Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Kenny Beats

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Kenny Beats is a highly acclaimed music producer and songwriter known for his unique sound and creative approach to music production. With an impressive discography that includes collaborations with some of the biggest names in Hip Hop, Kenny has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the industry. His distinctive style, blending trap and electronic music elements, has earned him a loyal fanbase and critical acclaim. From producing chart-topping hits to hosting his own popular web series, Kenny Beats has become one of his generation's most sought-after and influential producers. Kenny previously performed as half of the electronic music project Loudpvck before returning to his Hip Hop roots. Kenny recently returned to DJ’ing live and released his first album under his production moniker, Kenny Beats, called Louie. *Note: KB refers to Jimi Hendrix’s drummer as Mitch McConnell while talking to Rick. He, of course, meant Mitch Mitchell. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Ancestral Supplements https://ancestralsupplements.com Use code TETRA ------- LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------- House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------- Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra 

Tetragramaton. I can remember opening of FedEx envelope. And inside of it was a cassette player, which I've not seen a cassette player in a long time. Oh yeah, I'm sure. With headphones attached to it. And it didn't say who it came from. It had no information. And I start listening to it.

And what's on this recording is incredible music. It's incredible, and odd. Is it an album? Is it a mixtape? Is it some old recording? Like, it's so unusual and bizarre and good. Friend of mine, Richard Russell, was in town from Excel, and I asked him, did you send me this? And I showed it to him and he listened to old and he's like, no, I wish. And it turned out you sent it to me. Yeah.

Tell me what that was. I wanted to send my first record I ever made to people who I felt like collaborated on it without knowing it. And so you were one of, I think, 10 or 12 people who got it ahead of time. And no one of the people knows who else got it. So I never was like telling this other person, oh, I sent one to Rick and I just sent them to the people. I'd say 11 out of 12 responded or maybe everybody now has responded, but it took a while. And even when you had first heard of it.

I know who sent it. It was monthly. It was so vague. I was just hoping that knowing you and your team well enough that it would just get to a place where you'd press play. And if I could get to a place where you pressed play on it, maybe without even knowing what it was, that to me was the only way for you to really hear it maybe in a pure way, you know?

Because even if the connotation of me making it or it being about my relationship with my father or anything like that, it could have maybe hindered it. And there were certain people when I played them the record, I told them what it's about. And I told them how I made it in this and that. But there's, I don't know, there's a few people I couldn't get to,

a few people who work quite in town or around. And I was like, I need this person to hear this in the right way. And I'm not gonna be able to play it for them in the right way. So that cassette that you have, it says Rick Rubin at the start of it. And it is only your cassette. And on it, I basically have clips of me and my father. There's clips of a million different musicians playing. There's samples of things that my dad loved that I use,

but I guess it would be kind of hard to tell. Why did you make that recording? I was sitting in a cottage in Bath, England about the starter record with a band called Idols, and I got a call that my dad got cancer. My dad died of a very tumultuous relationship. He was a drug addict. For many years, we didn't speak for many years.

I hated him and thought he was a thief in the liar and not the guy I knew growing up. Just growing up. Growing up, were you tight? Super. My dad fostered my entire musical ability and knowledge and everything. He's an audio file.

He listens to music on music on music on music and every format possible in my whole life when he has free time. And he would go to the local library which had gotten some crazy big donation. I grew up in a rich part of town in Connecticut. I was not rich, but they had a huge donation to this library and my dad would get 30 to 40 CDs out a week

and rip them so then he had them now. And then that's how he kind of made his digital music, music collection, once vinyl was not really the thing for him anymore. And so my whole life, my dad would sit in front of a receiver on weekends and make these mix tapes. And the mix tapes would be anything that he loved or thought other people would love.

And he would always make them for people. And this was such an ingrained thing with me that like, I grew up like with music being the thing between me and my dad. He played basketball at Yukon. He played pro in Sweden. He was supposed to go to the league. This is that he's a six foot six guy who's known

as being this great basketball player. He never gave a shit about me playing basketball. He never gave a shit about me playing sports. If I could make music or show him music or whatever, that was always how I got the reaction for my dad. So music was always our thing. And around 16, 17, typical story, you got a back injury, you got addicted to opioids.

Our relationship really started to fall apart as is his life. And that went on for many, many, many years. Luckily by the time I was in my early 20s, I was making music and making money doing it, I was able to help support him in this and that, but we had a very not close relationship. So whenever I found out that he had cancer, you have a lot of different feelings. You have feelings about wasted years, you have feelings about, well now I gotta step up to help him,

but you also have this part of you that's like, should I even help him after what they put me through? And that's a very hard thing. And I'm not the only person who has parents like this, family members like this, situations like this. But when it hit me, the first thing I thought about was those recordings from when I was young. And as soon as I hear cancer,

even though there's a million stages and a million types, everyone hears cancer and has an initial reaction of, oh, end credits. And I started thinking, what do I really have besides some photos and whatever I can remember still of my dad? And one of the first things that I was like, man, I have all those cassette tapes.

And I can call my aunts and uncles and family friends and get those tapes back. And in these tapes, it's like, it's as close to sitting next to my dad as you possibly can be. You hear him almost messing up sometimes, I'm like, oh shit, let me turn this on. He makes mistakes on him. He's doing this whole bravado of this fake radio presenter.

