Got FL Studio at 14. Dropped out twice. Somehow ended up here.

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 through high school, not taking it seriously, until I tested out. There's a test in California called the CHSPE that lets you get your diploma early, so I took it after 10th grade and left. Dropout number one.

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

Testing out early meant community college full time, and the best part was I wasn't stuck in school from eight to three anymore. Every free hour went into beats. This was the SoundCloud renaissance, people like J.Robb, Monte Booker, Sam Gellaitry and Tek.Lun uploading the craziest stuff I'd ever heard. WondaGurl was my god, still is one of them, and I spent all of 2015 trying to make my drums hit like hers. No tutorials existed yet, so I was on Reddit and Twitter all day begging for the sauce.

By 2017 I got fed up that nobody was teaching this stuff, so I started posting my own tutorials. Grew to about 10,000 subscribers and started selling drum kits on the side, and for the first time this was actually making me money. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.