I’ve read that this all started when your cousin’s husband gave you FL Studio, is that right?
Yeah. He was making beats for like 10 or 11 years, but it wasn't something that he went on and fully pursued as a career. Before he told me to get into making beats, he really just educated me on old-school hip-hop. I had no idea, besides Tupac. That's all I knew. This is starting in probably grade six for me. And then he was putting me onto Big L, Pun, Biggie and other rappers that are important in the history.
He told me to download FL Studio. I started looking at ‘type-beats’ online, just to listen to them. And then on [YouTube’s] suggested [column] it comes up with tutorials for FL Studio and stuff. I started looking at tutorials, and from then on, I was addicted. I would be in my room for like 14 hours a day, just staring at the computer, learning. My parents were getting worried about me, telling me, “You've got to go outside more," and all that shit.
That's how I got started, and then from there it just becomes like second nature, bro. Like the only thing you do.
I think everyone reading this knows at least one person who makes beats or used to make beats, and it’s always the same story; Starting with FruityLoops, FL Studio, ACID Pro, all these kind of freeware hacks and so on. Everyone can start there, but you've obviously transcended that. It sounds like you did that because of your networking and because of your hustle.
I notice a lot of people – and this is no disrespect to anybody – especially in Australia, they're really talented. I'm not going to say names, but there's a few producers that are really, really talented, but they lack networking. And it's like, "Bro, I'm from Werribee, you can do it." You literally have to just DM people, email [them]. Get people’s emails; producers, artists, whatever.
For me to land that first [placement], which was with Migos, I'd reached out to certain big producers and just started sending in my samples that I made. A few of them got back to me, like, "yeah, whatever." And then one of them got back to me - Ricky Racks - and he was like, "Let's work", and we became friends. We're still friends to this day. And that relationship just helped me land that Migos thing with him. We just collabed on so many beats, and he'd send out like 100 beats that we'd done to everybody. And that's just how far networking can go.
It was a simple DM, like, "Hey man, I've got some samples for you. Check them out," and then just building relationships off that. I think it's important, even with upcoming rappers. I don't mean upcoming rappers that have like 200 followers, but you see upcoming artists that are having a little buzz in their city or whatever, and then you can hit them up, it's a lot easier than you think. If you want to get to an artist, just hit up their friends. You see who they're following. Hit up their A&Rs, hit up their engineer. Hit up their producers, send them samples. You have to network or else no one's going to hear your music. No one cares. And there's a lot of producers that are super talented - more talented than me, more talented than a lot of people that are really big in the industry - but they're just not networking. That's the issue.