HB Kash
Interview by Black Dog Bone
Nick Kashar and Kyle Artzt (HB)
hbkash.com, itunes.com/hbkash, beats4legends.com, sellbeatsnow.com
You are in a group together but you are in different cities. What’s the deal wit that?
HB: Me and Kashar have been making music for a long time together, but we’ve always been on different coasts. We met up in Boston. We both had studios at our houses, and with today’s technology it’s become easy to record like that. We’ve been working together for years from a distance. Currently Kashar’s in California stationed with the military and I’m over here in Seattle, Washington.
You don’t ever perform together? You just make music in your studios and send it back and forth?
Kash: We had a performance together before in Seattle. I moved out with HB for a couple of weeks and we did a show together after our first collaboration album.
What role do each of you play in this?
HB: I try to handle more of the business side of things. I take care of the marketing, promotions. We’ve been promoting for a long time and we’ve managed to get millions of play actually using websites like soundclick and myspace. We’ve been promotin on the internet for a long time and that’s where our main fanbase is. I’m a marketer myself. I have a couple of businesses—I actually sell beats online and I sell information on how to sell beats. And Kashar’s and amazing artist. There’s a certain feeling you get when you get an HB and Kashar track together. When you get HB Kash—his sound and my sound merge together really well.
Both of you make beats. Does one of you do more of the vocals?
Kash: Most of the time I’m known for doing the choruses really well. I can’t sing as well as some R&B artists, but with the sound that we bring to the table I can go and put a chorus together in no time at all. And the feedback we get on Soundclick, Myspace, all the message boards, the fans love every song that we do together.
You both are on every song in the album?
HB: Not every song. We like to show what happens when we come together. It’s really a phenomenal sound that happens when me and Kash get on the same track. We definitely both have singles on the same album where I might have done one song solo and Kash has done a song by himself. As for production, we both make beats and we’re both good at mixing and mastering. But we also like to go out and get production from different sources, so we work with different producers too.
You seem to be using the internet as your main promotion tool. What sites do you recommend other independent artists to use when they’re trying to get their music out there?
HB: If you’re a Hip Hop artist the best place to start is soundclick.com. It has over a millions producers on there, a million rappers, it gets a huge amount of traffic. Me and Kash have gotten to the number one spot on Soundclick many times! I can tell you that when you’re up there you’re getting thousands, if not tens of thousands, of plays. Especially if you’re promoting as a producer. Tens of thousands of plays per day, and those are real fans. And then if you’re promoting an artist you’re talking about hundreds of downloads per day. Then you have to think about where those downloads go. And the social networks are also a huge part of our promotion. Right now we’re running a Twitter campaign that’s been successful. Soundclick, Twitter, Myspace and Facebook right now are all the best places to get promotion. All you have to do is come up with creative ways to promote yourself that other people haven’t thought of yet. Then you’ll make it every time.
All of the outlets you mentioned are free to use. Just like you, there are millions of people promoting there. Who has the time to go through all that music? Each human has limited time in the day to look at websites and listen to new music. Do you think it really works?
Kash: There are billions of people in the world and there are hundreds of thousands of people who think that they are real artists, who think that they can rap. But people like myself and HB who have been doing it for a long time with a very strong background in music, we make the time. No matter how hard. Myself, I’m in the military. I just came back from surveying a tour in Afghanistan. I am still making the time to market myself, to go on these social networks and to advertise. That’s something that you have to have heart as an artist to do. You have to make time in your day to put your name out there. What you put into it is as much as you’re gonna get back.
You’re an artist and you want to get your name out there, but all of that promotion online is free. There are millions of artists doing the same thing you’re doing. How do you get the public to take notice of you and how do you make money out of all of this?
