It's Levels To This

Speaker 2 (00:00.16)
I put my pants on one leg at a time. The only difference is once I put my pants on, I make gold records. Producer versus beat maker. Over time, the word producer has lost its meaning.

There's always been some overlap, but it's like really exaggerated now now that one person can do the whole gig, right?

Beatmakers make beats, producers make records. That's funny. No. Imagine if Quincy Jones didn't let Michael Jackson cry at the end of She's Outta My Life.

You can't fake

Speaker 1 (00:36.974)
Oh, if you can get that kind of reaction out of anybody. on, man. Yeah, that's cool. Come on.

You're not gonna get that emotion

Speaker 2 (00:49.25)
about the things we've

Speaker 2 (00:57.582)
you

Speaker 1 (01:20.534)
I was thinking we could get into that producer versus beat maker.

I like that. I like that. Okay.

like that. So talk to me about the big picture. Let's dive into it.

Producer versus beat maker. Over time, the word producer has lost its meaning. And we kind of briefly touched on this before. It's lost its meaning because of technology, basically. Because one guy can come in and play all the parts because he has, you know, all the sounds he needs right here.

And because that one guy can compose everything, he's also the producer, which he is the producer if he's seeing the, the, the song from A to Z. But so.

Speaker 1 (02:20.878)
So it's always been a lot of gray area about what a producer is, but now I think we're talking about how many hats one person's wearing. And there's confusion about where producer ends or say where beat maker begins, where songwriter exists. And there's always been some overlap in that too, but it's like really exaggerated now that literally one person can do the whole gig, right?

And the most common thing that I see is being the producer just because you made the beat. Quincy Jones didn't touch anything musically on Thriller except for PYT. Maybe one other song, but PYT for sure. And what a producer was brought in

to make the song make sense, to deliver an industry quality product, see it from beginning to end. Whatever's wrong with this record, the producer's bought in, he's gonna fix it and make it right. He doesn't have to physically touch a key. Everybody that has written on the record is just a composer and that has been getting lost. Now,

Me as a producer, if I'm over a project, say for instance, with you, because you always come with your own lines, you write your own guitar lines. I'm always going to give you publishing because you actually wrote into the song versus, hey, I just need this guitar part play it. I played this. I need you to play that. And you just, you know, basically a work for hire.

Yeah, play me a C seven chord call today. So when you're talking about Quincy, I was just watching a thing with his drummer, a long time drummer, John Roberts, who played a lot of his stuff. And John was like, Hey, I could, you want that drum machine sound? Let me go program the drum machine for you, you know, and take care of that. So there's like, he's literally making the beat, right? You know, and.

Speaker 2 (04:19.48)
You know.

Speaker 1 (04:45.142)
And some of that is like kind of sub producing in that domain, but you know, beat making as starting with like just the drums, but it's cut the terms evolved over time, right? Talk to me about, let's define the term. What, what is a beat maker?

Okay. And this is my perspective of this definition of beat maker. A beat maker is basically the modern day composer because he's one, he can write a song. Well, I'm not going to say write the song, but he can write the music. Give it to me and I'll take it to where it needs to go.

get a whole song done to it. Like bring in the writers, bring you in to play a guitar, you know, a guitar part if the song needs that. If the song needs anything, you know, whatever was in there, if it needs to be bigger, I'll make it bigger. But to this point, the beat maker in a lot of instances is technically is a composer.

You can post stuff, so you're gonna get your writing credits and all that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you produced this record.

Well, you know, it's sort of implied that, you know, like beat makers kind of working on say a loop, right? Come up with a four and eight bar, or maybe it's even got more phrase on that, but like, basically it's an idea, it cycles, it can have levels to it. can, you know, some

Speaker 2 (06:27.103)
You're a composer. That's a composer.

Well, but you know what you're drawing distinction with as a producer is turning that musical cycle of an idea into something resembling more of a song, a complete, like it's got paragraphs, it's got a beginning and an end and a title as opposed to this is like a cool poem I wrote. Right. You know, I don't know. I'm trying that as an analogy, but you know,

A producer that provides more structure and... polish? Is that a fair statement?

That's a perfect statement because I sum it up to beat makers make beats, producers make records.

Okay, talk to me about the difference. What's the difference between a beat and a record?

Speaker 2 (07:18.412)
You supplied the beat, the, you know, whatever, whatever you played. I mean, you could have done the whole thing, but the difference is once I take that and get it in my head, whether I made it or not.

