Adrian Younge Quotes

With '5 Boroughs,' we were each working on beats, sitting in front of our laptops and samplers.

All the Public Enemy albums, I knew what records they were sampling but was like, 'How'd they construct it like this?!'

If I sample a song, I usually make samples out of the whole album. Then I move on after that. Doesn't mean I'm going to release that whole album, but I do that.

Sampling is very important for me. It's the backbone of hip-hop.

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.

Remixes come very quickly, because you already have the melody and the vocals. I have a great passion for music, so it doesn't matter to me if it's a remix or an original production. I don't think about it as, 'Well, I have to spend three hours on a remix or I have to do something all original.'

I'd met Dr Dre, he was thinking about his next album, we talked a little and he said, 'Let me give you some of these loops and see what you come up with'.

My brother makes beats, and I DJ.

I've been making beats since I was, like, 12.

A lot of people hear things on the radio and try to make their own version of that.

I probably started trying to make beats at around 12.

I started making beats in high school.

I used to re-create the beats that I heard.

The difference between doing a remix and an original track is that when you do a remix, you obviously already have the original track as a starting point. But with the originals you start from scratch.

I don't sample. I'm not like one of these guys who concoct some beat on my sampler and just turns it in.

You should find the dopest producer in your area, and that producer is always going to want songs written to his beat.

Everything I make as a producer, I visualize it as a DJ first. And all those beats, I test them as a DJ.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

'White Rabbit' was mostly done in about two days, the music in about half an hour. The music is a 'Bolero' rip-off and the lyrics a rearrangement of 'Alice in Wonderland.' You take two spectacular hits and throw them together, and it's hard to miss.

I'm taking a lot of freestyle music and flipping it.

I've been more and more into production lately, and I really, really love that. I love recording.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

Sometimes you're inspired by an old-school song that you want to chop up and make a sample out of it. I find that with a lot of older Motown music.

A lot people don't know that Mannie Fresh is one of my favorite producers because I used to just be fascinated with how he would be producing stuff. He'd be silly, too, when he raps.