How I Became A Beatmaker (By Watching Other People Make Beats)

I’ve been in love with rap production since I was a pre-teen. Outside of generally scratching the musical itches in my brain, I grew to admire the ingenuity and skill required to take something old, through sampling or interpolation, and truly make it your own. Plenty of songs coast by on iconic melodies and drum patterns with the barest possible embellishment, and a good amount of those songs aren’t worth the potential cease-and-desist, but even those only come from having the taste to recognize an earworm when you hear one. My favorite producers, people like Q-Tip, Madlib, and Fat Jon, are all capable of scrambling samples into shapes that move and breathe differently than their source material while also knowing when it’s time to loop it and leave it. 

I grew up around music, playing instruments (piano, bass, djembe), singing in choirs and school musicals, and noodling with production software like GarageBand and FruityLoops like many bored teenagers in the early aughts. In late 2025, ideas started floating through my head in ways they hadn’t since I first taught myself to play N.E.R.D.’s “Happy” on the piano, and I felt the itch to create for the first time in ages. I started a payment plan for an SP-404 MKII and began studying old and new favorites more closely than I ever had while I waited for the sampler to show up at my door. I could’ve just started cutting shit up in GarageBand, but you can’t hear stories of how Madvillainy came together with nothing more than an SP-303 and a dinky record player, or Dilla chopping up the beats for Donuts on an SP-1200 from his deathbed, and not want to try that for yourself. Similarly to how listening to music on a device made solely for it like an iPod or CD player is a different experience than doing it on your phone, I wanted to feel the pads and buttons at my fingertips and not think of anything else. 

Workflow basics of the machine came to me fairly quickly, but what really pushed me over the edge was seeing other producers share their own workflows and tricks on social media and in breakdown videos. I had my own ideas, but, like any fledgling creator, some part of me just wanted to *be* Knxwledge or Nottz. Seeing Knxwledge tinkering with his machines in his recent HEAR EVERYTHING documentary with Audio-Technica or rewatching old Pete Rock interviews and episodes of Rhythm Roulette—Mass Appeal’s web series where producers create beats from samples pulled from three random records picked while blindfolded—gave me the confidence and hot tips to try what worked for the pros and stumble on my own quirks and workarounds to make music closer to my vision.

Earlier this week, producer Kenneth Blume (fka Kenny Beats) made a sharp counterargument to my approach while on Instagram Live. “We’re gatekeeping again. Stop telling people how you made your music. Being able to figure out how someone made your favorite song in five minutes ruins your favorite song.” He cites YouTube and TikTok production breakdowns of artists like Tame Impala and Mk.gee as a net negative to creators everywhere, and encourages up-and-comers to just figure it out on their own “instead of watching six more tutorials…and using everything in those tutorials and wondering why your beats don’t feel special to you.” 

This stance is interesting coming from Blume, a stylistic chameleon and longtime working professional who didn’t gain the profile he has now until creating his now-defunct The Cave series, where he made beats in 10 minutes for a rapper/vocalist of the week and had them perform over it, and participating in shows like Rhythm Roulette and live streams on Twitch. To his credit, many inside jokes on The Cave revolved around him hiding particular plug-ins and sample choices (one of my favorites is Alchemist taunting eagle-eyed viewers on how much they could learn from Blume's videos), but even with the blurs and omissions, Blume’s DAW was usually on display, bits of musical data stretched and clipped for his audience to see clear as day.

Of course, I understand the basis of Blume’s argument. After years of, inadvertently or not, giving up the goose, he believes seeing a song broken down to the atoms sours the experience. Also, while we all have our influences, they can atrophy into imitation if left unchecked—why would I want to listen to a million Metro Boomin, Pi’erre Bourne, or Alchemist clones when I could just listen to the original? One of the biggest curses of the internet democratizing our lives is being inundated with so much stuff all the time, and music is particularly guilty of fitting the cookie-cutter molds encouraged by that saturation. However, I disagree with the notion of burgeoning talent needing to go all warrior-monk and lock themselves in a monastery with a computer or a beat machine until they reemerge with something resembling a unique sound. 

