{"id":3554,"date":"2015-05-07T23:12:27","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T06:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/?p=3554"},"modified":"2015-05-07T23:12:27","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T06:12:27","slug":"young-guru-is-the-most-influential-man-in-hip-hop-youve-never-heard-of-via-wall-street-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/young-guru-is-the-most-influential-man-in-hip-hop-youve-never-heard-of-via-wall-street-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Guru Is the Most Influential Man in Hip-Hop You\u2019ve Never Heard Of via Wall Street Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"

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ON A COOL, RAINY afternoon in Austin, Texas, Young Guru\u2014Jay-Z\u2019s personal sound engineer for the past 16 years\u2014was giving a master class on recording and mixing techniques at Dub Academy, a music school and studio east of downtown. Lanky and lithe, the former high school basketball star radiated a quiet authority at the front of the room, befitting his nickname. While his disquisition ranged from best practices for setting sound levels to navigating life on the road, the audience\u2014which included everyone from gee-whiz interns to producer Mannie Fresh, who mentored Lil Wayne\u2014hung on his every word.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because Young Guru, 41, is the most famous and successful engineer in the history of hip-hop, the man in charge of soundboard operations for many of his generation\u2019s legendary recordings. He was on the ground floor of both Sean Combs\u2019s Bad Boy Records and Jay-Z\u2019s Roc-A-Fella Records. He recorded Eminem and 50 Cent early in their careers. You name them, he\u2019s been in the studio with them: Beyonc\u00e9, Drake, Rick Ross, Rihanna, Snoop Dogg. \u201cHe asks producer questions, which lead us to talking about engineering,\u201d says Ernest Dion Wilson, aka No I.D., who produces for Kanye West and Jay-Z and is known as the godfather of Chicago hip-hop. \u201cI ask him engineering questions, and we end up talking about production. There are not too many people with whom I trust that conversation.\u201d It\u2019s a sentiment echoed by the dozens of artists he\u2019s worked with. \u201cHe invigorates me,\u201d says the rapper Common, who was nominated for a Grammy this year for his album Nobody\u2019s Smiling, which Young Guru mixed. \u201cWhen I get around him, I feel like we can accomplish things, because he has that type of energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Young Guru is not just a sought-after authority in the music industry\u2014in recent years he\u2019s become equally in demand in Silicon Valley, where his innate grasp of the relationship between engineering and art is a valuable commodity. He\u2019s an artist-in-residence at USC, where he teaches students about music technology and music history, and is a frequent guest speaker at colleges (NYU and MIT among them), tech conferences and companies such as BitTorrent and Pandora. In 2013, he partnered with Hewlett-Packard and the Recording Academy\u2019s Grammy U program to create an educational tour called \u201cEra of the Engineer.\u201d At 13 cities across the country, he spoke to students about what audio engineers do, explaining the influence and innovations of famous practitioners like Tom Dowd, who pioneered multitrack recording, and Tony Maserati, who helped invent the sound of New York hip-hop and R&B.<\/p>\n

While artists and producers tend to think about the creation of a song on a macro level, engineers operate on a micro scale, using precise metrics to smooth out or blow up any sonic detail within the overall sweep of a song, much as a baker deploys exact pinches of spices and ingredients to achieve a desired taste. Using preamps, compressors, faders and, of course, a highly discriminating set of ears, an expert sound engineer like Young Guru layers the various elements of a track, an alchemical process that can utterly transform the music\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThat\u2019s the gangsta thing about the computer,\u201d says Young Guru. \u201cWhen computerized music appeared, other engineers were thinking that it didn\u2019t sound right. And it didn\u2019t at first. It sounded clunky and janky. But I thought it was incredible. Before it, you needed four guys on the mix. Now you can just write it.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a client\u2014like Jay-Z\u2014whom Young Guru has worked with so long, he can almost anticipate what the artist wants. When Jay-Z thought the track \u201cRun This Town\u201d didn\u2019t sound \u201carmy\u201d enough, Young Guru found a stomp-like sound and layered it under the kick drum to create the effect of a troop marching down the street. Other times his touch is lighter: On \u201cEmpire State of Mind,\u201d Young Guru applied his knowledge of grunge bands like Nirvana\u2014which tend to have a wide dynamic range\u2014to descend into the scaled-down beginning of the song\u2019s second verse without losing the energy of the first.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s expanded the idea of what an engineer can be,\u201d says Patrick Gillespie, an administrator at Cornell University, where Young Guru judges an annual design competition sponsored by Intel. \u201cEngineers are no longer sitting in the back room. They\u2019re out front, creating things, showing the world what can be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Young Guru was born Gimel Keaton in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1974, the middle-class son of a schoolteacher mother and an accountant father. He recalls traveling to Philadelphia as a child to get cassette copies of early hip-hop recordings that had come down from New York. By age 12, he was DJ\u2019ing midnight basketball games in the Wilmington projects, while studying his DJ idols Jazzy Jeff and Kid Capri by day.<\/p>\n