I'm gonna see it to the finish line. My job is to like, if I hear a great idea, how can I make this great idea better? What can be done to make this better? If it's the artist in the booth and it's beyond the beat making after this point, it's putting the artist in the booth, making them do one part. If they're not hitting it, making them do it.

15 times until they're absolutely pissed off at me, upset, mad, ready to go. But now I have them, I'm getting what I need out of them because I finally pushed the right button. They're mad at me, which I don't care because their performance is turning out great. That's what the producer does right there. The producer is going to sculpt this record. He's going to sculpt this idea into a record.

We're gonna make a record out of this.

It sounds to me like you're taking ownership of like the emotional properties of the song.

Speaker 2 (08:40.866)
Yeah, every, everything. Yeah. Taking ownership of everything and then turning in that final, because when you got it, it was a lump of coal. By the time you're done with it, it's a diamond.

Speaker 2 (09:01.614)
So, I was just getting ready to segue into that. So for instance, me making a beat, I can do the whole thing myself, just like anybody else. Yes, I can do that. But once I make that beat, now I'm going to turn this idea into a song and we're going to get that song into a record. And it's just like the Saturday Night Live skit.

with Christopher Walker. Christopher Walker. More cowbell skit is like him is like guys. I'm just like you. I put my pants on one leg at a time. The only difference is once I put my pants on, I make gold records. That's the difference.

And the band would be the beat maker in this analogy. I'll stand in there doing their little guitar thing.

You beat me.

More cowbell, gotta have that cowbell. And that's the difference right there in a nutshell. You know, we all put our pants on the same way, but when I put my pants on, I make gold racquets. That's the difference, man. And look, that's not saying that.

Speaker 2 (10:22.286)
The beat maker doesn't produce an excellent beat that the rapper figures out how or the singer or whoever, they don't figure out how to turn this into a solid record. I'm not saying that because in today's climate, the artists don't need the producers as much as they did back then. Artists back then, and even when we came into the game,

Artists were still needing producers to produce them.

Well, navigating like, you know, if they're on a label, like the label pressures, what the label wants, navigating the recording studio process, know, like shepherding an artist through, especially if they're like new, if they've never been on a recording studio, don't know the process. Right. But beyond that, getting the performance to match the energy that the song requires, right?

You're defining that as like the producers task.

There was a time, and I'm sure you're well aware of this, there was a time when an artist could come in and be recording to a beat and they leave the studio and they're like, my God, I don't know how you, and the producer hears it and he's like, hey, leave that up. When everybody leaves, and when the artist come back the next day, it's totally different.

Speaker 2 (11:56.664)
from how they heard it when they left. Nothing has changed musically or nothing like that except for arrangement, which is key to what a producer does. A producer helps with arrangement of the song. So when you come back in, the arrangement is different. Your performance is still the same. Then nobody come back in and re-perform what you did. Everything is still the same. But me as the producer, what I did was maybe take this and move it here.

move that over here and just make decisions of what's strong enough to be verse, what's strong enough to be B section, what's strong enough to be chorus or bridge. And all you did was just lay a bunch of ideas down and I built the song around these ideas. So that's kind of, that's the difference in what a producer will actually do versus just

You know, hey, I got this beat, I'ma send it to you, do what you do, and I ain't got no say so after that.

Well, especially when it's like the raw idea, the beat maker makes a beat, sends it on, and it's an eight bar loop, and maybe there's some dropouts here and there, or like different instrumentation, but it's basically gonna be like the same loop, nine times out of 10, right? And like the producer or the artist has to like sculpt spaces for the artist to kind of do their thing, to synergize with what's going on with the beat.

You know, and maybe that requires a level of objectivity, like the beat maker's too close to what they've heard a million times, exact same way. Yeah. You know?

Speaker 2 (13:39.416)
Yep, Because the...

And when I say the beast, mean the, industry, beast, their monkey see monkey do, especially as time went on in the time that we are now. So whatever's working on a hit record, I've had A &R's come to me and say, Hey, started with the hook. I don't want to start it with the hook. I'm so.

Alright.

Speaker 1 (14:13.944)
So, so and so did that. Look how many copies they sold. Yeah.

and and

We want a Xerox copy of that.

I can, I can discern perfectly well if this song needs to start with the hook or needs to start with the verse. Imagine Billie Jean starting with the hook. There's no buildup now. know what saying? Like we, we, we climax, we blew our load from the beginning.

