6ix was in his last semester at University of Maryland when he got a phone call from Logic, who had just signed a deal with Visionary Music Group. “The label wants me to come out to LA,” Logic told him. “I want you out there with me. Let’s fucking move!”
At this point, 6ix had nearly completed his pre-med requirements. He was going to go to medical school and become a doctor like his father. (His mother is an engineer.) But when Logic called him, he didn’t think twice. He informed his parents that he would be dropping out of school. Three days later, he packed up his worldly possessions and moved to Los Angeles to begin his career as a professional hip hop producer.
6ix had been making beats for two months when he met Logic at at beat battle in DC in 2011. “I thought I was terrible,” 6ix recalls. But Logic was digging his musical steez enough to invite him over to his Godmother’s house, where he was staying at the time. With 6ix’s assistance, Logic slowly generated regional and then national buzz on the strength of his Young Sinatra mixtape series. “I remember when one of the songs first hit like 5,000 views on YouTube,” 6ix says, as if remembering the good old days. “We’re like, ‘Yo! This is crazy!’”
By the time Logic got his deal with Visionary, 6ix was his go-to producer and most trusted collaborator. He produced eight songs apiece on Logic’s 2014 debut album Under Pressure and his 2015 follow-up The Incredible True Story (which can be conveniently shortened to the acronym TITS.
Since moving to LA in 2013, he has resided in a house with Logic and Logic’s wife. After racking up a sizeable debt from long studio hours working on Under Pressure, they built a spartan home studio, comprised of two Yamaha speakers, a Shure SM-7 microphone, and a simple audio interface. It turned out to be a wise investment -- 6ix estimates that 50 to 60% of TITS was recorded at the crib. “Literally, I just wake up and start making beats,” he says.
Despite the close creative partnership he shares with Logic, 6ix endeavors to expand his personal brand in 2016 and beyond. Reclined easily on a black couch in the HNHH studio, wearing a simple black baseball cap and stroking his dark beard thoughtfully, he is unsure how much information he is “allowed” to divulge. His diverse production style has caught the ear of Pusha T. While he has already produced for artists like Dizzy Wright, Sylvan LaCue, & Michael Christmas, 6ix is known first, second, and third as Logic’s right-hand man. To this point, he has lived (quite happily) in Logic’s shadow. It won’t be long before that changes.
Click through the galleries to go Behind the Beat with 6ix.
A portrait of 6ix as a young man
6ix’s parents emigrated to the United States in the mid-seventies and settled down outside DC in Prince George County, Maryland. As is common in first-generation families, a heavy emphasis was placed on education.
“Literally my whole life I was going to educational summer camps,” 6ix says. “I was going to get tutored just to get ahead. But the whole time I was always playing music.”
His father’s love of music was a wellspring. It was written in 6ix’s DNA. It also allowed 6ix to listen to whatever he wanted and freed him to pursue his own musical ambitions so long as his grades did not suffer. When he was eight, his mother bought him an acoustic guitar as a reward for good performance in school.
“I just fell in love,” he says earnestly. “Guitar is my true passion.”
6ix started off playing classical and eventually developed an enthusiasm for heavy metal. In high school he was a member of metal bands with names like Brain Lasers and Chapter of Decay.
“I remember my dad driving me and my homies when we were like freshmen in high school,” he says. “We were playing like Baltimore late on school nights, just playing music, loving music, and my dad always supported that.”
6ix’s introduction to hip hop production came when he was 20, by way of his high school friend and college roommate OB. OB would make beats and invite 6ix to add guitar and bass. All of the sudden, he caught the bug. He bought a drum machine and FL Studio. While his grades slipped, has passion for making music soared. His thirst for making beats was unquenchable. Not even his extraordinarily dorm setup -- a laptop with a busted screen and “fucked up speakers” could prevent 6ix from immersing himself in hip hop production.
“I was hooking up [my laptop] to a TV monitor because my screen didn’t work,” 6ix recalls. “That’s how crazy it was. But it was still so fun, we were just making music. I was learning FL. just having fun not thinking about anything. And the next thing you know, we’re two albums deep, you know? We’re still doing the same shit we were always doing.”
The making of TITS
The Incredible True Story is densely populated with live instruments -- guitar, bass, drums, grand pianos, horns, strings, and flutes all appear within the album's sonic universe. Logic and 6ix's basic formula while creating TITS was 1) construct a song's foundation at their home studio, then 2) head to the "real" studio where they had a bevy of session musicians at their disposal. "Really we wanted to be musical and make it even more grand," he says.