Then no one was ever making it. So it's a mix tape where he's the MC. Yes. For himself. Yes. Or maybe a friend. Yes. And he went to broadcast school.

So he had a little bit of knowledge about ins and outs on radio shows. But it was doing it as a hobby. Yes. It's what he liked to do. It's just as hobby. But he would give them to people. So if we went to a dinner party with my parents, it was never a bottle of wine or a food they'd bring over.

My dad would give you a cassette. And then we'd always hear back like, oh, I've been listening to the cassette every day in the car. It's all he listened to. She never knew that a Linus more set song. She loves it now. And so my dad was kind of like the purveyor of new music in this like 30, 40 years old. And it would be old music and new music.

Everything. He would put a cameo song on there or a song from the chronic on there, or it would be old music and new music. Everything. He would put a cameo song on there, or a song from the chronic on there, or it would be like, Patsy Klein and Hank Williams and anything in between. Jazz. Jazz is one area my dad was never deep, and he has his favorite things.

But it was never super deep in jazz, but it was one more anything else. More like things you might have heard on the radio at one point in time. And he had to have something quirky in there just to be able to say, Bet you never heard this or bet you would love this. He was always loved to put people on to stuff.

And so he would make me tapes. When I went on my first time where I had to take a train ride by myself, like eight years old, my dad made me a cassette tape, and it's kind of what kept me safe on the tape. I was listening to another one bites the dust for the first time, on a walkman on this train and not thinking about, oh, I'm scared, I'm by myself on the train,

just thinking about, whoa, it's baseline, it's amazing. And so we have always had a relationship through music. And when I started playing guitar, it's like my dad fell in love with me in a new way. When I started making beats and stuff, and him being this person always was using tape decks and knew a little bit about broadcast stuff, he was so interested in seeing me use an NPC.

He was spending any extra money he had to go to Sam Goodey and get me that one guitar pedal. And my dad lived paycheck to paycheck my whole life. So my mom would ground me and then I go to my dad's house and he'd be like, all right, let's go to guitar center real quick. Just don't tell your mom, dad, he fostered everything. We lived in about a 600 square foot apartment

for many years and my dad would wear headphones while I played drums in the living room. So he could still listen to the TV and watch ESPN, but I'd be playing a drum kit in the middle of the living room to slip not to whatever. And he'd be sitting there in headphones and he'd let me do it. The only rule was I had to put the kit away when I was done.

So every day I had to set up and put away a drum kit. The amount I knew about, how fast to get a symbol stand in the right position, it was unbelievable by 14. So I could play amps loud as how the only complaints would be a neighbor. My dad will let me rip in these tiny apartments and it was, what got me to Berkeley,

it's what got me to know the amount of music I know and it's always been our thing. So I went back to these tapes. My dad's sick. I'm going to lose my dad. Like I got to I got to go record him. I got to record him talking. I got to get more. What can I have to save and I got so scared. So I started looking through old emails, looking if I had the tapes anywhere and I started realizing, well, I have a lot of stuff of me and my dad when I'm a child. I'm three to eight years old and most of these tapes and I'm fed up with him half the time.

Sometimes I'm really excited to sing the song from Pocahontas I just heard. Sometimes I'd be playing with a Cassio keyboard and literally making my first beat where there's an automatic drum beat on there that's playing and I'm playing around with the keys and he's recording me and then saying, well, that's my son Ken and coming up next we're going to have a little bit of Natalie

Ambrosia with Torn and then the song would play and my aunts and uncles got the biggest kick out of this and so I started thinking I'm going to make my dad a tape. I'm going to make him. My tape, no one's ever made him one. I figured that would be something that would mean so much to him and I was like, I'm going to sneak in all this stuff of him. So he's going to hear his voice, he can hear me as a kid. Then a song he loves will come in and then I'll get thunder cat to play on top of it. I'll get Omar Apollo to sing something beautiful. That's like something my dad will pick up on.

We have a lot of inside jokes. So my dad used to do this thing where he's like, if you ever get kidnapped and there's a secret password and no one knows where to find you, just know if I say this word, that means it's really me. And we always had these stupid, hyper insane scenarios, but my dad and I have inside jokes that are written on the Louie inside covers that are for no one but him. Not the label, not my friends, I never explained them. They're stuff in the vinyl still that only my dad understands and no one else. But when I made it it it wasn't for the world. I just wanted to make him a tape and as I was doing it that was the best way I could think

to get him excited was let me bring in all my collaborators that he loves that I work up. I did a huge fan of like Vince Staples. I did a huge fan of Smeenow. He just loves certain people that I work with and I started reaching out to these people, I started making this thing, but all under the guys, I'm just going to give it to them. I'm going to make Christmas thing. And as I started making it, I've never been so emotional as to you on my life.