Enrolling at Howard University, he became one of Washington, D.C.\u2019s leading club DJs. The school put on an annual hip-hop conference, the first of its kind, which gave Guru access to stars like Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. By his senior year, he\u2019d DJ\u2019d at the shows of all the big hip-hop artists who\u2019d come to town.<\/p>\n

After a tour in Europe, Young Guru studied sound engineering at a studio in Maryland in order to learn how to record jazz and rock records in addition to hip-hop, which he was already working on with two of Bad Boy Records\u2019 biggest producers. Two years later, he was in Manhattan, working on a record with Memphis Bleek, a Jay-Z prot\u00e9g\u00e9. \u201cJay-Z came in to supervise. He saw me and said, \u2018I like the way you work.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Sixteen years later, he\u2019s still Jay-Z\u2019s personal sound engineer and a close confidante, to the point that the hip-hop juggernaut entrusted Young Guru with holding his entire musical oeuvre on the sound engineer\u2019s hard drives at home. \u201cWhenever he needs me, I\u2019m a phone call away,\u201d Young Guru says. \u201cThat\u2019s how it rolls. I drop everything for him.\u201d The relationship has its perks\u2014Young Guru has served as Jay-Z\u2019s tour DJ since 2010.<\/p>\n

An avid reader, he devoured books and articles about design, tech culture and his favorite subject, physics (he even once attended a scientific conference to learn about the God particle). \u201cI want to know how the universe works, the same way an engineer\u2019s mind looks at a piece of equipment,\u201d he says. \u201cI want to take it apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

When opportunities beyond music began to arise, Young Guru was ready. He was an easy talker and a natural teacher, having acquired his nickname in high school while giving African history classes at a community center. In 2013, as a visiting lecturer at USC\u2019s Thornton School of Music, he made such an impression that the school named him an artist-in-residence and enlisted him to help design the curriculum for a new music-production major.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s made a huge impact across our school,\u201d says Chris Sampson, vice dean of contemporary music at Thornton. \u201cHe\u2019s been featured in our music history classes, our songwriting classes, our production classes and general education, because he has that depth of knowledge and flexibility. He went from being a guest speaker to a vital colleague.\u201d<\/p>\n

Young Guru realizes he occupies a unique cultural niche, that of the smoothest guy in the room who also happens to be a science whiz and a massive Star Trek nerd. Like his hero Spider-Man, he knows that with power comes responsibility\u2014in his case, to help change the perception of engineering. \u201cTo my younger community, engineers weren\u2019t cool,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I was always the guy who didn\u2019t care what other people thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019ll soon be at the Kennedy Space Center to judge the Intel-Cornell Cup, supervising innovation labs at MIT and consulting Warner Bros. Pictures on franchise science-fiction projects. But music remains a major focus: For RCA Records, he recently finished mixes for a debut from the hip-hop collective A$AP Mob. It\u2019s all part of the guru\u2019s wide-ranging curriculum, a never-ending process of education.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe truly is a scientist, a musician, a visionary,\u201d says Common. \u201cSometimes technology doesn\u2019t get to the core energy of a project, but he knows how to manipulate it where you feel like you\u2019re getting something authentic and organic. He uses technology at its highest level.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ON A COOL, RAINY afternoon in Austin, Texas, Young Guru\u2014Jay-Z\u2019s personal sound engineer for the past 16 years\u2014was giving a master class on recording and mixing techniques at Dub Academy,…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[2152,7],"tags":[212,72,1031,138,35,2679,2678,2677],"views":1154,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3554"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3575,"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3554\/revisions\/3575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mp3poolonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}