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Image via HOT 97
Timbaland has been making hit records for a long time, and the way he sees it, the grind has changed, and his feelings about music production as it stands now are mixed.
Timbaland was recently a guest on HOT 97 and during the course of conversation, host Ebro rattled off a list of things he could do with apps on his phone, from tempo-matching songs to downloading new sound effects to essentially hosting a party, all from the device. Timbaland still acknowledged that the ease the technology provides doesn’t eliminate the need for productivity, saying, “You still gotta put the work in, it just makes it easier for you to do all your ideas, I guess.”
But later in the conversation, he said that modern producers, by his definition of the word, aren’t really producers anymore:
I don’t think we have producers anymore, I think we have great programmers. Beats are not made how we used to do them; I think they come as a package. The looping is for you to figure out which program to run it through to trick it out and to make something that once was something totally different. I take patterns, layers and blend the colors. People don’t even know how to make their own snares anymore.
Watch the complete conversation below.
