He responded like, ‘We were just talking about your mixtape last night!’”Īt this point, Rocky was living in Jersey and had already recorded a version of “Demons” to the “Numb” beat from Volpe’s first instrumental mixtape, which he’d released in March of that year. “He posted Rocky’s stuff and I hit Yams up. “I used to check because I liked the old pictures from rap magazines and the funny captions,” Volpe recalls. (Volpe was raised in New Jersey and resides there still, in Bergen County.) One in particular jumped out at the MC-the song that later came to be known as “Wassup'-marking the first exchange in a fruitful relationship between Volpe and Rakim Mayers, a.k.a. In May 2011-the year he says music became “full-time”-Volpe sent just four beats to a young local rapper. So Volpe prefers email to working in the studio. Next.’ I’ve learned from going to a bunch of sessions that there’s usually no point for me to be there.” “I’ll go to the studio with a rapper and I'm like, I have four beats-that’s it! Other producers will have 50 beats stocked up and they’ll play them with the rapper going, ‘Next. “I have a few things at a time that I'm happy with,” Volpe, 29, says.

And yet he’s helped shape the sound of some of the most talked about artists in rap today, from 2009 to now, from Lil B to A$AP Rocky to Vince Staples. If Mike WiLL could last 120 hours in the studio, playing through endless beats for an MC to jump on, Volpe would last maybe 12 minutes. Mike Volpe, who produces and releases music as Clams Casino, is taking the less-traveled path. The most prolific producer usually wins the day. Take the “five beats a day x three summers” regimen mapped out by Kanye West on his song “Spaceship” Drake producer Frank Dukes and his self-made Kingsway Music Library, a massive collection of affordable original music for other beatmakers to sample or the catalog of beats Atlanta hotshot Mike WiLL Made-It has created (enough that “Mike could lock you in a studio for five days and not play the same beat twice,” according to Miley Cyrus).

Read enough interviews with hip-hop producers (or the rappers who use their work) and you’ll come to understand that successfully selling a beat is often a numbers game - and that volume wins.

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