Making Vibekilla's "STAY WOKE" beat.

Yo, I'm here to walk you through some of the process behind @vibekilla's "STAY WOKE"!
I've known @vibekilla for quite a while and I've been wanting to work with him for a majority of the time that I've known him. With that being said, I've shown him a lot of what I've worked on, and it never seemed to be something that he could see himself on. I love what "STAY WOKE" came out to be, and it's been a pleasure to work with both @vibekilla & @theaura-phzd....

When I opened up my DAW I was having a pretty good day so far and a majority of my music reflects how I feel that day.
I was presented with an empty screen but it quickly filled. I created a melody using "Sakura" Which looked a little something like this:
(I don't remember what preset or anything as I lost the original midi for the melody, I had this melody sitting on my hard drive for a while) I threw some reverb on it and equalized it, then moved on.

With that in mind I instantly knew this was gonna be a trap beat.
I found some drums that I though sounded nice and beefy and created a four bar loop that looks like this:

I don't typically program my drums like this, I typically use a step sequencer .... But I thought I'd try something new. I really enjoy trying different techniques when producing/beat making.
I ended up using a completely different sounding hi-hat roll for texture, a kick that clips intentionally, a typical trap snare with plenty of reverb, and a 808 sub to fill up some of the low end.
I had the 808 follow the kick pattern and yet do it's own thing at the same time, I didn't want the 808 and the kick to follow each other, but I didn't want the 808 doing anything that would break the flow of the song.
The hi-hats hit every half a beat, while the hi-hat roles come in and out about four and a half beats to catch the ear.....

when it came to the hook, I wanted to keep it very simple, I just make the kicks drop out so it puts more focus on everything else:

And that's where I started to strain my creativity on this beat, so I decided to wrap it up with a fade out:

I went for more of a modern minimalist approach to the mixing, I didn't want anything to be overwhelming, or empty. I made just enough room for vocals:

Here's what the full project file looks like:

That's when I showed it to @vibekilla and he just fell in love with it, he heard it he audibly ooh'ed and said "This shit bangs! You need to send me this." And so I did.
From there it took about three or four days for @vibekila to fully write and record the song. And since I sent @vibekilla an unmastered version of the beat, I also exported the stems and sent those. He sent the stems along with his vocal tracks to the audio engineer for this track @theaura-phzd.

@vibekilla said "Honestly it took a while.
I went through a lot of concepts; my circle is fucked up and I don't really fuck with a lot of friends like I used to, mainly because they want to do their own thing.
I'm honored to be trending, and all I want to do is bring new artists to the table that could never be heard through the use of this platform."

Be sure to check out the full song on @vibekilla's profile!
and please join us for our steemit journey to turn this into a platform for artists of all kinds on Discord