10 Essential Sounwave Productions

Sounwave is one quarter of Top Dawg Entertainment’s in-house production unit the Digi-Phonics. Although deeply respected in the hip hop production community, he rarely strays outside the confines of TDE's roster of artists, and even within TDE he collaborates with Kendrick Lamar more than anyone else (although he did produce three tracks on ScHoolboy Q's new album Blank Face LP). Along with Terrace Martin, he was one of the chief architects of To Pimp a Butterfly's sonic universe.

Sounwave is a holistic producer with no signature sound -- his great strengths are his abilities to construct an arrangement -- to elevate a beat into a song -- and to cater to each artist that he works with. Click through the gallery to listen to 10 of his best productions.

"Menthol" samples Tokimonsta's contemplative "The World Is Ours." It's a suitable backing track for Rashad's stream of consciousness scatter shot examination of his relationship woes. It reads like a page straight out of Rashad's diary.

A bonus track off Jay Rock's 2010 Black Friday mixtape, "Shadow of Death"  opens with 8 bars of a curious oboe & conga sample, and then Jay Rock announces his presence at the top of his verse with a simple "chyeah," cuing Sounwave to unleash the beat in full, a mighty cascade of strings, a flood of Biblical proportions.

Like many instruments native to middle school concert bands, the baritone sax is criminally underutilized in hip hop. On “There HE Go,” Sounwave assigns the bari sax man the bass line, a delightful move that only adds to the song’s sense of mobility. “There He Go” is best played upon waking up or during the morning commute to work, as it will give the listener the sense that anything is possible.

“Hoover Street” is a tale of ScHoolboy Q’s stint as a drug dealer “back when the only fan I had was a fiend,” and of the thrill of being a “real nigga.” Given the lyrical subject matter, the beat is much more experimental than you’d expect. Sounwave begins with an unorthodox drum beat mirroring Thundercat’s unassuming bass groove, then switches abruptly to a slow, cold-blooded boom-bap beat straight off Illmatic.

Sounwave produced the first half of ScHoolboy Q's two-sided pill opus "Prescription/Oxymoron." (His Digi+Phonics partner Willie B produced the other half.) He creates the sensation of Q drifting in a nightmarish sea, the numb, dark world he travels to when he abuses prescription drugs.

The “Hol’ Up” beat sounds like the soundtrack to a ‘50s Pan Am cross-country flight, back when flying coach was actually tight. To fly coach in the ‘50s was to be a winner, and Kendrick is no more forward-leaning and confident on Section.80 than he is on this song. “Big shit poppin’, when losing ain’t an option.”

The "A.D.H.D." beat is a straight-forward flip of Odd Future's "The Knight Hawk." It provides a texturally rich but relatively neutral flavor, blank sheet on which Kendrick indicts the cavalier use of alcohol and drugs that ultimately brings ruin to body and mind.

Sounwave produced the first half of Kendrick Lamar's "m.A.A.d City." (Terrace Martin produced the other half.) He is not known for his bangers but here he creates a savage adrenaline rush of a beat, one different in sound but similar in essence to Jedi Mind Tricks' "On the Eve of War." The battle is nigh.

Kendrick’s lyrics on “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” are extraordinary. But it is Sounwave who controls the song’s energy flow like a pressure valve, bringing in wispy white noise gusts and an upbeat, martial trap drum groove when he wants to turn things up.

I got a bone to pick! 

The “King Kunta” arrangement is a marvel. Your garden-variety song structure will introduce new layers when when the chorus comes in, then revert to the core elements on the second verse. Sounwave throws this formula out the window, choosing to introduce each new sound at his leisure – first the haunting synth is added to the fundamental bass and drum groove, then a guitar lick, then an unexpected harmonic shift, then the voicebox dude, and later the grand finale, a flurry of distorted and funky Stankonia guitars.