In the past few years, gaming and creator culture have become an increasingly prominent part of the rap world. Consider the growing presence of Twitch streamers or Ericdoa's viral “Ninja Taper Fade” moment as an illustration of the overlapping Venn diagram between gamers and young rap fans. “Speedrunning,” a term that refers to players seeing how fast they can beat a certain game, has even reached the rap world, with young producers posting videos of themselves recreating popular rap beats in record time.
17-year-old Lukasz Potoniec, who goes by the name Zestro, recently managed to recreate the beat for Playboi Carti's track 'Magnolia' in less than six seconds. Zestro, whose family is from Poland but now lives in Ireland, says he spends two to three hours every day practicing speedrun. All of this, of course, is documented on his YouTube channel, where he regularly uploads new speedruns that are cut and recycled on TikTok. “When I first started doing speedruns, it was literally just me beating my own records over and over again,” he says via Zoom. “I started posting them on TikTok and eventually one of my best friends, Rob, saw these Speedruns on TikTok and started winning them. And that's what really started the hype.”
Robtmb is a 20-year-old producer from Maryland who frequently posts production tutorials and challenges like speedruns on YouTube and TikTok. For some time in December, he and Zestro were in a heated battle to recreate “Magnolia” as quickly as possible. “I think I was already fast and had just connected to the DAW [digital audio workstation]. I just knew a lot of the shortcuts and things like that, so I just used that to my advantage and started making content out of it,” Rob tells Zoom. For weeks, as most people were focused on the holidays, thousands of viewers on TikTok and YouTube tuned in for hours as Rob live-streamed his attempts to beat Zestro's time, which at that point was still around 7 seconds. Eventually, he would break the speed record only for Zestro to upload a new clip a few days later with a new, even faster time. This went on for weeks. Zestro currently holds the current record for “Magnolia”. Currently.
“I remember making my first beat when I was around 12. I had it in Garage Band on my Mac and I just put in some drum loops and called it a beat,” Zestro recalls. “I came across tutorials on how to make beats and then from there I got the FL Studio 20 trial version.”
First released as FruityLoops in 2003 by Belgium-based software company Image-Line, FL Studio allows users to visually map the various sounds and samples to a specific track, sort of like puzzle pieces with grooves in the correct configuration. Knowledge of basic music theory is helpful, but not necessarily required. “I think FL Studio is user-friendly, so it's easy to get into and you don't feel like you're making patterns,” says Zestro. “You don't feel like you're playing any instrument. I think it's good because it's easy to get into. It's not scary.”
That's all well and good, but making a beat in five seconds requires a level of hand-eye coordination and keyboard dexterity reserved for elite gamers. I found myself drawn to speedrunning videos because the sound of the mouse clicking and the keyboard moving so wildly had an almost ASMR quality. “I have a lot of producer friends who come from the same gaming community. I come from doing trick shots in Call of Duty and stuff like that,” says Rob. “I feel like that plays a huge role in the producer as well. I feel like this could help you become a better producer while definitely being a gamer.”
While Rob says he played instruments like guitar and piano when he was younger, he says, “It's a more difficult process than FL Studio. Visual – it's very easy. It could be overwhelming for a new FL Studio user, but it's like a video game to me. And I feel like learning an instrument is the opposite of that.” Fittingly, Soulja Boy's “Crank That” was the first song he remembers speeding to. This song is intertwined with the rise of FL Studio and more visually oriented music production.
Producer Kenny Beats, whose production Discord server is a hub for many young up-and-coming producers, said Rolling rock last year that the introduction of visual production tools is its own kind of generational marker. “I I consider myself the oldest member of the current generation. If we don't break it down by Gen X, Gen Z, millennial, and think when did people start with visual music?'' He says. “That would be once music came to computers and once you could see a waveform and maybe once drum machines were introduced and things became a visual representation of what you were hearing, that's very different from any person who has worked in a studio or made any kind of music since the late 90s and before.”
For Rob and Zestro, speedrunning videos are part of another shift in the way people create and release music. Both producers say that videos, and content production in general, helps them attract clients for their beats. “I think it's advertising, just getting your name out there, but I'm just trying to get my content out to as many people as possible,” says Rob. “Even the people who don't make beats and stuff, I'm just trying to reach everybody.”
Where once there might have been a separation between a musician and a content creator, those walls are beginning to crumble as the online world demands content from each of us. This may sound scary to some, but for producers like Rob and Zestro, it's all part of the game. “To me, it's the same thing,” says Rob. “I'm a musician and content creator.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/speedrunning-hip-hop-1234968918/
