Independent Hip Hop

I been producing and rhyming almost since the beginning of my career. It came out of necessity cause, frankly, me and Nameo couldn’t afford to pay producers for beats. I was like “Psssh, I can make beats” (though I had only rarely touched anything really close to a professional production tool in my life). But it was one of those things I just “felt” I would be able to do. I’d always revered producers/production and studied their techniques, but applying it was quite the learning experience…… layman’s terms – my first beats were WACK.

I know there’s a lot of producers who will occasionally jump on the mic. As well as supreme emcees that will dabble with the pads now and again. But my true admiration of those that do “double-duty” are for the ones who make ill beats as well as being excellent wordsmiths…. consistently. I can tell you from experience that this is most likely difficult for them. But not the way you may think…

I can only speak personally, but it seems that the issue with being an emcee/producer is inspiration. It seems it’s almost impossible to be inspired to produce AND write simultaneously. The last few weeks, for example, all I can seem to do is make beats. I been cranking out a lot of them too. But I can’t write anything right now. I’m too “in the zone” of making beats, and anytime I try to work on some lyrics I’m dealing with serious writers block. I went through the same thing working on the Building Blocks album, but in reverse. We were furiously writing during our studio sessions, but we needed a few more beats for songs to round out the project. I stared at my MPC for days…. I was in the “writing zone” and I was stuck there.

So you can see where this could become a problem if/when time is of the essence. All I can to to try to compensate is to work with inspiration anytime it hits. If a couple of lines pop into my head while I’m in the car, I’ll repeat it over and over again to commit it to memory until I am able to write it down. If I’m in a store and I hear an oldie with a dope break, I grab my cell phone and either text myself the name of the song or use the audio recorder to catch a piece of the song for reference.

I tip my hat to all the emcee/producers out there.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Make The Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.