Some Mai lore

It's always been about the drums.

Got FL Studio at 14, went down a rabbit hole chasing one drum sound, and somehow never climbed back out.

It started at 14

Like most producers, I got FL Studio the way you're not really supposed to at 14 (we won't get into it). My older brother was a hip hop head, so I grew up on MF DOOM, Three 6 Mafia, Tommy Wright III. Around 2014 I really started getting into artists I was discovering, Flatbush Zombies, Joey Bada$$, Gambino.

I messed around on FL all the way through high school without ever really taking it seriously. Making beats was still just a hobby to me. That changed the first time I saw a beat battle.

Then I saw WondaGurl

There were these beat battle videos going around YouTube. WondaGurl, a teenager going up against a room full of grown men, and her drums just knocked way different than anyone else in there. I genuinely didn't know drums could sound like that. Something clicked, and I never really heard beats the same after.

WondaGurl at Battle of the Beat Makers, 2012. The one that did it.

Real full circle moment though. Years later she dropped her own soft clipper plugin, and I ended up making the ads for it using my own beats. Me, promoting a plugin from the producer who got me into all of this in the first place. Pretty cool.

The ad I made for her soft clipper, using my beats.

Down the rabbit hole

After that I got obsessed with one question: how do I make my drums hit like that. This was the SoundCloud era, people like J.Robb, Monte Booker, Sam Gellaitry and Tek.Lun putting out the craziest stuff I'd ever heard, and I wanted my drums to live in that world. WondaGurl was my god, still is one of them, and I spent basically all of 2015 trying to make my drums knock like hers.

Nobody was really teaching any of this yet, so I did it the hard way. I picked apart every kick and every mix I could find, and I was on Reddit and Twitter constantly asking anyone who would listen. I still have the threads.

WondaGurl Kick on Reddit

WondaGurl Mixing on Reddit

The kits, and the gap year I never came back from

I tested out of high school in 2016, then just went full time at community college, giving myself a lot more time to focus on making beats. No more sitting in a classroom from eight to three, so every free hour went into drums.

By 2017 I was fed up that nobody was teaching any of this, so I started posting my own tutorials, basically the stuff I wish I'd had back when I was digging around online. Grew to about 10,000 subscribers and started selling drum kits on the side, and for the first time the drums were actually paying me. That same year I got into UCLA, but the kits were selling, so I made my mom a deal: let me take a gap year, and if I can really make money doing this, let me keep going. She said yes. I never went back.

Then that summer I went to Hollywood and asked random strangers to freestyle on my beats.

~40M

views across the series

3 wks

10k to 100k subscribers

videos, one summer

Coming up with a whole new scene

That video went crazy. It took me from 10,000 to 100k subscribers in about three weeks, and the series ended up doing around 40 million views. After that I wasn't really thinking about anything but this.

Going full time, I just got to make. Tutorials, dumb funny videos, beat battles, whatever I felt like that week. It resonated with a whole new generation of producers, and I got to come up right alongside people like Ramzoid, Aries, kbeazy and Nick Mira. A new little scene of us all figuring it out on YouTube at the same time. Truly a special thing to be a part of. And I got to put a lot of kids onto beat making, make it exciting for them the way it was for me.

Mai with Aries and Ramzoid — Me, Aries and Ramzoid. 2019.

Lucid Monday

There's another crew I have to shout out. Back in those SoundCloud days there was a collective called Lucid Monday I was obsessed with, started by a kid named Julius. They'd do these weekly playlist drops putting on SoundCloud producers, and at some point they featured one of my songs, which was crazy to me back then.

I ended up living with them. Lucid Monday turned into one of the coolest producer magazines out there, the whole idea being to make producers the stars. I helped out on the early videos back in 2020, living with Julius and producers like Dilip and Othello who came up alongside it. They've gone on to work with everybody, Kaytranada, Boi-1da, you name it. They even did a cover video with The Alchemist that I'm in.

Lucid Monday Magazine, Issue 10. Kaytranada on the cover.

Mai and The Alchemist on set — Me and The Alchemist on the shoot. 🐐

Rare cookup with Dilip in 2019.

Stellar Studios

In 2020 I took the leap and got my own space at 22. That's Stellar Studios, in LA, which has hosted incredible artists and producers such as Paris Texas, Jay Versace, BNYX, Zelooperz, and Black Noise, to name a few.

Oh, and the Grammy thing

So this is actually the cookup where I made the drums for Doechii's Bullfrog. I bounced them out, put them in a pack called Addictive Breaks 2, a producer named Stoic got the pack, and the rest is history. That record ended up winning a Grammy.

Addictive Presets

Somewhere in there I started making preset packs for Addictive Drums, my Addictive Presets. A video of them blew up on Twitter and things took off from there. Kenny Beats even hit me up to say Addictive Presets was super smart. Pretty soon it felt like everybody was making beats with those drums.

That eventually led to XLN Audio, the company that actually makes Addictive Drums, bringing me on to work on their Hip Hop and Gospel kit alongside some incredible producers like Omari Jazz. So my presets officially come with the plugin now.

In good company