But its influence extends beyond just the talent it’s spawned: Since its release in the late 90s, FL has helped shape the actual sound of music across a number of genres, from hip-hop to electronic music to the mainstream pop they filter into. In this sense alone, the program could be regarded as an incubator for new pop music, serving as a training ground and sharpening producers’ skills over the past 15 years through its simple workflow. Soulja Boy’s narrative of using FL to go from relative obscurity to stardom is not unique: Many others, including heavy hitters like Hit-Boy, Metro Boomin, Young Chop, and Hudson Mohawke, share similar story arcs, evolving from hobbyists to producers for artists like Drake and Kanye West. I had to have made over 150 in a couple of months.” One of those turned into the number one song in the country and a major record deal. “I’d be making beats everyday when I got home from school. “I was forced to make them myself,” he said. Six years later, he’s still using FruityLoops, now called FL Studio, and those ten minutes have been cut down to five.
“I didn’t have money to buy beats from other producers,” he recently told me. He puts a cherry on top by proclaiming that it all results in “hits.”
Rather than use the video as an apology, he uses it as a declaration, proudly asserting that he indeed does make beats using his computer, in only ten minutes, on a program that he doesn’t even own. But being the most reviled rap act of the moment-Ice-T had dubbed him the killer of hip-hop-seemingly gave Soulja thick skin. It was easy to use but sophisticated, an entry point for anyone with any sort of music production ambitions.Īt the time the in-studio video of Soulja Boy was shot in 2009, he was enduring a barrage of hate for the simplicity of his music, which had been downloaded millions of times. All you needed to do was drag together colorful blocks of sound to create compositions. You didn’t have to buy an instrument or an MPC you didn’t have to know how to read notes. With a quick click on file-sharing applications like Napster or Kazaa, we were allowed access to a full-scale music generator, albeit a version that we couldn’t always save. After all, it was the accessibility of the popular beatmaking program FruityLoops that first drew an entire generation of kids to it in the early 2000s.
“People were like, ‘Man, you used this demo version to make this song that went number one and made all this money.’”Īlthough he namedrops the software quite a few times throughout the video, the fact alone that he references a “demo version” of it would give most millennials enough of a hint to know what he’s talking about.
“ probably took me like ten minutes to make, and everyone know I made like 10 million dollars off of the song,” he says.
0 kommentar(er)
