First Placement is a Viewfinder series on producers and how they landed their first major placement, told as a first-person narrative, with the producer’s name revealed at the end.
Our producer this week is Seattle-born, Virginia-raised, and currently based in Atlanta, but it was during his junior year at Virginia State University when a friend introduced him to FL Studios.
A move to Atlanta in 2016 pushed him deeper toward the producer path after interning at Mean Street Studios for DJ Drama and Don Cannon. “I interned for like two years. Uzi was going crazy with Love Is Rage, Playboi Carti was getting ready to drop his tape, a lot was going on, and I soaked up plenty of game,” he shared during our call.
From Mean Streets Studios to placements with Queen Naija, G Herbo, Dom Kennedy, Quentin Miller, Isaiah Rashad, and Childish Major, all major acts, but today’s story is about...
Childish Major and I dropped a single last year called “Wife You'' at the beginning of last year. We dropped that joint, then randomly, Boi-1da followed and dm’d me on Instagram, “Yo, you’re fire.”
I’m like, damn, this is Drake’s producer. I tell him I appreciate the love. I just left it at that, I didn’t want to press him about music.
Fast forward to quarantine. I briefly stopped making music because it was just a weird time. I was kind of chilling. Then my pops got on me. “You need to do something to gain some traction.”
I started posting minute-long video snippets of me making beats in my room. Then my dad started telling me, “You need to go live and have people tell you what to sample.”
I did an IG live in April, right before my birthday. There were 50 people in there. That’s lit for me; Fifty people is a lot. Boi-1da hops in the live. I was making a beat, he thought it was fire and DM’d me again. This time with his number and a message: “Yo, send me some shit.”
I sent him some beats later on that night. He liked them. That was in April, we built a relationship from me hitting him up, conversing about random things.
In November, I was in LA. Boi-1da was too. I hit him to link since we never got a chance to meet in person. We wound up getting dinner. He’s mad cool. We chopped it up, we drank, we had good food, and I picked his brain. It was a great time.
After dinner, he told me he was looking for a Monopoly game, and I offered to give him a ride in my rental. As we're in the car, he asked if I wanted to hear some music. I'm driving around LA, and he's playing me unreleased songs. At one point, he's like, I know you got some shit you've been working on.
There was this one beat, I made it for Kendrick [Lamar], but I was like, “1da, I want you to hear this.” He said play it. I played 10, maybe 15 seconds, and he said, “Stop it. Airdrop it to me right now.”
I airdrop it to him. After that, he told me to keep sending him beats. A week later, I’m back home in Atlanta. I get out of the gym to a Boi-1da text. “Don’t play this for anybody, LOL”
He sent me my beat with Drake vocals. I couldn’t stop playing the song. I probably played it ten times that day. Boi-1da told me that night Lil Wayne wanted to use it for a mixtape.
A week later, my boy sent me this video clip of DJ Khaled playing the song and announcing No Ceilings 3. Everybody could hear my tag. That’s how he knew it was me.
No Ceilings 3 dropped the day after Thanksgiving. The Drake-featured “B.B. King Freestyle” was track number two.