Fade
The Beat Strangler
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illest o.g.
Ever since he posted pictures of his setup, I figured tomkillsjerry was dedicated to making beats. With gear galore and dope lighting to compliment it, he recently won the Beat This! Competition by surpassing a tough lineup of competitors.
Let's find out more about him, shall we?
Okay so what's up with the name? As a kid I was a huge Tom and Jerry fan, so why do you think Tom kills Jerry?
Haha. Well, I wish I could say there was some grand deeper meaning behind it but I'm afraid not. When I first started making beats on my Galaxy s3 (yes, a cell phone) I started playing them for people. I was at a party one night and a friend of mine told me to play something so I did and this chick was all shitty and said "Oh you're a DJ ? Whats your DJ name Tom?" And I said in my most drunken state "tomkillsjerry" and people were like oh that's pretty dope and it stuck.
You won the Beat This! Competition recently, how did you put together the beat?
Man I was ridin high when I found out I won because I had just won 1st runner up on Indabas Artist of the month showcase. Then I saw I won the Beat This!, that was a pretty good week. That one was all started like most of my beat with a pad sound playing during the intro and throughout the track. Then I looped that chord progression and started playing in the drums on Maschine. I'll finger drum in a few variations of the main beat and then track it out and load it into my FL project. From there I'll start doing some sound design just filling in the holes I hear.
As you progress in production you start to have affection for the subtle changes in a mix or sound selection. Having a whisper quiet horn playin in the background of a break adds just the right amount of atmosphere to keep your attention. In a time when you can make any sound you can imagine, the art of addition by subtraction is a difficult concept to grasp. Adan Jones the guitarist from Tool summed it up perfectly when he said "You learn very quickly that discipline plays a huge part in your writing. You learn that not playing can be just as powerful as playing. You need to let things breathe. I could fill up every little space with feedback or something, but why? That silence just makes the time that I do play have much more impact."
It's always tough to win the contest when there's no theme, and unfortunately a lot of times it's decided by a point or two. Do you prefer theme or no theme?
I like both. I'm all over the place music-wise so sometimes it's good for me to have a point of focus just for practice. I rarely have a set style in my mind when I start building a track. I let the song take me where it wants to go. Man, that sounded pretentious as hell.
Your winning beat was really dope, and what sealed the win was that sped up vocal snippet. What is that?
That vocal chop was the last thing I added before mix down. Usually I'll let a beat chill overnight or for a couple days then I'll come back to it. I was diggin on it but I felt like it didn't have a good enough top line. So I sampled an Indian female vocal and, well I don't know if I should say this, it's a secret weapon of mine. Oh well we fam right? Haha.
I took the sample and dropped it into FL's SliceX and pitched it up. In SliceX it chops the sample up for you but it's usually horrible so you have to go in and set set your regions to your keys but when you do this it really opens up a vocal for endless possibilities. I got the idea from Flux Pavilion in the Point Blank Master Class video here:
You're from Fort Worth, so how come you don't have some sort of Dirty South type beats?
Haha. What makes it worse is that I literally grew up 45 min from Houston and my real first exposure to Hip Hop was Z-Ro, Lil Flip, UGK, Paul Wall, and DJ Screw. And I still bump them all the time but that's their sound so if I make a track like them as soon as it hit your ears it's dated and has a foundation in the culture of Houston Hip Hop. I make music through my filter taking parts I like from everything I've ever listened to. Here's a couple of my favorites from my younger days:
This bassline though:
Z-ro killed this freestyle:
From what I've heard on your SoundCloud, your style seems to be a mix of Boom Bap (I hate that term) and a New Age/Modern Hip Hop style. Is that correct? It's hard to explain I guess.
