First Placement is a Viewfinder series on producers and how they landed their first major placement, told as a first-person narrative, with the producer’s name revealed at the end.
I started in high school after a friend downloaded the FL Studio demo. A few months later, in January 2011, I did the same. Music wasn’t a huge interest of mine as a kid, so I didn’t play instruments growing up. If it weren’t for my high school rap group’s desire to make original songs, I wouldn’t be a producer.
Having no prior experience or mentorship, I didn’t know how to be a student of beat making. I thought if I kept doing it, I’d naturally get better. That was right to a certain extent, but if you don’t understand how to improve your craft, you can only get so far. I learned to properly mix my sound and sample studying videos on YouTube by producers like Freddie Joachim―he produced “Waves” on Joey Bada$$ debut mixtape, 1999―Evil Needle, Mr. Carmack, and to a degree, J. Dilla. Dilla is directly related to my first placement.
I watched a documentary in the summer or fall of 2015 that explained Dilla and what I call the mosaic technique. He would chop samples by taking a literal second from a song to make these small segments of a beat and then put them all together in a crazy order to create a loop that you could only get by mixing and matching different sections from a sample. I never thought of doing that until hearing how he did it. I decided then to make a beat using the method.
I found a sample, pitched it down three or four semitones, and then I made a bunch of little chops: Two seconds here, one second there, and three seconds in random places. Then I started messing with them: Mixing, matching, and arranging until I created my beat. When I made it, I thought it was okay. I had that beat and one more I made that day sitting for like a week. I didn’t send them to anyone thinking they were decent.
Because I went a couple of days without making any new beats, when Isaiah Rashad texted me to send him some, I only had those two. Isaiah and I met through our homie YGTUT. TUT found my Soundcloud in September of 2013. My page wasn't popular. I was getting five to ten listens on beats. I’d be happy to have 50 plays over a month's time. TUT doesn't remember how he found my Soundcloud, but he made a song called "SuperSize" with a beat that had a free download. It's still one of my favorites.
We connected over email after the record. I had no idea who Isaiah Rashad was then, but TUT said he would connect me with his friend who was about to sign with TDE. TDE didn’t announce him signing with them until November, and his debut tape, Cilvia Demo, wouldn’t be out until the end of January 2014. So before his career officially got started, TUT called me and put us on the phone.
"That beat is crazy," Isaiah said of "SuperSize," "I want you to make some stuff like that for me." I tell him I'm still learning and how I'm not that good yet. "Man, I've been with my producers since they first started. Keep doing what you doing and send me whatever you make." After that call, it didn't matter how long I went without sending beats, he would be understanding, supportive, and randomly check on me. We stayed in frequent contact, and of the two beats I sent him that day in 2015, the one I made using Dilla's mosaic technique got placed on his 2016 sophomore album, The Sun's Tirade.
I originally named the beat “Nowhere,” but when I got the song, it was called “Park.” When I asked Zay why he named it that, he replied, “Because that’s your name.”