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.