I got, like, a verse and a hook.’ And then he rapped it and went in the booth and recorded it and I was like, ‘Yo, this shit is crazy.’ Just the energy of that whole night was nuts and ever since I was just like – me and this guy, we’ve got to lock in.
He was like, ‘Yo, I got something for this. “Drake just came in and he liked the beat and started writing, like immediately. “It was just us – just me, Drake, and D10, in the studio.” He explains how their first track came together. “From the first song I heard,” Boi-1da says, “I was like, ‘Yo, this guy is great.’”Ī few missed encounters and plans to collaborate over a handful of MSN Messenger chats later, Drake and Boi-1da finally linked up to produce “Do What You Do.” “This was before OVO,” he says. The MC’s name was Aubrey Graham, now known to the world as Drake, back then just an aspiring rapper, occasionally rolling a wheelchair down the halls of Degrassi High. D10 encouraged Boi-1da to check out the young rapper, often talking him up at length until Boi-1da finally caved and checked him out. D10 would play piano, and a young MC who also worked at the restaurant would perform alongside him. D10 was another instrumentalist and producer, who was working at a restaurant at the time. The nascent talent went on to win three consecutive competitions, leveraging the success to make connections in the Toronto music scene, including a fellow producer named D10. “It was literally a bunch of grown men talking about the equipment they use, like, ‘I use an ASR 1045 726 Module.’ I didn’t know what anybody was talking about.” At 17, he signed up for his first competition and was nerve-wracked.
#Back to back drake snare how to
“All my friends were at parties doing stuff that normal teenagers do, and I was in my basement, like, tweaking sounds and trying to figure out how to chop samples up.”įeeling confident in his newfound endeavor, he began showing friends and other kids at school the work he was putting out, and they encouraged him to enter local beat battles happening in Toronto. “There would be times in the summer where I was not outside at all,” he continues. I always had an interest in beats.” A friend eventually introduced him to FruityLoops, and after using his mom’s credit card to buy a copy, it became, in his words, an addiction. “I got started with music in 2002 – I was 15,” he says. In his teenage years, however, he ventured on his own and began experimenting with making beats. His father raised him on a healthy diet of dancehall and reggae, and his mother bought him his first Casio keyboard. “Make sure you put this one on lock for me.”Ī quick recording session amongst collaborators, some messing around with Omnisphere and Splice, and one hit record with Drake later, Boi-1da earned six Grammy nominations this year and a win for Best Rap Song for producing “God’s Plan.” The prolific hip hop producer has a track record of hits that many only dream of, all of them culminating in a Producer of the Year nomination for his work on Billboard-charting records by Drake, Cardi B, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and more.įar from the hills and sunshine of Los Angeles where the Grammy Awards took place is a small town in Ontario called Ajax, where Matthew Jehu Samuels (aka Boi-1da) grew up after relocating from Kingston, Jamaica. Photographs: Nathaniel Wood “Yo,” Drake said to Boi-1da, after hearing an early version of “Mob Ties” for the first time.