Winding Down Listening To This

🍀

28d (edited) • Community

I’m sitting down tonight, winding my brain down before bed, reading and listening to this podcast at the same time, and I was surprised to see Rick Rubin pop up on The Diary of a CEO.

I loved the story in the intro about Jay-Z sitting there listening to a beat, basically mumbling and rhyming in his head, then stepping up, recording it two or three times, picking the best take, and boom, there’s the song.

You know what that tells me?

He has his process down.

And I love that because it reminded me so much of the way I (and a lot of you) like to create music now.

Sometimes I’ll literally start by humming a melody or rhyme, type it into ChatGPT — or just record it directly — and build an entire song from that one little idea.

Then I’ll listen to the beat over and over, mumbling, singing, and rewriting parts in my head until the song feels right. That’s honestly one of my favorite parts of making music.

Growing up in the ’90s, when everybody wanted to freestyle and rap, that part of the creative process is just fun to me.

I’m only at the beginning of this interview, but it’s pretty damn cool hearing how similar parts of Jay-Z’s creative process are to the way we naturally like to work with AI music today.

Different tools. Same creative instinct.

6 comments

Winding Down Listening To This