Alexander the Great Interview
You just released The Susan Sarandon Story mixtape, which features an array of quality guests and some of your best beats. You must be pretty proud of the project.
Yeah. I definitely am. A lot of it is songs that were already out or are coming out. I just had a lot of music sitting around and I felt like people didn’t really know my body of work or they weren’t really associating different joints I did for different artists, so I just really wanted to put one cohesive thing together.
Do you think people will realize all the songs you’ve done as a producer now?
Yeah, I hope that not only that, people know me for different works that I do. I want people in California who hear about me from working with Fashawn or A1 or Omar Aura to hear about the music I’m doing with Steven King or REKS or vice versa. I’ve got stuff in the works with people in Detroit that I essentially cold-called because they had never heard my music. I’m kind of all over the place.
A lot of your songs feature more than one artist. Is it ever a challenge making cohesive songs with so many people involved?
Yeah, it’s very difficult. I don’t like to do it online. I literally like to have everyone in the same place. I would say maybe only two or three of those records on the tape, I’m just trying to think off the top of my head, were done with people in different places, saying that I may have not been there for part of the recording process. Being there, you get to add your input and you’re taking yourself from being a beatmaker to a producer, if that makes any sense.
Is it ever hard giving constructive criticism to established artists, especially with you as a relatively new producer?
Yeah, especially if you’re in a session with someone you’ve never worked with before and you admire them as a musician and you think they could have done it better or done something different or you have a different idea. It takes a certain personality but I think that the music just comes out way better and I think most people will listen to criticism, if they’re smart, at least.
What are you most proud of on The Susan Sarandon Story?
One of my favorite songs on the mixtape is “The Masquerade” by Hadji Quest. I’m really proud of that because that’s a perfect example of what we were just talking about. Hadji Quest is the homie from Brooklyn and he’s got a project coming out and Statik Selektah did most of the production on it. That song was essentially just one verse and I had gotten really attached to the beat because I played this guitar riff at the end and I arranged it a certain way. I told him we couldn’t just have one verse on there. I told him to come over to my house and we would figure out what we should do for the hook and he should write a second verse and he should write a bridge. We crafted the song around a certain structure and Statik made the cuts and the song sounds fantastic. The other thing about it is that no one’s ever heard his music before. That’s the first song that he’s released, so to have that song be the first song released and have it be a song that I’m so proud of, I was really happy with that.
And you’re doing more work with him, right?
Yeah. We’ve done probably fifteen or twenty joints, but I’m not sure how many. I think there’s only ten or twelve joints on his project that he has.
Why did you name the mixtape after Susan Sarandon?
That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? I’ve been working on my full-length and I was going to use some of those records. But the musical direction went elsewhere, so I was thinking if I should scrap these songs or whatever and I decided to put them out and I didn’t know what to call it so I went to Twitter of all places. I asked my followers what I should call this project and YC the Cynic, who’s the homie, said I should call it The Susan Sarandon Story. So that’s how the title came about but what he didn’t know was that I was looking for something very weird and along those lines, but it also just kind of worked because I happened to go to school with Susan Sarandon’s daughter and as far as having any ties to the music or the content is zero. And it really is, you know, this is not an album. This is a collection of songs. When I put out a full-length and when I eventually get the project out, it will definitely be more of a complete project. But this is just something I wanted to get out to get people more familiar with me. I wanted to throw a weirdo name on it and let’s just run with it.
Could this parlay into a ping-pong match, with Susan Sarandon and her connection with the ping-pong club SPIN?
I would love so. I would love so. It’s funny. If you search her name, a review for my project actually comes up on the first page. Maybe she sees it. That’s some high end, snobbery side of ping-pong, right? Like people riding horses and drinking champagne in between ping-pong matches?
I don’t think it’s the kind you’d play in your basement.
I don’t know if that’s me.
You’re also working on a project with Chaundon. How’s that coming?
It’s done. It’s actually been done for four or five months. He flew out to New York for two weeks, knocked it out, went home, I got the mixes done and that’s it. It’s a good project. Ten songs.
You do a lot of work with Steven King as well. What can we expect from you guys?