I made it over the course of one month, and I didn't really tell anybody. Until my managers, I was making an album, I didn't really tell anybody. I just invited people over and would explain it to the people who were there. There's people I wish were on that record, but they just were in Los Angeles that month. And I wasn't about to send it. I had to be in that room in that month. And as I started making it, I would play it for an artist who was going to help me with it or a musician who was going to play on something and they'd start talking about their brother or their mom or someone who dealt with addiction or someone who dealt with mental health issues or whatever it is in their family and I started to realize like this isn't just about me and this isn't just for me and I think part of the reason I've never made

a record and I've always made records with and for other people is I've never felt like my story particularly was super exciting anyway compared to rappers I work with, songwriters I work with, bands I work with who have been through the ringer in their lives. You know what I mean? Who have experienced and created things I could never imagine. I've always been like, I want to help amplify that. I want to tell these stories and something clicked in my brain while I was working on Louis and talking to people about their lives that this is what I meant to say. This is a record I'm meant to make.

It's about not romantic love, not intimate love, that love you have for that person who's put you through hell in your family or in your friend group or whatever, that you do love them, but you hate them and you've been through a lot of different things and I realize that if I could get that across in a way where a sample plays and it says, do you still think of me? And you don't think of your ex, you don't think of a romantic partner, you don't think of someone you wish you were together with, You think of an estranged parent. Do you still think of me hurts? And a very different way when it's a mom won't speak to anymore versus an ex from college.

You miss a different type of love and hurt and Recontextualizing all the music on there to make people think about that part of their heart was to me worthwhile. And that was the point of making that record. And it started as a gift and it just spiraled. Should we see how it starts? Go ahead, yeah. This is my dad describing my nickname. Why did people start calling me that? All of the people we all started from originally came from before. Oh, it just starts with Rich Ward. Look, Luke started with him and he used to call me Lewis

Jim. Oh, my God. And then it just progressed from there and then all of a sudden it was like then you started doing things up on my mind. Look, look what the hell was going on. When your mother capitalized on Luke, ohan, she loved blue. She warned you of blue all the time, exclusively for the rest of your life. Whereas I would switch up Leonard, and Land, Louis, but it was Louis. Your mother was straight, Louis,

or Louis. She's still to this day before. Louis, it's Louis all the way. Never letter. And boy and I were were letter picked up. And I can't, if there's some other reason for that name, I'm not aware of it. But your mother is stuck to that name.

I swear. Oh, it's a kid on that side of the truck. It's supposed to fuck up, thing of all that. Linux get it, Charles blooms the third, and there's no L anywhere in it. So how did that first track come to exist? Once I had made the gift version of this is what I want to present to my dad, had the epiphany of I'm going to make a whole record and I'm going to put this out.

This isn't just about me and my dad anymore. And then I figured out that I wanted to call it Louis. Does Louis a secret I've never let out? It's what my parents call me. Unless you're my girlfriend or someone who's a really close friend of mine and been to my house a lot. And I grew up in apartments, very embarrassed to have people over. So I didn't have a lot of friends over.

I used to go to their houses. My mom calls me Lou. My dad calls me Louie. It's this weird nickname. And that's my dad's version of the story. My mom is completely different version of why my nickname is Louie. It's based on a friend of my dad

who had a bald head. I didn't grow hair until I was three years old. I looked like Lou. They called me Lou. That's his version. As it came from his friend Rich and that it ended up. But I asked my dad to tell me the story. He didn't know I was recording him,

but I just said, Dad, why do you remember, call me Louis? It's kind of weird, because unless I'm in trouble, it's Louis. So it starts with a sample of your dad talking. Yeah. And then the panel? The panel is a sample of a record I've always loved called Brenda and me.

And there's little things I added here and there to it, but all the voices you hear at the end are some other little clips of people and my family saying my nickname and other random clips I found of the name Louis and it was just like to kind of make you feel like it's your nickname. Kind of when you hear all those people calling the name and this perfect explaining why it's the nickname that I wanted to put people right into and this person explaining why it's the nickname, I wanted to put people right into my shoes. I think just off the gate, even if you don't know who I am or you get this random cassette in the mail,

it feels like it's someone's dad talking to them, I think. And because he mentions your mom said this and done it, I feel like someone's talking to their dad. And so I feel like even if you didn't know why I made it or who I am, it puts you in parents, family. Yeah. And then when the first song comes in and you hear lyrics or you hear anything start to happen throughout the record, you're already in family.

You're not thinking about what made such a cool opening because it really leaves you with a question mark. Like if you walked into a room and heard there was someone playing piano or someone playing a record and somebody talking, it's one thing. But for this to be recorded and presented in this way, it's very jarring right out of the box of like, what am I listening to? What is this?

It made me wanna hear more and know more and understand more. Yeah, it was one of the first times I've ever focused on an intro for its function rather than its feeling. I feel like so often when I'm going through a track list with an artist or we're working on the introduction to an album, you want to set up the feeling for the rest of the record, but more than the feeling, I needed to get across some information and only my dad could do it, I felt. I felt if it was anyone else saying it, it wouldn't have been authentic,

because that makes me want to cry when I hear that. Yeah, and also the piano is so emotional. Yeah. I have a feeling if we just heard the acupella of your dad, it wouldn't necessarily feel emotional. No, no story. No, and he's got a gravely moose. But the music carries the whole emotional weight

and makes the story feel- To hold with emotion. He also, he lies in it and he very clearly lies. It's not something you need to know my family to know at the end of it. He says, your name is Kenneth Charles Bloom the third and there's not an L anywhere in it. There's an L in Charles and there's an Ellen Bloom. We have that completely wrong, but I'm leaving that in there for a reason because it's a bit of that. Is that a liar?

