Rakim Quotes

My beats are pretty s - - y, though. I don't know how they work.

I talked to the record company about what I had in mind. They said they wanted something lush. I figured the best thing to do was let them hear what I had in mind.

I started out really making music in my dorm room, and it wasn't really producing or anything like that; it was you making something.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

When I went into the studio I created a sound that I wanted to hear.

It's very important when you in the studio to be with a confident creative.

What really excites me is the production. I get in there and change a lot of stuff.

I write all my hooks.

I like making sounds and putting it together, I'm not just a singer or a producer.

You get the beats. You write to them. You go in the studio and lay it down. Hopefully, a song comes out sounding good. If it comes out sounding good, you put it to the side with the rest of the other good ones, and you try to decide which ones you're gonna use on the album.

With our producer, Greg Fidelman, it was really a joy to work with him and to try different things and experiment.

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

I started by producing, and the rapping came second to that, because I wanted to fill out the beat.

It is easy to get an interesting loop to happen, but it becomes a collage when the song and loop are constantly changing.

There's no record that you done heard me produce that I spent more than ten minutes on.

Producing is important because if there is no one making the tunes, there is nothing for the DJs to play, and nothing for the people to dance to.

Being a producer is a very different experience than writing my own songs.

I didn't want to make a record that was just guitar and voice, that was just the technology available to me. At the time, I remember thinking, "I am making a Faust album." That didn't translate.

I've got my own studio, so I sit in my studio writing and if I get a great take, that's the take.

I demo all of my songs on Garage Band, where I pretty much play everything - not very well, but I manage to hammer out a drum beat and a bass idea.

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

In high school I was making beats for my friends and for myself and rapping over them.

I've built an 8-track studio in my house that's virtually identical to what they used at Abbey Road, and I also own the 16-track set-up that Led Zeppelin used to record 'Houses of the Holy.' I'm interested in producing, but I'm mostly recording my own stuff.

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

An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.