Yea I get that a lot. None of it is intentional. Man, it's hard for me to describe what my sound is, haha. I think I'm still discovering what my sound is, I've been producing for a year and half about? I feel like a lot of it is rooted in Boom Bap and G-Funk with a little Southern Trap influence, deep bass sizzler style hats. My favorite producers are El-P, Sonny Digital, 9th Wonder and DJ Premier. I've started to gravitate to more Boom Bap type drum sounds lately because I feel like I have more freedom in what a song could be. In Trap you don't have much room to operate in.
How do you feel about beats and songs that are mixed really hot? It's one thing I notice with a lot of productions today and I think it can be a turnoff to the listener at some point.
For me it's a turnoff because the limiting just wears on your ears, it's in your face so much, the twack and crack of the snare and hi hats all frying bacon all in my headphones. Sometimes it's like "damn bruh you do know the faders also have the ability to go down". Haha.
So how did you get into making beats?
I honestly started making beats as a fluke. I downloaded this DAW app called Caustic and messed around with some samples and really just wanted to make something me and my friends could freestyle over when we got drunk. Haha. We used the same damn 3 beats for years, LOL, but I didn't think nothing of it but then I made this on a cellphone.
After that people started asking me why I don't take it serious and so in August of 2014 I bought FL 11, a laptop and a MIDI Keyboard. Little did I know this would slowly start to consume my life. I'd be at parties thinking about my beats and no matter where I was my head was in my "studio". Really I make music because it's cheaper than therapy. I get lost in it, forget to eat sometimes because I'm trying to get these drums compressed right to pop in the mix. It's an obsession, really. This quote from Charles Bukowski comes to mind "Find what you love and let it kill you".
Do you play any instruments?
Yea I've played guitar for 10 years and by default Bass (if you can play guitar you can play bass, I swear to God it's true). Played drums and now I'm getting decent on the keys.
What do you have in your setup? I saw from the pictures you posted that you have a lighting fetish of sorts....
Yes I do. It's all about the vibe. You can never deny just how far a vibe can take you. And that starts with your creative environment. I produce after midnight and mix during the day. I've found those times work for me the best.
Here's a gear rundown:
The hub of my spot is is my Desktop Rocking 32gb of ram and a 6 core i7 5820K with 1tb off SSD storage.
Loaded with:
- Komplete 10
- East West Sound Library
- Slate Digital Plugins
- Abelton Live
- and FL 12
- DSI Prophet 08
- Novation Bass Station II
- Behringer X-touch Control Surface
- NI Komplete Kontrol 49
- Mashine Studio
- KRK Rokit 6's
- and the 10" KRK Sub
- Audio Interface is a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6
- And the LG Ultra-wide 34UM67. If you can go ultrawide, so dope.
The best thing you can do in any creative field is be creative everyday, make something everyday. I've put out at least a beat a week since I've started and I think that has helped my evolution a lot. I don't own a TV, I dont party (often), I make music, it's what I do now. And if you want to be great at something it takes that borderline insane dedication to what your craft is. I still have so much to learn and I'll try to learn it all but I think I'll run out of time before that happens, haha.
I once forgot to save my Cakewalk project files. Instead I just saved the project so I lost everything. What was your biggest studio blunder?
Oh man there's been a couple. Had a failed hard drive with no backup on my first DAW, lost everything, EVERYTHING I had been working on for the 6 months prior, such a sad day. And recently while arranging Y spot in a different way I messed up and plugged the DC power brick into the USB of my old interface and fried it. Hey wanna throw away $300? Touch the DC power supply to your USB port on your brand new interface... It's legit.
Are you working with any artists or are you just making beats?
I got a few things cooking up with some local artists and a cat up in Canada I'm working with trying to help him develop his sound. Here's an early version of a song we are working on, the hook is dope as fuck:
Do you have any projects that we can expect from you soon?
Yea I'm finishing up the art work for my 2nd beat tape. Here's my first one on Bandcamp:
Thanks for doing the interview. Do you have any shoutouts you'd like to give?
No problem my dude, and shout out to Namesi, King Drew, TheRealAGE, Spuntastic and all the other Showcase bangers that always bring that new new, haha.
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