Or is that just wrong? It's both. I'm guessing it's more wrong than a lie. But either way, I left that in there on purpose because right off the bat, my dad's telling us, he shows you who he is. He's an unreliable narrator. Yeah. So right off the bat, it's telling you a lot about a relationship.

And when you listen to Hey Mama by Kanye, you know how he felt about his mom, I wanted to be very clear that this is not, and I love you dad album where I love my family album. This is how I feel about my family album. There's very dark moments in the album too. What do you recommend me listen to? You pick. Hold my head is a great one just to give you the feel of what this record is trying to portray. Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, my God, oh, my God, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, my God, my I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy

I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy I'm a big boy Before you came out with me It's like the world's greatest mix, too. I've really never broken down exactly who's where and who's on what.

There's moments of me singing on Dewey that no one knows where they are. There's moments of certain people playing that aren't notated. There's people who are not in the thank yous, who are on the record, and people in the thank yous who are not on the record. I've never wanted to fully break it down. The way I've broken down so much stuff I've produced. I wanted this to be heard a certain way. But when you hear Pink Seafood rapping,

it might set you up to think we're about to get a verse or a song or whatever. And then he does a piece of a verse and then goes away. We go back to a piece of the sample, we haven't heard yet, new, lear content. Then we go into an instrumental. You might hear Cory Henry come in on a road, you might hear other people playing in places,

but right off the bat I wanted people to be focused on, the feeling you're getting from the sample and the music and the artist all at the same time equally. Not an artist. The art is up here. Yeah, it never feels like this is the artist's record. Yes, it never feels like that. That was the point, it was to use everyone as an instrument,

everything as an instrument, Everything as an instrument. And I give everything equal weight. Feel alive with ancestral supplements. Organ meats are nature's multivitamin. These incredible supplements are for anyone seeking to enhance their well-being and reach their optimal health. Organ meats are high in antioxidants. They support bone health, skin health, reduce toxic load, and improve mood and memory. Made from 100% grass-fed beef liver, this supplement is loaded with essential nutrients and vitamins, including vitamin A, B12, and iron.

Unlike synthetic alternatives, ancestral supplements Grass-fed beef liver is sourced from pasture-raised grass-fed cattle in New Zealand, ensuring the highest quality and nutrient density. Elevate your health and embrace the power of nature with ancestral supplements. Join the tribe and visit ancestralsupplements.com today. When you're making it, is it intentional like, okay, I'm going to put a keyboard in this spot or like, Corey Henry plays it on the whole thing and then you pick the spot that you want to use? It was pretty intentional, but I ended up reducing a lot. I ended up having people play on stuff and really like I want to let this be a way. And like there's even a moment on a song called Get Around where it's basically every single take I did of one of my favorite artists is Ka-Dijon.

Every single take I took of Dijon singing is on the song. So I didn't spare anything. He didn't really have a specific melody. He was doing for a while or a specific thing he was doing. But if you were to take everything away from that acapella, you'd hear every mistake he made, every single other thing he think that didn't fit together, things that are out of tune with each other. But all of him is on top of that sample and it created a feeling. Did we listen to that one? Yeah, go ahead. It gave the sample a whole new feeling to it. What's it called?

Get around. Now you love me, banter. Hey! I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach.

I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out.

I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try it out. I, it's in the sample. It only says it once or twice, but it 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 hurts. That one always hurt a lot, making it really did.

I love it. Me too. Yeah. I 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 with it. There are no stakes. All that is is just this is a

pure expression of love really. Yeah. There's no expectation for to do anything. No, 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. And 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 went 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. Like 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 with 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 billions of dollars, been a platinum plaque, got a Grammy nomination. Anything I've ever done in my career is, I've never had anything I've done for anyone that's made billions 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.

Yeah. 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. And 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 of 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. It's 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. So 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 them 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 I've been really writing so long as you and I've been talking about this yet But I've been I've been in lyrics for a couple of years. Which you never really did before. Never did. 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 sentence, but in rap even the times were 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 But 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 like doing something you haven't done before, songwriting.

I feel like I'll be around 22 year olds who 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. But 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? Yeah.

Now, I kind of like, when I see something in someone's face that I know people see in my face when I 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 I 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 and plaques and blah, blah, blah, blah. But 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 the 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 a 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. I think Jodie will hear this and be like, man, like you're going to a whole new length since the 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. I think that song will do really well. I think this song's going to be great for that artist. She did a great job.

Not really 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. 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. And what she said to me at the time I was like me and 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 the ladies 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, that'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 done anything, you know what I mean? That's had this kind of success for this, for that, the record I made for me. Yeah. And when Jody said that to me, I don't know if I fully believe or if 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 listen to it and it's like, well, this is the best album he's ever made. I, by far, no comparison, by far. And in his mind and in the company's mind, this was 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 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.

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 network. 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, because I can get so many perspectives on so many sides of things.

Some I agree with, some 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 should 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 wrap records and they're going to do their first record. But I don't know. I didn't have anyone in my ear about it. And now I think

it's 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.

