From the moment I wake up, there's melodies and chord progressions in my head.
It's funny cause I really end up hating everything I do anyway.
I maybe make like one or two beats a year where I can go back and be like
"Yeah, that’s the one.”
And I think this is actually one of them.
I linked with Pump through his manager. Shout out Doonie.
Doonie knows how to put together a winning situation.
So he called me up and said, "Hey, you gotta fly out to Miami.”
We were in the dream hotel.
Pump was on the top floor of the penthouse.
It was a really really dope room he had.
Pump has a lot of producers he works with, so we're pulling up MP3's out the email.
Knocking out the songs, getting comfortable recording in the hotel suite.
We ran out of beats basically and I was like, "Pump, we should start making our own beats."
The first beat we made ended up being "ESSKEETIT" and the rest is history.
The beat is really simple.
There’s really only seven sounds in it.
Basically very stock FruityLoops sounds.
I didn't have much installed on this computer.
The main sound, it’s a bass sound in the stock Nexus banks.
I was flying through sounds.
He’s like, “Yeah, that’s the sound.”
I ended up tweaking it out a little bit.
I turned up the release.
And then turned on this polyswitch to kind of make it bend.
That was basically the melody that put the whole beat together.
So once we laid down the bassline here, I moved down to the 808.
808 pattern, something like this.
It was just a stock standard 808 that everyone has, everyone uses.
So after we laid down the bass and the 808, the next thing I put in was probably the clap.
Definitely nothing special at all, just a clap where it’s supposed to be.
The hi-hat pattern is going to dictate the bounce to the beat.
It’s going to really glue everything together.
I think I did something like this.
With these four sounds here, this is like the whole bounce.
The heart and soul of the record.
Something was missing to me.
It just needed one more musical element.
Instead of like picking a weird synth sound or something like that, I’ll pick a piano
and find a melody on the piano and then maybe change the sound out afterwards.
But I just ended up leaving the piano anyways.
Something like that to just compliment the bass.
And this is a terrible sounding piano.
Everybody knows it.
It’s just the FL keys.
If I would have used like a really nice sounding Omnisphere or Kontakt, or something like that...
It would have really been too much.
The shittiness of this piano kind of makes everything work.
It almost sounds like a cartoon or something.
There's actually two more sounds that went in the beat.
One of them was this Strobot sound.
That's just an accent.
It really only appears in the song four times.
It comes in the middle of the hook.
The very last sound was this sound effect every eight bars.
This sound effect kinda lets the listener know we're into the next section.
It's something I like to call creating movement.
Once you create the bounce within a pattern, you got the core of the beat, now you gotta
make the music build.
You gotta make the music move.
I find arrangement is very important.
If you're a good arranger you can really create a lot of movement with very little.
I try to put my mind into gear to make Lil Pump type beats.
Right when that bass drops, I have to be able to picture Pump on stage with the water bottles.
Alright, so we finished the beats in FruityLoops.
I exported the track out and recorded right over the stems to have full control of everything.
So the beat's tracked out.
We loaded it into Pro Tools.
Here it is.
So the vocals, I actually recorded them through an aux track.
The plug in chain for the vocals is the RComp SSL channel strip and a DSer.
There’s literally absolutely no EQ on the vocal at all.
It was just a proper vocal tone.
I had the mic set up right.
I had him on the mic right.
I’ll solo the lead vocal of the hook.
That’s dry.
With the delay and the reverb, it kind of makes it a little more spacey, but it’s
very low and very subtle.
Here’s my delay setting.
It’s an H delay.
Super low feedback.
Super filtered.
My reverb setting is just a deverb.
1.7 decay time.
I put a one band EQ to take out some of the mud of the reverb afterwards.
I had no idea what he was gonna rap about.
It wasn't until he started recording.
It was a combination of him writing and free-styling.
He knows what he's doing.
He's got a method that gets it done.
So I kinda just stay out the way until he's ready.
And then I mastered it right here in the session.
I didn’t know we were making the single.
I was just doing something quick to get the job done and get the mp3 emailed to his phone.
I find a lot of producers over-do everything.
They’re over-EQing, compressing, reverb, delay.
They’re really just mangling and destroying all the sounds in their beats by adding all
these effects.
And it kind of takes away the soul.
It’s just going to make everything mushy and blend together.
I like my stuff to be just pure and wide open.
It’s really so overly simple.
Nothing’s over thought and there’s no complex melodies, or sounds or mixing techniques
with it at all.
It’s just super basic, it what it is.
And I think that’s the greatest records in the world.
They’re just really musically simple.
Shout out my boy Smylez.
Rest in peace, Smylez.
Without Smylez, there would be no "ESSKEETIT."