There's no draw-

Speaker 2 (14:50.434)
You know what I mean, versus-

Yeah, no, no, for real. Cause there's no like wind up with the, like the, you know, the spooky wind in the alley kind of in the dance with the little squares and all that light up and you know.

You don't get all the excitement that comes with that record, which is why you could have a record, you could have a song that was five, six minutes long, and it still seemed like it was only a couple of minutes because the song kept taking you through emotions, changes. was peaks and valleys. You were on a roller coaster, you know.

Michael Jackson didn't start singing until three minutes into the record because the first two minutes he wanted to dance. You know, and that's a part of the whole thing. So not every song needs to start from the chorus. And as the producer, if you build the song a certain way, you built it to not start from the hook. now, because you created a builder song, if you change that and put

The hook. First, now the song does this.

Speaker 2 (16:05.152)
Instead, it has nowhere to go but going down. And these suits don't understand that. That's why you're a suit and I do what I do. Let me do my job, you do your job. And at the end of the day, just tell me if you like it or not.

It's got nowhere to go but down.

Speaker 1 (16:25.208)
Well, you know, it never fails to amaze me that there's people that work in the industry day in, day out, and yet still have no to little imagination about where a song can go. they want to follow the plan. Like it was like a McKinsey group consultant that told them how to make a carbon copy of the last thing. That's true. Because it's a safe choice for them.

And that's it.

Speaker 2 (16:53.536)
It's Yeah.

They can hang onto their job a little longer. Cause Hey, look, I followed the game plan of the hit record. You can't blame me. It must've been the producer of the beat maker or whatever. Right. You know, also this, that's like a CYA thing. That's kind of the insecurity of the suits is like, well, I followed a proven game plan from last week. It must not be my fault that it didn't work. know,

And, and, and this is true. They'll, they'll put, they'll put the success or failure on us when a lot of times I've seen more times than not labels fail a song more than the producer did because they don't understand it. They want to add all these changes to what you did. Now it ain't my record no more. It's your record.

major label record is like a major label movie. Right. There's a lot of hands on it. There's a lot of, you know, ideas in the pot. So it requires buy-in, but like that's like a director, you know, in a movie, the producer's kind of got to keep some version of that vision whole through that process.

Because in the music world, the producer of a record is the director and the producer of a film wrapped into one. That's what we are as producers. And when it comes to the beast, the powers that be, we are too difficult to work with because we're the last ones, typically, not so much today, but typically,

Speaker 2 (18:37.006)
We're the last ones to touch this record. We're gonna, all we need is the great performance out of the artist. Once we get the great performance out of the artist, now the magic happens in post-production, just like in the movie, in film. But the directors are given more leeway to, most of the time, especially if you're a big name director, they're giving you the green light to...

turn your movie into what you need to turn it into. And in today's music industry, we're not getting that like we used to. It's pretty much just give the artist a beat, let them do what they wanna do to it, and you want me to sit back and shut the F up. And it's like, okay, so now if you wanna start doing that, what I will start doing is,

the producers that I have up under me, I'm gonna start giving you their beats.

And you're not going to get any custom fat boy beat. I'm not going to do any, I'm just going to throw beats at you from a lot of my producers that I'm trying to, you know, get them through the door and all that. I'm just going to give you their beats under the guise of me. And if something sticks, great for my guy and you know, great for you. But I'm not, if I'm not going to have any say so on this record.

I'm not giving you any of my A-list stuff.

Speaker 2 (20:13.728)
And that's the trade off, you know, but once you have a name in the industry, if it's a fat boy beat or if it's a honorable C note beat or if it's a drummer boy, Zaytoven, Metro, whatever, as long as you stamp it, they're just like, okay, we got one from you. know, after that, it's just run with it.

Well, you know, that's kind of, they're seeing it as an inconvenience to deal with the people with the artistic vision, right? Which is why I hope it doesn't come to this, but that's why there's always pressure to introduce AI into this whole process, right? To like make more accurate plagiarism copies of the other thing they wanted to do and not get sued.

You know what you can't put in AI?

Emotion, feeling, you can't put that in AI. AI is going to give you the technical stuff, but it's going to miss. Every time I've dealt with AI, it just felt flat.

Well, they'd say uncanny. There's something, I mean, beyond like the six finger or whatever pictures, there's something you can't fake.

Speaker 2 (21:40.91)
No, can't do it. So you'll never be able to replace human emotion with a, numbers, you can't turn numbers into emotion. You can try to fake an emotion, but I can tell that's fake.