If 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. Element Electrolikes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function. Experience an increase in steady energy

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LMNT In less I'm making a decision in the moment to make it better. Like I played you some music in progress today. And that's the first time I heard it probably since we recorded it. I don't ever listen to it because I don't want to have ideas that I'm not going to execute now. It's like I don't want to think about it. It doesn't exist. Until we're in the room and it's like, okay, I'm not going to execute now. It's like, I don't want to think about it. It doesn't exist. Until we're in the room and it's like, okay, now we're going to finish it.

Then we listen to it and make the decisions and do it, but I don't want to get used to it at all. I want to 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. And 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 he made like seven to ten percent

better. It's not what it needed to be. Like me and Denzel 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 in like a week and a half span of just, we would wake up and go back to the studio every day. And 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 because when I theorize too much It's my over think shit. That's when I start to like going on it or wonder about other them because when I theorize too much, it's my overthink shit. That's when I start to 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

still going to 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 who were like, oh, I hear a melody in the shower, and then I go to the studio two hours later and make it, unless 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 DJing and when did you start? 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 a name out there, and everyone was thinking I was doing really well because I had me and Mac Miller, and me and SchoolboyQ posted on my Facebook, I'm working with all these rappers, I was making about a thousand dollars a beat, like $1200 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 is 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 music schools about. I played guitar my whole life and only started making beats around 15. So I always knew like drums and guitar and music was gonna be the thing, but I got to Berkeley and the first day walked into the guitar floor and there was a kid on the floor playing something. While 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 snap-o 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. Yeah, 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 gonna be able to support myself. It's also a real difference in the head between being a technically great player and creating music. There was a 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, you know, an open mic night or something at a bar or this or that. Like, so I work to play in a symphony orchestra or something. Which to be the chair at the New York Philharmonic, there's about 100,000 people who are trying to go for your job and there's probably some Russian kid

who's done nothing but play violin his entire life was gonna get that job. And it's still, and to live in New York City on that salary would be really hard, you know? 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.

And 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 808. I would try to do something that was a bass, 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 bowler. So 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. Is there anything like that today?

I don't think so. Nothing that's not already super monetized and has a million DMCA strikes. If you put up something that has a million DMCA strikes. If you put up something that has a Drake, Acapella in it, you're getting taken down in two seconds. We were in the Wild West where you go on SoundCloud, steal anything, flip anything, rip anything,

and it would stay up. You couldn't necessarily monetize it, but you could definitely... No, but it 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.

Yeah, 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. Yeah. They told me, my friend, 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.

The kids say, how? If you were going to Spotify I have to put it on Spotify. The 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. Dig in the way that you looked for records. It was so to dig again. Digging away from the duck for records. It was so much fun.

And I don't think there's any less validity to digging through links than records. I'd say 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 trying 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. How old were you at the time? I was 21 years old. Yeah. 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 sound cloud up and instantly someone hits me and it's like, yo, would you be able to play a show in DC next weekend? Somebody blah, 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. You know what 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 had 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.

It 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. Mm. This is, because there's some stuff on the radio that's good for. You don't feel like has any credibility. And even regardless of like a label and payola

and all the things that work in radio, it's like if something's gonna play be played on the radio a ton, it's 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? A MIDI keyboard, a logic pro, and 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 I played instruments. If I was at a studio that knew I had 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 had a degree from Berkeley in 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. But all these songs are coming up. All these people start playing them. 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 I'll play a bunch of my songs I'll play other songs and they seem 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 And I didn't know that because I was just figuring it out from seeing people slowly and getting booked my first gigs, so I was not 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. Who the fuck is 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. I don't know these guys. I don't know the ladies.

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, like 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 in these electronic eyes.

It was almost a financial thing. It was from my grow 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. I 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 dubstep 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 Kettie Beats people know now, I started to realize I got really deep into a scene that I didn't holy love with my whole heart the way other people did

I love the rap part of it. Well, that's what made you special The 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. Yeah 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. And I was making this electronic music for the first time. I would chop up these rare ac capellas that I had from studios, old songs,

I had school-wake-cue 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 it, as 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. And right, and you're still producing the whole time. Yeah. Welcome to the House of Macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood.

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the house of macadamias. I roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate Visit house of macadamia's dot com slash tetra Did 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 pass. And by the way, if you weren't getting paid, you'd still be doing it. You just have to get paid doing something. Well, I need to pay rent. Well, I don't think there's no rent to get paid. 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 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? What 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 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 this I was an intern at deaf jam while I owned it to get school credit So I'm saying like I was doing anything I could just 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. And this was 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. But this has been such a like 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 want to do in music and how do I want to 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 and is making music and is close to what I want to 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? And 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. It's 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 thing started to feel like, boom. And it's like, you guys don't love this. I 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,

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? I think I am in my brain or did I do some beats in my late teens, early 20s? And then now this I 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 Bauderoo and Coachella, some of the biggest sets in the world, the biggest DJs in the world playing my stuff. I do not take it lightly and I'm very gracious about it. 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. There's no amount of success that, you know what I mean, can override that feeling. And 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

in the shows immediately stopped is because there was zero money coming in from this new venture. I was about to start of 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, I think 2016, where I had a thousand000 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 I was gonna pay rent, pay car payment, pay whatever it was I had to deal with

at the time, and I just got a beat to this rapper from Atlanta. And 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 when we come back to the 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 the year after that, then you're a hundred songs produced by me came out. And once I got one, I just didn't let go and I would not leave that studio and 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 Blink one eighty two 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'll 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? And they go, that's a great idea. And I was like, I'm out. I'm gonna go work with 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. You know, 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. All 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 at 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. I don't think I would have ever had a live focus. Did you ever think about like,

oh man, I'm working on all these different records and 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. Yeah. 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. It's like, as a producer, that path isn't normally carved out for you. You 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 or that path isn't normally carved out for you. You make the music, and then you see the music enjoyed, and to be able to be onstage, 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 onstage, 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 and 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. Yeah.

