You wake up 2pm on a sunny Saturday in Brooklyn, with a bagel lodged carefully in your toaster that hasn’t yet got the memo that it’s time to pop and a woozy head full of the remnants of last night’s hip hop jamming session. One step into your homely autitorium – a fancy term for your dingy studio situated precariously between your laundry pile and leftovers from last week’s pizza party – you start to wonder if the bassline you were belting out at 3am really sounded as killer as you first thought.
Welcome to the giggle and grit of East Coast music production, ladies and gents.
The Rise of the Homely Autitorium
Let’s be real, the hustle of the East Coast doesn’t exactly promise you massive sprawling music studios where you can spend all day fine-tuning that illusive beat. Nope, in the blinkered world of East Coast producer superstars (read: you and your chin-stroking, beer-chugging buddies), the bread and butter slices of your audio sampler are typically served up from the homely autitorium. We’re talking a tiny space sweetly sandwiched between home comforts where musical dreams take flight among the dodged calls from landlords and empty ramen noodle cups.
But here’s the funny thing – the squeezed world of the autitorium breeds creativity like nothing else. When you’re tinkering around with that wicked new compressor nestled next to a scowling porcelain cat, every beat drop feels like a rebellious act of spontaneity – not to mention a hilarious one if you’ve forgotten about said scowling cat and accidentally whack it in an inspired moment of music production nirvana.
Beers, Basslines and Bagels
Creating authentic East Coast beats pretty much falls into three key phases: beers, basslines, and bagels. Your beer won’t open itself, much like your new beat won’t magically produce itself, but mark my words – the former can help you with the latter!
Beers unlock your innovative prowess, loosen up those stiff keyboard fingers, and add a charming slur to your sound (or your speech, depending on how many beers in you are). Basslines are your key to manifesting the rhythmic heart of your track, getting heads bobbing and bodies rocking. But remember folks, all this creative wizardry is fueled by the last phase – the humble bagel.
Few things in this world can spark joy quite like biting into a chewy, toasted bagel, preferably filled with enough cream cheese to make a dairy cow blush. Now, you’re not just creating music, you’re part of the authentic East Coast music production tradition!
Fairytale or Felonious Fantasy?
But it ain’t all fairy tale music production. The East Coast homely autitoriums carry a deep, dark secret. They are also the birthplace of the most felonious ear offenders ever crafted. East Coast has fallen victim to thoughtless lawnmower beats that pollute the airwaves, ominous chords that even a Halloween soundtrack would shun, and, most horrifically, bass drops that sound more like a soap dish projectiling towards a tiled bathroom floor.
Worse still, every East Coast producer worth their kosher bagel salt has fallen prey to the thoughtless and senseless belief that cramming loads of obscure sound palettes into one track will convert into an avant-garde soundscape. They won’t.
The Laughable Labyrinth of Love
In the rocky romance of East Coast music production, it’s a warped, laughable labyrinth of love-soaked, hate-fringed, and beer-laden anecdotes. It’s a wildly energized roller coaster of not only creating smoky, soulful tunes for the 2am collective sipping somber cocktails in dimly-lit downtown New York clubs, but also a journey to self-discovery, cat tripping and curry-dosed late-night track explosions.
What’s the takeaway here? East Coast music production isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s for those brave souls ready to blend passion and bagels, late-night solitude and hip-shaking beats; those willing to bask in the humorous truth of this unpredictable yet irresistible urban music production meld. But somewhere within this tangled web of sleepy cafes, graffiti splattered alleyways, unpaid bills and autitoriums, beats the heart of music, always crawling under the skin of the East Coast.
And yes, the bassline that sounded killer at 3am in the homely autitorium? It still does. But first, someone should really clean up those leftover pizzas…