They'll give you the perfect average, the mean of what it thinks emotion sounds like. Exactly. But it'll be a watered down copy of a thousand different songs, a thousand different beats. It's like if you mix colors, right? You just get this big brown wash. You don't get all the different little textures and whites and blues and greens and yellows.

when the kid mixes all his finger paints together, that's what you get. And that's the emotional content you'll get is just right

It's flatlined. It's just, there's no peaks and valleys in it. Imagine if Quincy Jones didn't let Michael Jackson cry at the end of She's Out of My Life. Cause he was really crying and he did several takes and Mike kept apologizing for crying at the end because he felt it was messing up the takes.

They did however many takes they did. And Quincy, being the genius producer he is, said, well, I'm going to leave the cry in there because he keeps doing it. So it must need to be in the song.

Speaker 1 (23:22.828)
That's gold if you can get that kind of reaction out of anybody come all the way are to sing it. Yeah

Come on, AI ain't finna fake cry. You're not gonna get that emotion.

You could put water, little drops of water coming out of your eye, but that's not tears. You know, it's not emotion. It's not actual sadness.

Well, I mean, if you

Speaker 2 (23:45.612)
And I don't know if, not yet, right now, I don't think AI can write a song that'll evoke that kind of emotion out of somebody.

It, it, it's good for stupid parodies. Like there's that, there's a guy, Mr. Professor, he does like yacht rock versions of late metal tunes. That's, that's kind of fun for like five minutes, you know, but like at the end of the day, you know, I want to hear some new music. I want to hear some actual music that's like, you know, so I don't know, maybe there's creative ways to use it, but it's always going to have a human element to it.

I mean, like maybe it just hasn't been discovered yet, but I think AI parading as human is always gonna be something that won't pass a sniff test. But a human using AI to create something new as part of the process as a human, maybe. I don't know. They said the same thing about drum machines and samples back in the day too.

Well, you know what, what I've, and I said this man, years ago, years ago, and when I mean years, I'm talking about when I was a very young man.

Speaker 2 (25:04.93)
people complaining about the police and how the police could have let you go. And I said, well, you know what? The only way you're gonna get perfect policing is if you put robots out there. The robots ain't gonna cut no deals. They ain't gonna let nobody go. If you broke the law, you're going to jail. That's the only way.

That because even in policing, you still get the human element of policing because I've been let go sometimes when I was, you know, something was wrong with my license or something like that. And I was let go. They just told me like, Hey man, just go, get that taken care of. Cause every time you get pulled over, pulled over, it's gonna, it's gonna come up. I think I had a situation in another County, that I had to take care of.

and the longer I didn't do it every time I got pulled over, it was going to come up. So,

Boy, have I got an old movie from the 80s for you to watch. Insert RoboCop clip here. There you go.

There you go. Robocop. So, that's the only way you're going to, you know, even with everything we do in life, you know, the police are going to get, they're going to be flawed because they're human.

Speaker 1 (26:29.922)
the flaws make them human and deal with people in a way that, you know, like you said, maybe there's things where they can let you go take care of the thing, slow down a little bit here and there, you know, those are usually what we call good cops, You know, that exercise little street justice judgment. Yeah. But if like,

Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 (26:57.588)
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust a robot to never malfunction and really make those kinds of distinctions on the spot or ever really.

The human cops malfunction too. They malfunction all the time.

They certainly do.

A lot of them got real bad programming to begin with.

There you go. You know what saying? which my whole point about the police came from the malfunctioning police. The only way you're gonna get rid of the malfunctioning police is to put a perfect robot out there, but what you sacrifice now is that human emotion that the good cops do have that let people go for petty things. Now that goes away with AI because AI,

Speaker 2 (27:47.04)
ain't giving up, doesn't have any motion. So it's not gonna let anything go. You're going to jail. You're going to jail. So that's what you get. So thrust into the music world, that's what we get.

So what do we need to fear from Robo producer?

man, I don't, we, we, what we fear from robo producer. Did. Man, music becomes.

J.A.I.

Speaker 2 (28:25.198)
Too perfect. A, B, C, one, two, three. Because it's going by numbers and it's always gonna pick from everything tried and true. It's never gonna push the envelope because it's only gonna have what's to pull from.

Mm.

So, whereas us as human creators...

A conversation you and I can have can turn into a record.

Right. Well, I'm like, it's fun. Computers can't have fun. There you go. They can't enjoy the process. you go. They might as well be, you know, you know, cartons in a warehouse or something for all it cares. like, but that's the thing about art, man. It's, it's fun. It's pain. It's sorrow. It's happiness all expressed.

