The EM Poll

Beat Crazy in Atlanta

Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           

As I pulled up to the ramshackle house in the Atlanta suburbs, I was sure that I had the wrong address. This couldn't be where producer, keyboardist, and Grammy-winning songwriter LRoc, who's worked with everyone from Usher to Mariah Carey to Nelly to LL Cool J, had his studio. No way. I was expecting something more modern and well kept up — maybe even a little flashy.

But a quick check of my notes confirmed that this was indeed the location that LRoc's management had meant to send me for the interview. So I walked to the door and rang the bell, still half expecting whoever answered to look at me quizzically when I asked for LRoc.

LRoc discusses the business side of producing music full time at remixmag.com"

But when the door opened, it was LRoc who answered. He greeted me amiably, and then motioned for me to follow him through a living room area equipped with a huge flat-screen TV and a Sony PlayStation console. We then went down the stairs to the basement studio that he calls “dakitchen.” It has professional acoustic treatment on the walls, a vocal booth, and a small live room. He explained that he purposely situated his studio in this nondescript house (he lives elsewhere) so that potential burglars would have the same reaction of “There's no way there's anything valuable in there” that I had.

In fact, there was plenty of choice gear — enough to pique the interest of any self-respecting burglar. But my mission was not one of criminal intent; I was there to spend the day watching LRoc work and to gain insight into his production techniques.

Background Check

LRoc, whose real name is James Elbert Phillips, was born in Liberia. As a child there during the '70s, he studied classical piano. However, his musical imagination was stimulated not by Bach or Mozart but by the sounds of American pop music that he heard on the radio. “I would hear those records, like Parliament Funkadelic and Prince,” he recalled. “I learned a lot from them.”

Although his classical training played a role in his musical development, he wasn't what you would call a model student. “When I left music class, that book went into the piano bench and didn't come out until the next session,” he remembered. “But I did play while listening to records. I practiced by listening to artists like Stevie Wonder, so my ear and my improvisational skills improved more than my reading.”

LRoc taught himself to play the bass guitar by “listening to the radio and listening to records. It's a simple instrument. I picked it up, and I loved it a lot. Classical piano was more my parents' idea.”

LRoc's family immigrated to the United States and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area when he was 16. There, he continued listening to funk bands such as Cameo, the Time, and the Brothers Johnson, but his musical tastes broadened, encompassing artists like Count Basie, Thad Jones, the big-band stuff, Chaka Khan, Chick Corea, and John Patitucci.

Herbie Hancock was also a huge influence. “He was a great musician, but he still could go and do some great-sounding commercial stuff,” said LRoc. “So was Bernie Worrell of Parliament Funkadelic; he was classically trained but played the funk. The kind of musicians I gravitated toward were skilled and able to play the simplified music without compromising their artistic integrity.” That concept was to become key to LRoc's later success.

Soldiering in the Studio

A stint in the army followed, and LRoc, stationed in Germany, found plenty of musical opportunities. He set up a MIDI studio in his barracks, in which he had an old Yamaha sequencer, a Commodore 64 computer running C-Lab software, a Yamaha DX7, a Sequential Prophet 600, and a Yamaha RX15 drum machine. “I was doing a lot of sessions, and everybody started calling me a great producer,” he said. “So all of a sudden, I was a producer, I guess.”

LRoc's passion was clearly more musical than military. So when his enlistment ended in 1989, it was off to Atlanta, a city with a budding music scene that would become one of the hottest in the country a decade or so later. He immersed himself in the city's gigging and recording circuit and steadily built his reputation. In 1994 he joined a band called the Chronicle. It was an all-instrumental improv band that was huge in the area. “We were like the southern [band] Roots. Hip-hop, funk, jazz, DJ — a killer band,” said LRoc. “It was incredible. It was spontaneous. We always made up stuff onstage. We did that for six years and sold out every show. It was crazy.”

As the Atlanta hip-hop scene grew bigger and more influential, LRoc became the regular keyboardist in Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz. The group was one of the main innovators of “crunk,” a subgenre that developed out of the club scenes in Atlanta and Memphis and that has become a major factor on today's national hip-hop scene. Working with Lil Jon, LRoc won a songwriting Grammy in 2005 for his innovative keyboard melodies on Usher's R&B megahit “Yeah.” LRoc's biggest break came when he was signed to a production deal by hip-hop mogul and producer Jermaine Dupri and his company So So Def. That signing opened a lot of production doors for LRoc, who now splits his work time between his own setup and Dupri's slick SouthSide Studios.

Inside the Beats

When I arrived at LRoc's studio, he was producing beats, the rhythm-track loops that are the foundation of hip-hop music. He explained that the songwriting process of today's hip-hop and R&B is different from that of other forms of popular music. A song often starts with a beat that's composed by the producer, and then the singer or rapper writes his or her raps and hooks around that.

“I have different artists I'm working on stuff for now. I tend to work on six or seven things at once. I'll work a little on one beat — get it to the point where it feels comfortable,” he explained. “I might have 20 different sequences in one file. And then, when the writers get here, I start to track stuff. I just come up with a lot of ideas. Sometimes I change the tempo based on how the hook flows; I don't like to put it in stone yet. I like to have the option to mess with the tempo — to change certain things. Once we've got a hook, then I track into [Digidesign] Pro Tools.”

Although LRoc often starts the beats on his own, he likes to have the artists' input as the process develops. He said about several of his current rap clients, “Usually when they hear something that they like, they start rapping. And if I see that the response is great, we'll run with it and then track it,” he said. “If they don't like anything, I have to start something fresh while they're here. We usually do both.”

go to the next page for more of the LRoc article.

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