Ty Dolla $ign is not only an accomplished performer, he’s an accomplished songwriter as well. On top of his own tracks, Ty has also had a hand in penning hits for others, including Chris Brown’s “Loyal” and parts of Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg’s “Young, Wild & Free.”
While overseas on tour last month, Ty sat down with i-D Magazine, and shared a few tips and tricks on how he gets into the zone – without sharing the entire secret formula, of course.
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1. Good speakers.
“The right speakers are important. In my real studio, I use Augspurger monitors because those are the best. At the house, I have Yamaha NS10’s and then I have the QSC’s and the KRK’s. I want a track switching between all the speakers, just to make sure it’s exactly right. You can be anywhere and hear a hit record and know that’s the one because the energy in the room will just change. It’s always the one that comes right off the top; when I wrote Paranoid, I knew I had one. It felt like something that they did in the 90s, like Bell Biv DeVoe vibes.”
2. Don’t worry about the words at first.
“I don’t really pay attention to content. When the beat comes on, I just write to it. I try to do that eight or so times a day. The most songs I’ve done in one day is 13 and that’s just doing the hook and the verse and I go on to the next song. Then I play it for all the homies and a whole bunch of girls. I don’t ever ask them either, because I don’t want to be ‘Yes man’d’. So if I see people react to it or hear people say, “Yo what’s that?’ then I know I got one; I’ll finish it, put the second verse and a bridge or a feature on it. Before I made Toot It And Boot It I thought too hard. I still think too hard and I’m still trying to accept the simple shit because I come from listening to like Nas and Jay Z and their crazy lyrics, so dumbing it down to simple shit is hard, but that’s what gets the party going. It’s cool to have both, so that right there is the difference in every song I wrote since. I realized I needed to stop trying so hard and I needed to just do me. That was definitely a life lesson.”
3. Bounce ideas off of other people.
“I’m not afraid to take other advice from people. Like say I’m just vibing with you and I got some music on and you say something tight, I will use that – and I’ll send you your percentage. Like Toot It And Boot It, that was from my cousin TC 4800 and my homie Nando who’s now working for YG. They were like, ‘Make a song called Toot It And Boot It’. I was like, ‘What’s that?’ They were like, ‘You know, when you fuck her and leave her’ and I was like cool, I gave them both 5%. That happens any time I’ve done a song, whether it was the homeboys or the homegirls that give me their idea. Even with Blasé when I was in the studio with the homie, he gave me a line or two for my verse and I was like, that’s tight. Most fucking rappers or singers are so up in their ego, they don’t want to give it up to people that help them. Fuck that. I give credit where credit’s due and you have the song credit.”
Read all 10 of Ty’s steps here.