We have assembled a sort of verbal liner notes for the TITS songs 6ix produced below.
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UPGRADE
On "Upgrade," 6ix subtly doffs his cap to J Dilla the man who first inspired 6ix's passion for hip hop by sampling the same placid wail (from "Clair," by '70s jazz vocal group The Singers Unlimited) that Dilla sampled on Slum Village's "Players."
"That’s a Dilla sample that I’ve always loved and wanted to flip ever since I heard it," 6ix says. "I heard that band was really hard to clear. And we sampled them twice on the album."
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LIKE WOAH
The high art form of sampling is cursed by the fact that samples frequently rob producers of 75 to 100% of publishing royalties. On "Like Woah," 6ix recreated a section of John Cameron's 1973 "Liquid Sunshine" so that he didn't have to pay royalties.
"'Like Woah,' that’s complete interpolation, there’s no master sample in that song," 6ix explains. "I had the sample that I was super inspired by, there was a couple drums underneath that made it kinda muddy and the quality of the song wasn't great. it’s an old song. So it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be."
He figured out the guitar part by himself and enlisted Steve Wyreman, who does all the guitar parts for No I.D., Kanye West, and Big Sean, to lay down the guitar that appears on the final recording. As for the flute -- “That was a live flautist from the Bay. We hit him up, and like 40 minutes later, he sent it back with the perfect replay.”
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YOUNG JESUS
6ix accompanies Logic on all his tours. His job: to make beats all day and record with Logic in their makeshift studio in the back of the tour bus. His greatest tour accomplishment to date is the creation of the beat for "Young Jesus," a thundering boom bap '90s throwback that contains the sort of rare intangible intensity that also exists in Mobb Deep's "Shook Ones Pt. II."
He made the beat while backstage in San Antonio. "Those green rooms had like Dark Side of the Moon rugs, these Hindu rug on the wall," he says. "I was just back there cookin’, I was feeling the energy.” There he came across a crucial James Blake vocal sample from one of Blake's songs with RZA. Unable to contact the notoriously reclusive Blake, 6ix ended up clearing the song by way of RZA. "He pulled some strings," 6ix says. "It was fucking awesome.
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INNERMISSION
A serene journey through the self conceived in the spirit of J Dilla and To Pimp a Butterfly, "Innermission" derives its character from its silky jazz electric piano harmonies laid down by Raphael Saadiq’s 19-year nephew Dylan Wiggins.
"He’s like a prodigy," 6ix says. "We were just in the studio one night, we had a couple hours just to kill. I had these drums and a bassline. I was like, 'Yo, I really want to add some shit to this.' And then Logic came the next day. He was like, 'Yooo, I need this.'"
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LORD WILLIN
The undisputed highlight of the TITS recording sessions was a 10-day trip to Hawaii. Logic, 6ix, and their team rented out a mansion. When they weren't hooping on the backyard basketball courts or motoring around the grounds on golf carts, they were making music in their makeshift studio. The trip to Hawaii produced five songs, including "Lord Willin'", "Never Been" "Run It," and the TITS outro.
While 6ix outsourced much of the guitarwork on the album to Wyreman, he played himself the methodical guitar riff that forms the spine of "Lord Willin'." The riff splays out into a four-part textured layer cake on the song's chorus. He recorded the final version of the riff on a Les Paul in No i.D.'s studio, which is stocked with vintage amps and pedals.
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CITY OF STARS
6ix names "City of Stars" as favorite song on TITS. Expansive and cinematic, it is more closely aligned with the album's interstellar space concept than any other song on the album.
"I feel like ['City of Stars'] is the most different song that we’ve ever done," he says. "I just remember being in my room at home just making that – having that kick and the four to floor and then having those chords over it. I was in a space where I just wanted to do something totally different and musical. More than rap, bigger than rap, you know? Musically I feel like I really pushed myself."
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THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY/OUTRO
TITS ends with the two-part title track "The Incredible True Story" co-produced by 6ix and Aftermath in-house producer DJ Khalil. "Khalil he sent us that beat, we were like, 'Woahhh, this is crazy!!' 6ix says.
If 6ix has a role model, it is clearly producers like Khalil who have managed to carve out careers in production without sacrificing artistic integrity.
They don’t give a fuck about anything," he says. "They just make the music they want to make, and it shows. Just being around those guys, I learned just how to be free, how to not care, take risks and put yourself out there. That’s all that matters."