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 it's like and kind of the I guess the internet now is what you think about when you think about like when people hear this and they react where are they going to react how are they going to react are you 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. And you see a song that you performed and there's 300 kids, 3,000 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 you're cool. It's like, that can last you of like when you're when you're a young kid and 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, 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, you know what I mean? So you can... That's a great idea.

In a couple of years, I've seen this thing. 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. 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, and where it 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. Like 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. Yeah, completely. The day before even. Yeah. You know what I mean? It might even be like, if it's someone who's playing a stadium, it could be a week. You know what I mean? I'll round to that where their head is there, you know?

But yeah, there's a group I work with, 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 in the art. 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 the 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 the DJ. But because it's like, it's so natural now. I'm playing five festivals this week. It's like what you learn about music

and different parts of the world, 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 sling and what it is that makes that niche thing.

What it is, like when you go to a show it's obvious it's obviously in the outfits obviously in the reactions it's obvious and like the staff the setup of it the lineups you know if you learned 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 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. And 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. You 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 release, 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. And 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. And telling people how good it is along the way. And, 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, a great. 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.

You 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 your 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, and I should post it out into the room. It's like, that's not gonna help you get better. So much of today's life happens on the web.

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Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. I 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 a bit of a kind 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. I mean, it's a, it's a, 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 old at this point. 100,000 songs a day. When I was, interning 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 do. 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. Isn't it?

It turned out that I went to kindergarten through 12th grade with the daughter of the president of Sony Music and never knew this. Her and I would talk about my chemical romance and science class. I mean, it was the only girl I knew who I could talk about bands with. Actually friend I knew my homies were played sports and shit were listening to like Cisco in the thong song they were not paying attention to like taking back Sunday or whatever this girl 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. And that just luck. It was just luck I just went to school with her. Public school. You 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 thorn one when I was like 17. So funny. And I stopped him as an intern and I was like, oh 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, the assistant I worked under was a guy named John Eman and John went on to manage A.Seprache, sign Lana Del Rey, became this unbelievable guy, still a great friend. And then his boss, who I would have to answer the phones for was Larry Jackson. Who 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. Who 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 a lot in New York City

and shout out to Austin Rose and you used to give me a ton of studio time as a young kid and currency would be at the studio. Nipsy Hussle would be at the studio. All these different rappers, I was huge fans of were 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 and, I'm always in the city, anything you need at any time,

I'm there, I know one knows more about your artist, no 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 commerceverse, you know what I mean? Like, yeah. Only girl who had like a studied belt, you know. 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.

I 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, jamit, 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 what pose her meant. And I was like, what the fuck? And he's like, she said you can't skate. I know. He explained it in his way. But she was like, while you were in 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 that day at 13. I decided I would be 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? At 14 years old, to try to figure out who played condos

on a fucking Billy Cobb them thing that my dad had. 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 just with the access they have now. Kids have had their dillifays, their Elliot Smith phase and their whatever they're, their Rick Rubin phase by the time they're 17 years old.

And then they're like, nah, now I don't know what to make. Everything's 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 I think it's still carrying on, Whitney, shout out to her. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Never 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, but in the course of your life, these are insignificant things. One minute. 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 and I'm five so in a you know maybe a little early 70s let's say and they had a little turntable and some albums they had different albums in the albums that were in my house so I would anytime I would go to house, I would just hang out and listen to music. That's all I would do. But you're 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, and just sit and listen to music.

Because it was hard to get in those days. I used to buy CDs based on what had more songs, because it gave me more to listen to, because I buy that one CD. If I had 18 versus 16 songs, that's it. I'm hungry. It's more for me to listen 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. It's like, okay, and turn 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. Yeah. And in my life as a record producer,

I wanted to make sure I could hear what the high hat was doing. Off-handed comment, by a 20-year-old kid in a rock band to a little kid, seed planted. I'm 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. You know, and it's like, yeah, it's ever since 16. Yeah, I had a revelation just recently. I would say in past few weeks that all it's about is rhythm. And 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. 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 that anybody else playing it just because of his feel. And Robert Glassberg has said the same thing to me about Chris Dave. Yeah. You know, 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 Christav. And I realize it's everything. Christav's the master of it. It's for sure. But it's not just Christav. 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 a laptop versus grew up listening to music, recording music to tape, whatever.

I see swing and bounce visually. I grew up with a grid, I grew up with visual music. It's a 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.

I knew that even young, but then I started to have my phases with Mad Lib or have my phases with like records you produce so many different things and 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'd put the song in my DAW, into my program, and I'd look at the drums against the grid. So, I'd look at the tempo, I'd put the song in the right tempo, and then I'd look at where the snares and where the drums sit versus where the grid is. And if you look at it, like what people call Dilla swing, Dilla swing is in between what people used to call like straight feel and swung feel.

