Man, Dr. Dre just inspired me so much. Just him personally, outside of music, too. You know, him doing the whole Beats thing… People like him, they set the bar high for me to set the bar even higher, you know? It’s more than just music when it comes to building a foundation and building your empire.
Everyone thinks you have to grow up to know who you are, but kids already know who we are. The world just beats it out of us.
With ‘5 Boroughs,’ we were each working on beats, sitting in front of our laptops and samplers.
I’m no longer the young guy in No I.D.’s studio asking for Kanye beats.
When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.
Everything in my life has been about sound and making music, so Beats represents just that – the improvement of sound and the dedication to everything I’ve been doing from the day I started.
Future’s the guy, like, where, if I send him some beats while he on the road, and there’s a pack of beats that he really like, if there’s a new vibe or new wave, he’s like, ‘Man, keep feeding me more. Feed me more of this every day.’
I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that’s when I started rapping.
It’s interesting because all I want to do is make music. I want to sit in my room, play the guitar, make beats, sing… And I have never made less music than when being a musician became my job.
I really like Caravan Palace’s electro swing stuff. They incorporate the electronic, but when you see them live, they’re all on stage playing live music. They’re all playing their instruments. They drop these beats with the DJs that are so incredible.
I like playful beats, xylophones, whimsical sounds of Bobby Johnson productions.
I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.
News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It’s a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.
The majority of people, especially young people, know Dr. Dre because of Beats by Dre, not necessarily from him being a rap artist.
Writing is like driving a car. Writing the beats of a screenplay? It’s like driving a rover on Mars. You have to be absolutely, extremely precise.
In about seventh grade, that’s when we started playing around with beats, rhymes.
I’ve never had vocal training. No one could ever say that they helped me carve what my voice has become. It’s just been more of self-training: me just continuously going into the studio every night and trying out different beats.
Winning isn’t everything, but it beats anything that comes in second.
But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.
Sometimes you’re with a producer who just makes beats and you can kinda do your thing to whatever beats they come up with. But sometimes you get with a producer who really produces you and the music together, not just the beat then you can kinda throw in your ideas and vibe off each other.
You know what my grandmother said, eventually: ‘When a man beats you, he doesn’t like you. He has women issues and it starts probably with their mothers.’ And I said ‘You’re probably right.’
A lot of people have been sending me beats, I’ve just been getting it in.
I’m a small-time white kid trying to represent hip-hop. If a hip-hop artist comes up and beats me in a battle, who did they beat? A small-town white kid who ain’t never been an MC, who ain’t never done nothing. Now if an MC comes to battle and they get beat by a small-town white boy, that’s MC suicide.
Part of my growth as a producer was not just about making beats but also helping in the process of inspiring the song and making the song the center.
Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.
I definitely feel excited to be able to put really hard beats – like hip-hop beats – behind my music, more than I did before.
I’m always home, doing nothing, making beats, and watching movies.
‘Kudi Maga’ is a pub-style song, but the lyrics are really nice and the beats are catchy.
Mumford and Sons and Adele are both incredible artists and are great for popular music. There’s a lot of club music with heavy beats, so to have that Mumford record and hear banjos being used is so cool.
With today’s technology, you can actually see the baby grow, move, and hear their little heart beats.
Before Mustard was even making beats, he was my DJ. He was doing all my shows with me before I was even cracking, back in, like, ’08, ’09.
When I made ‘Real,’ I recorded it over the phone in prison. I did it in a week. I had no idea what it was going to sound like. I couldn’t even listen to the masters before it came out, I couldn’t listen to 90% of the beats. I recorded 21 songs in seven days.
I was working for Johnny Shipes in New York when I was 17 years old, getting beats off.
High reputation beats high similarity.
Rick Ross has good beats, if some more questionable content.
Despite being an ocean apart, New York’s ESG and France’s Lizzy Mercier Descloux were shooting for roughly the same idea: disco beats with a rough and energetic presentation.
I feel like with a lot of Madlib’s beats, they are made for storytelling. I feel like when I’m working on stuff with him, I can really get into the storytelling aspect mode of my flow.
Pale Death beats equally at the poor man’s gate and at the palaces of kings.
What people would qualify as R&B is, for me, just soul. And I love honesty and soul and heavy, crunchy beats that move you and make you breathe a little bit faster.
In music, four is the number that every measure is – four by four, four beats to every measure. The number four is a sense of completion, almost.
When I was younger, I was a rave kid trapped inside a singer/songwriter’s body. But I kind of figured my way out because I started making these really terrible beats on this Yamaha keyboard that my parents got me for my 10th birthday.
Bill Ward, when you hear his beats, he’s not just playing a straight 4/4 beat; he’s doing almost a hip-hop beat. There’s a song called ‘Sweet Leaf.’ The drum beat that he’s playing, he’s trying to kind of swing and funkify it. Now, is he doing a great job of it? Maybe not. Maybe.
Once Cristiano beats my record, I will personally congratulate him.
It’s really important to me that my sound is a combination of beats and melody. I love hearing strong, confident beats in music because I love to dance. At the same time, melody is really important to me because I love singing.
Without Metallica, I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing. I have every Metallica record, of course, and I would spend hours on drums in my parents’ basement with the stereo behind me, cranking those records and learning Lars’ drum beats, beat by beat.
There’s very little synthesized sound in the ‘Arrival’ score. There are a couple of synthesized beats in there, but 99 percent of the sounds in there are acoustic in origin and either played or sung by a musician or a singer and recorded in a room.
When Zaytoven and Future are working together, then Future’s not working on no other tracks, and Zaytoven’s not making no beats for nobody but Future.
Nothing beats looking out to a sweaty, packed house full of fans.
You get the beats. You write to them. You go in the studio and lay it down. Hopefully, a song comes out sounding good. If it comes out sounding good, you put it to the side with the rest of the other good ones, and you try to decide which ones you’re gonna use on the album.
‘Who Do You Love’ was kinda cool to make. I just made the beat; I was self-determined to make beats at the time.
I’ve been going to Europe for some time on the festival circuit, and once you get in that element and see others reacting to it, it’s easier to understand. You get trapped in the wave. The beats are driving and super-aggressive – like, so hard. I was curious.
Cincinnati beats you up for three days, and all of a sudden it’s doom and gloom. I cannot live my life that way.
Lyrics over some nice beats – that’s what the people want from us.
I grew up listening to bachata, to some of the greats of the genre. But it was very natural for me to create this type of fusion and to incorporate new beats.
It’s not that what LCD Soundsystem and Juan MacLean do is necessarily simple, but they are basic loops and beats and songs that are just pleasurable in a really basic way.
I’ve seen many great performers on stage, from Dean Martin to Celine Dion, but nothing beats the first time I saw Elvis. There was no pomp, no pyrotechnics, nothing to distract you from the raw talent of the man in the white jumpsuit.
My music is airy; it’s spacious. It requires you to be able to rap and articulate your message over it. That’s what the beat demands of you. Not a lot of people try to rap over my beats because it’s a bit of a task.
When I was in middle school, that’s when I first started making beats. I was maybe 14, 16, something like that.
Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.