Behind-the-scenes content can often be as exciting and inspiring as the music it’s documenting. How many countless beatmakers would we potentially lose if the documentary about Jay-Z’s The Black Album never happened? Would a veteran MC discourage an upstart from watching Rakim explain his writing process in Ice-T’s Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap because it ruins the magic of “Follow The Leader”? Music tech in 2026 is more pick up and play than ever, but I’m sure Blume’s young fans himself felt more confident approaching whatever gear they were interested in after seeing the process laid out for them. Talent can persist through a lot, but it can’t be properly cultivated in a vacuum. 

There’s also the context in which Blume is using the word “gatekeep.” The implication in his video is of a revoking of access, a pulling up of the ladder. Not everyone is built to be a self-taught musician who comes out of the box fully formed; not everyone is some genre-defying savant ready to reconfigure the musical landscape with their every move; and not everyone has the resources and time to endlessly noodle in the first place. It’s also not lost on me that this is a white man talking about gatekeeping after attaining success within a Black artform—a whole different layer of problematic. I understand wanting to control the flow of your influence and not see a million biters in the world, but there’s a difference between conducting a masterclass and giving out a few pointers every once in a while. 

@feardorian1 sorry had to repost this - here’s the breakdown for the beat i made for tezzus & diamond* lyrical lemonade lunchbreak freestyle #fyp #tezzus #diamond #producertok #lyricallemonade ♬ original sound - Zim

That argument is different from the one about taste, which Blume is also scraping against a bit in his post. Gatekeeping for taste and quality is a more sound approach than for whether or not someone figured out how to re-create specific hi-hat patterns or what button to press to add the vinyl crackle. In his piece for Pigeons & Planes called “In Defense of Gatekeepers,” Jon Tanners contextualizes taste making within the confines of the blog era. Starting by referencing a Henry Dumas short story where white music fans elbow their way into a venue only to literally be killed by the potency of the music they’re obsessed with, he reflects on what being laughed out of legendary record store Fat Beats for being a white guy in love with Jurassic 5 records did to his ego: “This kind of friction can freeze you. It can also motivate you to push past inertia; an inertia that stops you from getting better at making music, from learning more about the history of music, that prevents you from stepping fully into yourself.” 

In Tanners’s eyes, this was an eye-opening experience that reaffirmed his love of the game, a chance for him to “recognize [he] disliked a gatekeeper’s taste, allowing [him] to define [his] own in contrast.” How does a potential artist do the knowledge if that knowledge is locked behind a door? Short of plagiarism or feeding someone’s music into an AI model, the threat of being usurped shouldn't be a deterrent to ensuring other artist's futures. I’m not saying every single producer needs to be an open book, but Blume’s iteration of gatekeeping, as laid out in that video, is reductive, never mind struggling against a tide he helped popularize.

I’ve had my ups and down as I’ve progressed further into beatmaking over the last 10 months. As a critic and journalist, it’s given me perspective on how tedious and frustrating the process can be and has helped me pick out intricacies I might’ve missed in production otherwise. My ideas have been scrapped mid-song or tweaked in post-production several times over. Some have come together in under 20 minutes; others have taken days to finalize. I dropped my first beat tape on Bandcamp on April 4 for 404 Day, and have dropped two more tapes since. The first time I played beats live, I was invited to back my friend Michael—the rapper, producer, and collagist known as Big Flowers—during a show at a bar in Brooklyn, and the feedback I got from the crowd was reassuring. I’ve earned a few placements, including one for a song called "Trippin !" featuring Detroit rapper-producer Nolan The Ninja and Los Angeles’s IceColdBishop, and am currently negotiating others; I’ve also submitted beats to established artists during TikTok listening sessions just for kicks, only for my work to be chided and laughed out of the chat.

I’ve come to this with a musical background, but I’m not perfect. None of this would’ve happened if I wasn’t able to work from the template I saw those who came before me build. Most people who pick up a creative hobby usually start out by imitating someone. If you’re bold enough to lean into it, and become assured enough to grow out of it, you might just land on something you love.