DJ Premier Quotes

I was completely fascinated by the studio process and layering sounds and creating soundscapes out of layering massive squalls of sound.

When I was a kid, I played drums, and when I first got a 4-track, I would put down drumbeats and then do the rest of the tracks on top.

I like tinkering with the tribe beat boxes and love using Reason as a beefed up beat box.

A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.

I agree with the rest of the band, that a truly synthesized sound isn't really what I would want to go for.

I'm a studio rat. I like going in there as producer.

I like working with modern sounds in the studio as much as I'm happy to work with a basic rock n' roll format.

I've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

Darrell is really good in the studio. I mean, he has a real working knowledge of how the process works, and what sounds good coming back over tape, and how the stuff works together.

But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

My producer, HH, makes sounds, so I'm writing to his beats.

Blending tracks and weaving and manipulating prerecorded music to create this mood, some people do it much better than others.

Sometimes I listen to music and I wonder how did they get certain sounds.

I don't think we'll ever use the same sound techniques.

Twenty percent of my records, you'll find a loop, like two or three loops per album out of 13 or 15 songs. I'd rather keep it like that.

I know all my different formulas to get certain sounds. I've been doing this so long that I don't experiment anymore. Or let me rephrase: I've been doing this so long that I don't have to experiment as much. You always want to evolve and change, but if I go in and I know it's a certain type of song, I know exactly where I'm going to place the mics.

Really, I just sit down, mess around, and play with sounds.

DJing is like a great tasteful art form.

I don't want to be on the mic, man. I want to stay producing.

Pretty much all the programming on our CDs is done by me personally, so I've kind of been able to have complete control of what sounds I'm looking for to complete a song.

When Thug hears a song, he knows how the whole shape of the thing goes. He can nudge the whole frame to the left to make it offbeat and sound how he wants it to sound.

Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats.

I think I make good beats, but when it's not mastered correctly, it can definitely make it sound like it's not a good beat, and that has been an issue sometimes with me in the past.