For most, the development of deejaying proficiency was followed by the acquisition of an inexpensive keyboard instrument with a rudimentary sampling function. At this point, the music is powered by youthful enthusiasm, creativity, and a generally high-school-aged peer group that didn’t have very high expectations in the first place. Hieroglyphics producer Domino describes his origins as a producer:
I had a partner named Jason at the time. Basically, I was their MC, and we were producing together…. I bought this little keyboard, and basically you would push the button and whatever you put into it would be what it sampled. Like, I started off by saying, “I’m dope! I’m dope! I—I—I’m dope! I’m dope!” Didn’t have enough insight to do anything with it. Well, he sampled the beat. We used to just like have a continuously drum break and tape it on a tape. And then have another tape player and then record from that tape to another tape player, and add stuff off the sampler—the new things that we had sampled. So by the time you’re done, you got like a fifth generation copy…. That was the initial way that we sampled. That’s how we had the different tracks was by dub, tape to tape. (Domino 1998)
DJ Topspin describes a similar process, which soon evolved into an impossibly byzantine home “studio”:
I got a Casio keyboard, a sampling one … for Christmas…. I thought that was interesting when I first got it. I was like, “Oh, you can sample your voice,” and I’d just do that forever and ever…. You couldn’t really do too much with it, until I looked at the back of it, and there was a input. So you could do something other than your voice. So I went to Radio Shack…. I got the thing hooked up…. It had the input, and I plugged into the Yorx [stereo] … and sampled little bits of stuff. And then I took my Walkman … and would sample pieces from a song.
I mean, it was … like with a little Y-jack, like you have two headphone female jacks, and it would be one going into the sampler, one coming out of the Walkman, and vice versa. This big spider-web concoction. But you could end up playing the Walkman, while hearing you triggering the sampler…. The machine was so limited, you could only do like halfs or thirds [of a loop] sometimes, you couldn’t get a whole. You’d have to overdub all those pieces. So you’ll have like a six-, seven-generation beat. [But] people I was runnin’ around with were like “Yeah, that’s the shit, man!” (DJ Topspin 1999)
Notice that both Domino and DJ Topspin specifically point out how their low expectations facilitated their early development. Both reflect with some amusement that their efforts were acceptable by the standards of their peers.
As they become more emotionally and financially invested in their work, most producers acquire increasingly professional equipment to facilitate it. This raises the issue again of sample-based hip-hop as a non-performative genre. Abstract and aesthetic concerns aside, there is a practical issue here: the hip-hop musician’s instrument, the sampler, is a piece of studio equipment. This simple fact totally obliterates conventional distinctions between performing (or practicing) and recording. Everything that is done with a sampler is, by definition, recorded. Moreover, the output of the sampler is almost always transferred to a conventional medium, such as digital audiotape or CD. At the most basic level, the hip-hop producer’s “instrument” (sampler/sequencer, mixer, and recording device) is a rudimentary home studio.
Virtually all sample-based hip-hop producers do the majority of their work in such home studios. As Theberge notes, this is typical of contemporary electronic music: “In genres of music that rely heavily on electronically generated sounds, a great deal of pre-production sequencing in the home studio (no matter how modest the quality of the synthesizer set-up) became possible. You could then simply carry the work on diskette to a more professional facility where ‘finishing’ work could be performed in a reasonably short amount of time” (Theberge 1997: 232).
For many non–hip-hop electronic musicians, the use of a home studio is a matter of convenience and expense rather than of socialization. They tend to make their studio spaces as distinct from their domestic pursuits as possible:
Often ignored … is the manner in which the domestic space has been transformed into a production environment. Musicians’ magazines often use cliches such as the arrival of the “information age” and Alvin Toffler’s (1980) notion of the “electronic Cottage” to explain the existence of the home studio. It seems to me that there is something else quite striking about this particular manifestation of contemporary music-making that is very different from previous uses of music technology in the home; that is, the degree to which the home studio is an isolated form of activity, separate from family life in almost every way.
The home studio is, above all, a private space. Studios tend to be located in bedrooms, dens, or basement rec rooms, far from the main traffic of everyday life…. The home studio is thus, by design, a private space within a private dwelling. (Theberge 1997: 234)
For hip-hop artists, however, the integration of the production environment with domestic space is one of its primary benefits. During the time of my research, the Lion’s Den, the home studio of the Jasiri Media Group, featured a playpen for the MCs’ infant son, and the Pharmacy, Vitamin D’s home studio, actually had a bed in it. In fact, as Vitamin D reports, the sense of social ease and domesticity that a home studio can provide is one of its major selling points:
There’s really no time-rush thing. You’re at the house…. People come through unexpectedly and it just adds a whole different energy in the room. So when you’re busting [rapping], it’s like you kinda get their energy in the track, too…. It’s how you can keep the spontaneity and stuff going. A lotta times, the best ideas that we’ve come up with … they were spontaneous, they just kinda, “Let’s just do this. Let’s do it!” you know? You can’t do that in a studio….
And you get inspired at different times. You’re not always inspired right then, you know? It’s like, I might be cleaning up the house, listening to some Miles Davis and hear a cold little riff or something, be like, “Man!” you know? “I gotta sample that right now!” Instead of going in the studio, doing all this. If I become inspired by something right there … I’m ’a get to chopping up these pianos, and then lead on from there, I might add these other records and start mixing over it. And it becomes what you hearing on tape. And you can’t get that with just going in the studio. (Vitamin D 1998)
And yet the very fact that these home studio spaces have their own names (e.g., “the Lion’s Den,” “the Pharmacy,” “the Basement” [Pete Rock’s studio]) suggests that producers actually do see them as being distinct from their general domestic environment. In fact, when referring to the home studio environment in the abstract, producers often refer to it as “the lab,” a term which very clearly draws a distinction between work space and living space.10
As with any form of music, an important technique of self-education is to listen to other artists in order to learn new techniques:
Jake One: I try to get into people like that’s heads … just to know. I’m just curious. You try to break down their method … figure it out. (Jake One 1998)
Joe: So you, like, listen to other producers and break down their formula …
Vitamin D: All producers do that, whether they admit it or not. (Vitamin D 1998)
This does not mean that producers want to imitate each other; the things they listen for tend to be very subtle techniques that nonproducers would most likely not notice. When I asked Negus I if he studied other producers, he was explicit on this point:
I do. Yup, I do it all the time. Like Timbaland, I’ll put him up there, because I like the way he makes beats, in that he samples occasionally, but for the most part his compositions are original. He does use some sounds,
