7th grade - even through middle school and high school - I admired a lot of Shawty Redd, stuff like that, that real dark, trap sound.
In school I was interested in music, but I never saw myself being a musician at that point. Music technology was the only subject I cared about: it taught me the basics of music production and I started making beats and freestyling with my friends.
I was probably just graduating high school, maybe still in high school. When I was still in high school, maybe the last two years, I was rapping but I wasn't telling anybody. When I signed my deal people didn't know it was the same Ryan Montgomery from Oak Park High School, because I used to play basketball and I used to fight. Like I'd bring boxing gloves to school. So when they found out, it was, "You mean Ryan who be boxing?" or, "Ryan who be hopping up at the park?" So I was known as that guy.
I started making music for fun maybe my senior year in college. I started rapping in high school, but it wasn't anything serious.
I really didn't want to rap; I was just a regular kid. My friend - his name is William Aston - we went to the same high school together, and he was rapping. He put out a freestyle over Chris Brown's 'Look at Me Now,' and it was fire, and the whole school went crazy.
We can't just go, like, oh that'd be cool then not do it. So it's one of those weird things. You gain all these things on your journey. You get smarter. It's interesting how you are who you are in high school in a lot of ways. When I look at my friends, I feel no different about them than I did when I was in high school. I mean that in a great way. They've taken on a micro scale what they were doing and making it bigger.
I have done whole projects with Scoop Deville, I like to basically work with a single producer. I always just worked on a bunch of songs, and then put them together, whether it was an EP or another project. None of them were mixtapes where I was rapping over other peoples beats.
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