He just dropped an EP called Distribution Habits. He’s of course on the Kool G Rap record with Rustee Juxx on my project. The EP was produced by myself, Harry Fraud and Statik. The album is pretty much done. We need to get a couple more songs mixed, but the LP is done. Ill Bill has a record on there. I have records. Fraud has records. There’s a Statik record that Term is on that is crazy. We actually just did a couple joints with REKS and Steven King that are out of control. That album is coming. That’s hardcore, gritty New York rap.
How’s your official compilation coming?
Good. I’m like, four or five songs deep. I’ll probably over-record, but it’s going well. You’ll see a lot of the same people on this project as The Susan Sarandon Story, but it’ll be missing a few and I’ll be adding a few people.
How do you balance which beats go for the various projects you’re working on as well as the ones you sell to artists for their projects?
Up until more recently, I have been more of going along with I’m just going to make a ton of beats and send them ten joints when someone asks for beats that I think they’ll sound good on. But lately I have been, sort of, as I’ve been crafting beats, who I would maybe try to craft this more specifically for, do that, and then send that to them. Sometimes I just know immediately, whether I hear a sample or once I start chopping it up. I’ll know, hey, this is for so-and-so.
As far as selling beats to random people, I’m really trying not to do that. I’m not trying to do the random I don’t know you-type of music anymore.
Can you take us through the making of an ATG beat?
For people who listen to The Susan Sarandon Story in their entirety, they’ll notice that the only track that has no samples is the last track with REKS and Lucky Dice. And that came about just from a guitar riff that I was playing. If you hear any guitar in my beats, it’s usually live guitar that I’m playing. So if I’m doing something that’s sample free, it’ll start with a guitar riff and then craft it around that. And those beats are always special to me so I always put a little bit more into them, I think, as far as time and self-criticism and perfection.
As far as a sample joint goes, it usually starts with the sample and I usually hear something right away that makes me want to chop it up. I’ll chop up the sample and arrange it in the way that I want or the way that I hear in my head and then start attacking the drums and just digging through drums and trying to find the right drums, which can take anywhere from a minute to 30 minutes sometimes, figuring out the right drums. And then once I have the basic structure, I might start thinking about song structure and how this would be presented as a song and how it can build and how it can move from start to finish and that process can take more time than it took to make the actual beat. A lot of times, once someone takes a song, I like to think they’re more like skeletons in the sense of once somebody decides to go in on something, if I hear changes to be made, I’ll go in after the fact and try to make it sound better. And now, of course, is the big component of bass. I like to play basslines on my bass guitar, if I can, but sometimes the samples have it.
What element does the live guitar bring to your production?
I think it adds a more universal sound. I think whether I’m playing with samples or playing guitar on the beat, I think the guitar is one of those instruments that’s sort of understood everywhere. Sometimes it sounds crappy but sometimes it can take emotional songs to either higher or darker places. The guitar is one of those instruments, it just breathes. It cries. What is it? “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”?
What other equipment do you use when making beats?
I use a midi keyboard and as far as production, I’ve been making all my beats in Pro Tools and Reason, so if I’m doing any synth work, I’ll use Reason as sort of refiltering before Pro Tools. I used to use solely the MPC and just pack everything in Pro Tools and do all the mixing in Pro Tools, but it just got to be too slow for my work ethic. It would just take too long to do everything. I’m actually looking forward to seeing this new MPC that they got, to see if it works anything like they say it does. I actually kind of jacked that move from Statik. I was making beats on the MPC and I started watching him and I saw I could get a lot more work done if I just used Pro Tools. You do lose the pads, the feeling of the pads. I do miss it, but I’m just way more productive.
What other projects can we expect from you?
Omar Aura has his mixtape coming. That’s coming soon. I didn’t do all the joints on there but me and him are doing an EP after that is released. There’s talks of other EPs with people but nothing has come to fruition. Hadji Quest’s project is coming out. Curtains has a new project coming out. I don’t know what the date is but I’m on that. I think I have five songs on that. Just a lot more of the same, just trying to get placements up and trying a lot more to do these producer-artist projects because I had a great time doing it with Chaundon.
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