A Quote by Rahki

When I first starting making beats, I didn't know samples were being used in any beats. I had no idea where producers were getting the real string sounds or the voices on their tracks. I knew nothing about loops or sampling off of records. So, by me knowing nothing about this it made me concentrate on my chords on the keyboard.
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.
'Welcome to Atlanta' was a song I wanted to do on my first album. The idea was for me and Outkast to do it, but I could never come up with a beat for us to do it. Outkast beats and my beats were very different.
Sickle cell anemia made me a real angry kid. I was angry at God. I used to sit there and pray to God, please, take this pain away. It was nothing magical happening, there was nothing there. I felt like my prayers were not being answered. It made me real moody, I had an attitude problem growing up as a young child.
Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats. I was starting to learn the signifiers of production from the '60s, the '80s. We never re-recorded anything. All the record companies that wanted to sign us - except for one - were excited about the recordings that we had done ourselves.
I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices - they were about my age, but they were doing it.
I never made beats to make beats; I only made them when there was a record to make them for. That's one of the things that has changed in hip-hop that's made me like it less. It feels much more like it's a producer-driven medium, where there are all these tracks that are completely interchangeable.
I made my entire first tape using Beats headphones - the studio headphones and halfway through the second one, because I finally started making a home studio. But I record and make all my beats with the Beats headphones.
Infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world - wrote reams of commentary [after 9/11]. Their articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago; about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violent. These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew.
Like with me, like around '97, for Christmas my parents bought me an MPC 2000 sampler and a little eight-track cassette recorder. And I started sampling records and, you know, producing hip-hop beats. And it got to the point where I realized - I innately realized that the music I liked the most was made by people that played instruments.
A lot of young producers will stay at home and make beats all day but making beats is only about 20 percent of the job. The other 80 percent is networking; that's what I feel like a lot of people are lacking.
For Odd Future, I only made beats for Mike G. With the Internet, I'm part of a production team making tracks for me to sing over.
It's great if you can afford to carry a string section on the road with you, but most people are used to the idea of just a keyboard player creating those string sounds.
When Migos flew me out to see if I was actually making the beats, they didn't expect a white kid from Canada to be making harder beats than the guys in Atlanta. Being white in that environment, it was definitely different.
I met the pianist Barry Harris when I was about fifteen. He would show me changes, which I had no idea existed. I knew about scales, but I didn't think about chords. I was fortunate in that he lived right around the corner so I'd be at his house almost every day and he showed me about playing melodies over chords. After about three years, I could play some gigs. I worked with drummer Roy Brooks and other guys my age at that time, like trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer. Some of the older guys were Paul Chambers, Doug Watkins and Louis Hayes
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.
I suppose that there might have been leading men who were put off from casting me as the ingenue because I was taller than they were, but I've no idea that this ever happened. When I did 'Much Ado About Nothing' opposite Mark Rylance in the West End, we used the difference in our heights as part of their relationship.
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