Meet 1K Beats, a 16 Year Old Music Producer from London

How long have you been making beats and was there any specific reason you started?

I’ve been making beats for about two years now: I started because a friend showed me the production side of music and I’ve always been into music anyway. But just being able to see what possibilities there were with digital production, and being able to be as creative as you want on it, that really helped.

Obviously you’re in full-time education—have you ever considered focusing on production as a career or has it always been more of a hobby?

I did look into taking music and production possibly as a job but ultimately decided against it because I just think it’s too competitive and saturated, and there’s too many people out there trying to vie for the same positions in the market. So yeah, full-time education is probably the way to go and I think I’ll just keep music as a hobby for now.

Who in the music industry inspires you?

I have quite a diverse music taste—I like to listen to a lot of 90s hip-hop and also a lot of modern trap stuff. Surprisingly (I don’t think you will have guessed this)—I like to listen to old music, like Bob Dylan, for example. I kind of like instrumentals and just a lot of old 70s samples, and just really playing around with different genres and different types of music, as opposed to just trap, which is quite prevalent now in today’s music and radios.

In terms of artists, I’d probably say that Pi'erre Bourne is probably my favourite producer, because he’s kind of reinvented the trap sound and has had so many different styles throughout his career, but I also like a lot of Outkast and Nas, from the 90s.

What would your ideal collaboration be: if you could have anyone on a track, who would it be and what would it sound like?

My ideal collaboration would probably be with Tyler the Creator, just because he’s very creative, and I like the way he’s evolved over the past few years especially with Cloudboy and Igor. The way he’s combined drummers—I really fuck with that, so that was really sick to see, and that’s something I hope I could do, working with him, because that would really open my horizons, I think. Also, Tyler the Creator is such a funny guy.

Talk me through the beat-making process.

So, there are two different ways of making a beat: one of them is using samples, and the other is to make your own samples, effectively. Primarily, I make beats using samples, like 70s and soul music, and occasionally some jazz and funk. But yeah, those are downloaded, then what I do is chop them up in time with the beat with a drum pattern, which I make using drum sounds (you can use samples, but usually I just make my own drums). Then I’ll play the chops and the sample with the drums and then add in all my tags and quirks. And after that, there’s just a very long mixing process where you effectively just go over the sounds, refine them, and take out unwanted noises and stuff. That’s the hard part of it.

Would you say your beats are more US rap/hip hop inspired or UK drill based?

My beats are mostly US-inspired. I don’t know, I just mostly listen to more of that music and I don’t know, I prefer it, I guess.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Usually the process of beat making is actually not as glamorous as it seems; it’s not all creative and fun—a lot of it’s quite routine, systematic, and just going through the motion of fixing up sounds and applying filters to them and just spending hours mixing to get it sounding commercially viable. That’s, for me, the downside of beats, because it just takes a lot of effort to put in—as with any grind—but it’s quite excessive, as you have to polish the sound and make it good for the radio.