And swung feel is dependent on a triplet and straight feel is dependent on like a straight four count. Dill is somewhere in the middle where there's certain things that are on and there's certain things that are late. But for me to understand how to create Dill's stuff, it wasn't always like, let me sit with an NPC and play till 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, 1-128th, 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. Like, it is because whenever you get that far you see, okay, the kick is exactly on the grid, the snare is 1 2 56th ahead, most of the time, categorically. And the hi-hat is 1 1 28th behind, or two grid spaces when I'm zoomed in to 1 1 2828. 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. Or there would be around producers sometimes where like certain producer would be doing all the beats for a certain person from a certain region or 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 high hat on every beat. And I was going to work with the rapper that he always worked with that weekend. He was like, bro, you use this high hat, he's getting on anything.

And I was like, what do you mean, though? There's so many other factors that could turn someone on or off from an instrumental. And he's like, trust me, if this high hat's in it, he's getting on it. He sent me a beat that we made that had the high hat in it. And I realized his high hat just had a bunch of space before the actual sample.

So in 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 high hat and it wasn't perfect. There was a little bit of air. It was like sampling a drum break in 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's almost never perfect. If it's perfect, it's not interesting.

None of the iconic ones are. And even when you talk about like categorically, things are rushed or categorically, things are ahead. If you look at funky drummer Clyde Stubbefield, if you look at the Amen 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 got to be in the playing, that's got to be in the programming now. So if you're trying to program something and you're wondering why like your drums are hitting, it's not always the volume of them, like you're saying. It's the feel. It's the feel. The slight imperfections in the rhythm. Yeah.

Interesting talking about singing. I remember those working went on, 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. Well, 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, like 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. Had made it this paramount thing of like the take of all of us together is go away, we make the magic. It's like you're saying it's this like thing between us that's intangible. 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. It's not like it's just the way they combine that. Yeah, 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,

it's like, 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 band 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 being able to look at it and say, look at where he's at, look where the kick drums at, put 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, this far back. It's like you're combining to make up, because things are like, a kick can be this far forward, this far back. It's like you're combining to make up, they're making something new when you put two sets 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. And 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, Pinopaladino 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, very favorite. It's part of Top 3. Yeah, for life. Yeah.

Doesn't get better. No, it doesn't. It just really 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, like I hate when people take what Quest said out of context,

though, because there's moments we speak about that. They're right. They say about it. You talked about playing drunk. And I don't know if you've seen Dan Charnas' book, Dilletime, but Dilletime debunks the whole theory that this feel and 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 plane 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 or because 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, that'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 failing.

Yeah, 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. Yeah 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 drunk and style.

But in the same way that in Kung Fu, drunk and style, that doesn't mean drunk. It just means it's not where you expect it to be. He could say whatever you want, it's when people who go to make something and that's not approach it without the respect, you 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'll, it's not that. It's not that at all. It's never that. No.

But mix wise, sonically, the songwriting, the feel, it's like, 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, always. Yeah. Couldn't help. Well, I mean drums are paramount, right? It's like in a lot of the greatest rock records, you listen to them, you'd be like, oh, this record hits really hard. But if you think about yourself doing it, I would have the drums way louder on so much stuff.

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 louder, 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 not in a rap stuff, it's just not, it ain't gonna work. And most of, most things. The very first rock record I made was the cult, the cult electric. And I remember I was working with an engineer, a much more experienced engineer. I was a kid in school. Andy Wallace was mixing. And he would get the mix together, and we would work on mix together.

He would mainly get the mix together. And then when the mix was finished, I would turn the kick drum up maybe 60 bees for every song. And it's like, okay, now it's done. Yeah. And 60 bees 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. I have to show that. That feels like major in certain circumstances. For sure. I've heard that though. They say a lot of things. They say you can't hear over 20,000.

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 between

noises and if you cut all the 18K, 20K, this 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. You might not be able to tell me 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 and you play it on a Stadium level speaker side, it's gonna sound insanely fucked up. It's like it's almost like you could 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, I don't know like that hearing test is a real scary thing. You ever done the, uh, mmm, yeah. So it's getting to 14k and things are getting real quiet. It's maybe should have worn more earphones than some of these DJ gigs. Yeah.

I think there's a way to get them back. I was just recently researching because clearly I have some iron 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. EAS, 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 is the loudest rubber you've ever heard your entire life is doing it for 15 years and I worry about

buddies of mine, you know what I mean? Because it affects how you make stuff and it's like you know, I've had people complain me stuff before where it's like You know, like you're not hearing this well enough. Oh, it sounds insane. It was so tinny in like sharp and like Man, it's smartly it gets so worried. I just made my managers get in years like protective ones because then walking me up on stages, being on the stages, it's like you guys aren't any less in front of giant monitors than I am. And you're not protecting yourselves at all.