Speaker 1 (29:23.086)
in a statue or a painting or a song. That's the whole point.

It's human emotion.

Not only that.

We put the human emotion in the lyrics, but players put human emotion in the notes. The way we hit a certain note, the way we bend a certain note. Human emotion is in that. AI can't reproduce that yet.

It can make a copy of it. But there's a difference when you're doing a run and you get to the top and that note, you know, everything is hard and then there's this one note that's a little softer.

Speaker 2 (30:18.71)
And it makes you like, man, damn, did you hear how he hit that note? That's because the human did that and the human may not have.

done that purposefully, it just happened that way. Most of the time it did, you know, or for instance, prints with the, and this is how the human brain works.

Most of the times it did.

Speaker 2 (30:50.866)
Next to human emotion. They performed Purple Rain for the first time during the shooting of the movie.

Speaker 2 (31:03.106)
First time anybody heard it, first time the band performed it.

And Prince, his solo, so, and they knew, you know, they knew they were working on the Purple Rain album. So he had the truck outside with the two inch tape, with the recording equipment and everything. Prince did his live solo, that solo that we all know and love from Purple Rain.

And when Prince got to the, he leaned into that cause he knew he hit it. He knew he hit it. I got them with this right here. Now they cut it down in the, in the, in the final album version, but he man live. And if you find, if you pull up any videos on YouTube of Prince actually doing that live.

Recording it he played that part what seemed like three minutes because he knew

He did a few loops out of it, but it developed in real time.

Speaker 2 (32:11.778)
Yeah, and me as the producer, I'm listening to it. I can see when Prince came across that.

And from the time he did it to the time he realized, this is something. So I'm going to do this a few times to really catch a good take of it. And then we're going to, so I'm listening to it and I actually hear the part that ends up in the, know, I'm not knowing this is going to be the part because I'm listening to the whole totality of it. But then my producer brains like, yeah, that's the part I would have picked right there. And that's the part that we hear in the song, but

The human emotion Prince knew he caught him. He knew that was it. He knew that was it. that's what AI ain't going to, AI is not going to give that to you. AI ain't going to play something 50,000 times because they know like, man, that's going to get them because AI doesn't have that human emotion to attach to that. Right. Or judgment, you know, so that's man, you know.

or judgment.

Speaker 2 (33:19.774)
All this time that we heard Purple Rain, the first time anybody heard that record, anybody that says they don't like that... What's it?

And getting back to our original question about beat maker versus producer or composer versus producer or however you want to phrase it. There was a version of Purple Rain that existed before that performance that was probably had all the elements in it, but was not quite Purple Rain yet. didn't exist until Prince cooked it. They put it in the oven and cooked it. Let it rise.

maybe put a little icing on top of the cake or whatever. But like there was a recipe for purple rain that existed before that moment. Yeah, it was. It wasn't the song until that happened.

And I mean, you you talk to any of the band members, they didn't know how it was gonna come out, because it was the first time they all did it.

But all they had to go on is the foundation that they already had, like you were just saying. But live, man, when you're, you all these human elements, real human beings feeding off each other on the stage, the way Wendy plays that opening, is that Wendy or Lisa, the guitar player? Which one is the guitar player?

Speaker 1 (34:48.078)
I want to say it's a windy.

Wendy's the guitar player. Wendy Mount, yeah. So the way she, I mean, she kills the intro chords off top. And once you do that.

Bobby the doctor

That's that 80s sound we're talking about, like the Cyndi Lauper tone with the rich, clean guitar with the rich chorus, little flam, something like that.

You can't replace that man. AI, I don't care. I mean, it's a tool and I use AI. I use AI. I use it as a tool though. I don't need AI to create a whole song for me. Cause I still want to, I still need the human element of emotion in the record. And that's what a producer is going to, Hey man, need, we need some, we need human element in this.

Speaker 2 (35:45.184)
I think the songs that win the awards are the songs that evoke the most emotion out of people.

They not like us. You can, however you feel about Kendrick, however you might feel about Drake, that song brought emotion out of people. It tapped into something. It tapped into something. And I think those are always the best songs, the songs that get that human emotion out of you. It makes you react a certain kind of way.

It tapped into some-

Definitely tapped into something.

Speaker 2 (36:22.072)
But to turn back now, think of all the things we've been through

Hey, just real quick, we need your support. If you like seeing discussions like this, we need you to like, comment, and subscribe to the channel. Thanks for watching.

levels today.