Jewel Droppin’: Bangout, Pt. 1
Drawing Inspiration from Other Beatmakers is Pivotal
| Bangout interviewed by Amir Said (Sa’id) |
Bangout: I made that beat exactly for 50 Cent… Me and my wife was puttin’ a bed together in the room… and “Lean Back” came on the radio. And I was like: ‘Yo, this shit right here is going to be big’. So the next day, I was like: ‘I’m going to go in the studio wild early’. I didn’t go into the studio with the intentions to bite off “Lean Back”. It was my first time hearing it, it was out of my head. But I was like: ‘Yo, I’m gonna make a big fuckin’ record like that’… Some up-tempo, party shit with doofy-ass drums, and the gutter shit still in it.
Sa’id: A lot of dudes don’t understand how beatmakers feed off of [other beatmakers]they listen to… a lot of times, they get their inspiration from other real producers!
Bangout: To add on to that, I’m-a tell you some of my inspirations. First of all, Premier is my #1 nigga. Because of… the nigga was way, way, WAY ahead of his time, as far as samples going, drums going. Like yo, he was just in another whole world with beats. He was that innovative nigga. After Premier, then when we got Dre. Dre is fuckin’ phenomenal. Then The RZA is a fuckin’ genius. Then we got Just Blaze. Just Blaze, he’s one of the illest producers, period, I ever heard. ‘Cuz he put together all the Premier shit, all the Dre shit… And then another one of my favorites is Timbaland… All of these are the niggas that inspired me. And I’m just now discovering how ill Darkchild is. He’s a fuckin’ monster.
Sa’id: Did you intentionally go for your sound?
Bangout: No. Like we said, we Hip Hop niggas, I’m not no fuckin’ musical nigga. I’m a Hip Hop nigga. I lived this shit. And when I make beats, I try to make soundtracks to shit that I experienced! Like sometimes, I could be makin’ a beat, and I’ll just be thinking about the wildest game of Manhunt [street tag]that niggas ever played, that turned into throwin’ rocks, and my man getting’ hit by a fuckin’ police car. Or I’ll be thinking about a time when niggas was on the roof fightin’, on the roof, like 8 of us just scrappin’ for like a half hour. All my street shit, I put in my beats. All my beats got a story behind it…
Sa’id: There are beatmakers who are calculators, who do things by calculations, then there’s beatmakers who are visualizers. Are you a visualizer producer or calculator?
Bangout: Both.
Sa’id: How so… Explain the part of you that’s a calculator.
Bangout: Because a lot of this shit is math, like really understanding the machine. Understandin’ what the filters are, understandin’ pitch. You gotta pitch everything up 10, if you want the sample to feel a certain way, or you gotta pitch the sample down by 3… Or if you wanna pitch the sample in the same way that the keyboard is lined up, you gotta pitch all them shits up 5; or on some machines, 10. That’s the math part behind it…
