What Inspired You To Become a Beatmaker / Producer?

[Monts! ter®]

Was it something you fell into by mistake? Were your parents music figures in the industry while you were growing up? Is it something you always wanted to do or were you born to do it. Devine Intervention? Whatever it was tell us what got you started and why you do what you do.

[The Product]

To be honest, besides my family, music is the one thing that really drives me. I can do the 9-5 thing, but music is where I wanna be. I've been in it some way or another since I was a kid. I was the dude banging on the lunch room table at lunchtime for the rappers, so ever since then... I've been in love with music.

[Monts! ter®]

I feel you Roomy, I was the same guy in school that was making beats on the walls in the hallway and banging on the cool kids table while they rapped...they wasnt even battling just freestyling. So in essencem you are still a kid at heart..in the music. Thank you for sharing how you was inspired.

[D.Q.]

It was my Mom. She's behind it all. She bought an old piano from our church and took my sibling and I to piano lessons. I was 13 yrs old at the time. I didn't actually get in to production until probably 1998. I met a christian rapper at my church. He invited me over to his producer's house. I was playing the piano in the producer's living room. We went from the living room to the studio that same day and it was on from there.

[Monts! ter®]

Thats a beautiful thing....its funny how most producers when they get started never even thought "Well how DO they make the music and record?" You just want to make music. Now look at you. Thanks for a brief overview of how you were inspired D.Q.

[Lady Prodigy]

Well it all started in 1873 lol. When I was 4 my goal was to play every instrument in the world!!! ( I didn't know there were more that 10 lol). My mother let me think that I could....... She took me to a Cathelic garage sale. I jumped on a organ, and I fell in love with it. My mom scraped up $100 ( which she didn't really have to give), but she did it anyway. My father was really mad that she had did that (hatter!!!!!!!). Just imagine 3 old men trying to fit an organ in a hatch back lol. From there I would go to chior rehersal with my mother, and I would go home and play what I had heard. Later they bought me a Yamaha (which I still use lol) and I listened to the differnce in the organ and the piano and adjusted, and I would play commercials( THERE'S A SPOT ON MY RUG.... IT'S REALLY BUGGING ME lol). I would play anything from cartoons, Animaniacs, Captain Planet (Pinky and the Brain) (Space Jam sound track lol) simpsons to lambshops..... anything that I thought was a challenge. When I was 8 I wanted to own a record label. Back then kids wanted to play house and play frogger lol. While they were doing all that, I was writing out my marketing plan...When kids were trying to be like tupac, I was listening to Carlos Santana. When my brothers (no good) friends came over, I would jump on the piano and play the drums on the keys with both hands in time while they rapped. When I was 12 I wanted to play the drums, my mother said ok. And I had entered Guitar centers drum off. My mom told my father to clap no matter what lol, because I had never picked up a pair of sticks in my life, but I had played like I had been playng for ten years.... then I got the name baby girl aka lady stix. When I was 17 I won Sam Ashes drum off, and won my first jazz kit. I thank God that I was a mature 4 year old and I thank God that I have a mother that believed in me and still does believe in me. Ya dig!!!!! (I fell like I just wrote a book lol)

[Monts! ter®]

I thank God for you to come here and let us know how you were inspired and I am sure your piece as well as every producers piece that they write in here will motivate others as well. You are a Lady Prodigy. Name well earned.

[Chenyelu Bomani]

My first encounter around age four or five was with a set of drums belonging to a friend of the family. Once I rattled the skins it was on man...got some sticks and everything in the house became fair game / perc is still my passion. Began formal spanish/classical guitar lessons around age nine but couldn't hang with it but for a year or two. I ran around in Black Bottom, Hastings and Paradise valley in Detroit hanging near all the doors of the music joints to listen to whatever I could hear being played...wish I had a dollar for all the times I heard "hey kid...get away from there". Roaming through Brush Park and encountering backyard blues and honkey tonk sets...I can see those uprights, steel guitars and harmonicas like it was yesterday! At church (after worship was over) I would always find my way to the piano and play blues riffs much to the dismay of my granny. Played mainly by ear didn't have enough self discipline to maintain reading music I guess!
So with the advent of technology I can blend both worlds "live and virtual" with a vast array within my reach...it's heaven man!

[Lil Wonder]

I came a producer, because I was always in the studio, laying down piano tracks for projects. I felt like if Im always going to be in the lab, I mine as well, learn how to use the equipment. Little By Little the enigneer would show me things each session. When I went to college I began to take engineering classes and now I run my colleges sound production lab. Over the course of 7 years, I have been producing, I started out with a 4 channel mixing board from radio shack and 32 mixing board and a full homestudio. I would say this is my calling.