Mike D Quotes

I love sampling, and RZA loves sampling, too.

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.

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

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.

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

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

I've wanted to do it for years, but every attempt at it has turned into another tune. We have actually taken a different approach, we're doing a lot of sampling - we're even sampling bits of Flash!

In 2008, I was more just thinking about using the touchscreen for writing the songs. From there I started thinking about how I visualised music.

If I wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea, I want to go to my computer and be able to do it. So I hired someone at Guitar Center to come over to my house and teach me Logic music program, and I learned it over a couple months.

Today, it's very tempting to create songs by cutting and pasting in the studio.

My brother makes beats, and I DJ.

I like producing beats, and I like rapping, too. I have a program for the PC, and I can hook my keyboard to it.

When I write for an album, I'll always have about 30 different types of instrument around me. I set them up in a small room with my computer running GarageBand, which is always set to record.

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

There was this cereal, and it had a special promotion with a CD inside the box that had a really simple music-making program on it. I got it, and that opened my mind to being able to make music on a computer and seeing all the different layers.

I think making electronic music isn't much different from writing a book or painting a picture or making a film. It's a creative process, and it's an art form.

I write my own music. By myself, on a computer, I program guitar and piano.

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.

I don't think people realize that I produce like 90 percent of all my music, except for the songs that I co-produce with people.

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

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

I just record whenever I can, whenever I'm home, whenever I have access to something that can make music.