It's even if you're not a music-making person, it's like you're gonna want that. We used to listen so loud at the studio, I don't really do that anymore No, it 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 anyway. Really? It's on purpose. Yeah, you have to build a focus on it What is a 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. It'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 Coinsiding 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 gonna be on stream at this time, everybody alerts the discord, and then you have a ton of people that show up for your stream. So we just started my Twitch stream

and my Discord at the same time, and took control of that. 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 are you doing it? Up to four or five times a week for a couple hours of time. I mean, yeah, there was nowhere to go. There's 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. So 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. We had such 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 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 other. Can you still do those as well? No, not even the YouTube. Yeah, I've never said I won't bring it back, but we've not done it in years.

And have you not done it since the Twitch and Discord? Well, your Twitch took over. And it wasn't plausible the film episodes of the cave 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 donuts 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. Everything 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 had the thing I had a deal with Twitch. Everything was, I just hadn't signed the deal. So we signed it, we set the cameras up. And before everybody else could make this lead to like,

oh, I'm gonna stream, all we're gonna 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 gonna be yet, but I was like, I know we're gonna be stuck in the house. How much of Twitch's music versus video games and other stuff? 3%, 5%.

Yeah, maybe, anything else besides video games, are there other 3%? Yeah, there's, 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 is now this huge thing now, where 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. There's people sleeping on Twitch and people watching that and setting 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. If 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, I 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 know that it was a donation sound. And I was like, please, whatever you do, just don't fucking make that beep. I had the speakers on and the studio really loud. It keeps beeping, but they kept doing what? So then 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. There'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 and one hour. And whoever makes the best beat, one hour gets a synth, gets a drum machine, gets a plug-in. And so we had, we gave away over $300,000 worth of gear on Twitch in the beat 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 XL 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. His name's DVR. A kid named Not Charles got a publishing deal after he won a beat battle and there was an A&R

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 deal. I'm not coming in and saying, well, you know, 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, 100,000, 135,000 people, the only discord bigger than my discord was Travis Scott. And 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 transphobia. Who checks that? How does that work? 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. I mean, I even just wanted to... And is there a service you can hire that does that?

And not that I know of? You gotta just find the people. Fans started coming to us like, I'd love to mod for you and mod for other discords. 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, legally 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 discourse all texts, they're just typing and posting pictures and stuff and links, no matter where that is, if I go talk about this right now with you,

and some kids like me and 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. So it wasn't like me, this like random white producer, doing me, and 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 was sending us stuff, they would start to talk to me about like, hey, I'm working on this product or hey, we're developing this piece of software. Do 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 wanna 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've tested all of this. And I would do this or I hate it. Of course. Or I don't, yeah,, 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 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 see me learn even though it was there wasn't all just like This that you do stuff. I would you would you talk to the audience when you do this?

Yeah, just doing it. I was just talking to them a whole time and to be honest You 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 pair of 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. And 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 to strike 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. Oh this is what someone's going to think, which is something you would have talked about, not how I make music. No. And it's dangerous. Danger. So, at first, I felt, oh, I've watched so much of people's opinions on me for a month, and 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 days. And it's during the lockdown as well. It's been, 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, Ares designed my Twitch, who designed the cave and would change the emotes out and handle the discord. It's like we built this thing all together. And once I started realizing that it was hindering the music I was making, I'm doing them a disservice by staying alone, because the only reason kids care about what I'm talking about is what I've done in music.

No one's gonna come in there and listen to me talk shit about anything if I had made all the records I've made. That's what the validity is, 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, I talking about what I did. You know, and so that's what got me off of there. And I, 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, whereas 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. I want to be 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. And 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 make that, I 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 people. Teach someone to fish. Yeah. I never... 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, that's what it is.

It's helping people stay in the fun place or the prolific place. 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. It's 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 barely have the extra money to spend on Twitter, get to 5,000 followers overnight, and have all these people collaborating with me, and messaging me six months later, like, yo man, I have my own studio now,

like I did it, this has happened in droves on Twitch, and it's like some of the most important things I've ever done in my life. And it's maybe realized like what my further path is beyond the music that I will make. And it's- When you're at a point where you can either make the music you want to make and not be impacted

by reading the comments. Yeah. Or when you're done making music and just want to teach. You're set. I'll never be done making music, but there will be a point where it's like, that's where the majority of my energy will go is to helping those people cross that threshold of like a forever music person. I have a question having never seen Twitch. Would it be possible for you

to do what you did on Twitch and not look at the comments or turn them off for yourself? No, it wouldn't be because so much of the understanding, it's like answering questions, these kids helped me way more than I helped them. Like they helped me understand, even just like little small things of just being like, all right guys, we need more queer and female producers in here about Kenny, it's women producers.

That's not how you say it, that 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 plug-in, 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, was 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 aren't 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 resource and I would really take the time to like read these things and try to answer it as best I could because it's like, you know, y'all just gave me four tips yesterday that literally got me placements or literally I was in a room in some studio in L.A. yesterday and I did that thing and it's like, you know, y'all just gave me four tips yesterday that literally got me placements. Or literally I was in a room in some studio in LAS today and I did that thing and everybody was like, whoa, and 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 artist that I would have known

about in two seconds had I been on there there's There'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 where some kid goes, can you hear 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 produced 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? It's like they did so much for me that me get some companies

to give you all some play. There's 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 chord 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? Why 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 never. And like that to me is so interesting. And I found it off a fluke of like, y'all do this content thing because quarantine's fucked up and it turned into the most important thing I've done to music. Yeah. Thank you. you