Kash: You’re right. There’s a lot of competition as far as how you stand out and how you can get to where you’re actually making money off your music. You’re absolutely right. There are millions and millions of Hip Hop artists out there. Anyone can pick up a pen and start writing and rapping. How do you stand out? In the internet it’s all about the charts. If you’re trying to promote and get serious exposure you’ve got to get up in the charts. No one is going to search through a million pages to find you. You’ve got to be on the first page, and you will get a lot of exposure from that. There is plenty of money to be made on the internet. Right now we make a lot of money sellin beats and also selling these information packages. We’ve never come out with an album on iTunes. We’ve always done this promotional thing, we’ve built this big fan base that way. As for the cash flow it‘s always from these beat websites, we make anywhere between 3 to 5 grand a month. When it comes to record releases, I think it’s underestimated how much money record labels put into promoting. A lot of people need to get with the idea that you’re gonna have to spend money in order to make money in the record industry. It is an industry based on connections, but if you’re gonna have a huge record release you’ve got to put the money down, buy the advertising, and get yourself situated. We’re gonna do online promotion as well, but we’re not gonna rely on that--we’re doing the print advertising like in Murder Dog as well. Online ads do help, especially with digital distribution. You can make money on iTunes and everything.
Do you do much with Youtube and videos online as well?
HB: Youtube is also an excellent tool. Look at how many people go online just to hear the audio side of the music as well as the visual. They can go on you tube and physically see what we’re doing as an artist, as a group. The type of music that we make is music that people can relate to. We’re not talking about Lamborghinis and diamonds because we don’t have those things. The average person nowadays does not ride around in a Lamborghini. When you hear our songs and we talk about things that are going on in our lives, millions and millions of people around the world are going through the same thing. They can relate.
Rap is crossing over and fusing with other types of music. Are you doing straight Hip Hop or something different?
Kash: We’re definitely bringing Hip Hop back. That stuff that you hear on the radio, that “Snap Your Fingers”, that Soulja Boy style that everyone is listening to--we don’t do that. We’re bringing Hip Hop back to where it was before when you could hear a song and relate to the lyrics. That’s what it’s all about, bringing the old school back. You see a lotta people wearing the old school Converse, that’s bringing old school back. That’s what we’re doing, we’re innovating the old school. It’s the new old school.
HB: Anybody trying to promote themselves in today’s industry should know that there’s more competition than ever. With programs such as Protools it’s so easy for anybody to pick up a laptop, get a cheap keyboard and start making music. You have a whole home studio for under a thousand dollars. It’s a lotta competition, but I would also say that it’s a good thing in a lotta ways. The independent industry is doing really well right now. We might be seeing the numbers fall within the major industry, but the independents are really starting to come together. With online distribution anyone can sell nowadays. I would say don’t get discouraged by the numbers. Just try to find ways to promote yourself in big ways. Think big, as big as you can. Try to reach hundreds of thousands of people all at one with a purpose and a strong product. Do it right. Don’t waste your time. Write up the business plan and get yourself situated. It is possible. People are coming up in today’s industry.
You were talking about Soundclick. What are some other sites that people use for other types of music? Are there other sites that are important?
HB: I like Reverbnation. They seem to have a more diverse base. They have it so you get paid for the amount of plays and downloads you get. So that’s cool. I think Reverbnation has a lot of features that would work for any artist. A lot of tools and resources that are gonna help you promote yourself. But honestly I don’t know of a whole lotta other places to promote yourself on the internet. It’s all about PR. You’ve gotta get in the magazines and you’ve gotta get interviews and reviews. You gotta get as much ink as possible. We want to be in magazines like Murder Dog. Most record labels nowadays are using PR as their main promotional outlet. It’s about gettin the press kits make, sending them off, making the phone calls, Put in the time and effort and try to get that first piece of ink, Once you get that first magazine to write about you it will be a lot easier to get the next magazine and the next. Start local, hit up any college newspapers, anything like that. Getting ink will help you tremendously as an artist.
As far as your sound, who do people compare you to? Do people compare you to other artists?
Kash: No. Not at all. We sound like HB Kash.
HB: If we get compared to anything it might be Linkin Park’s style of music. At times we get like Royce Da 5’9” or Eminem. Nas kinda has a similar rhyme scheme. But what Kash says is right. We don’t really resemble any other music that I’ve heard. A lot of people who like Tupac like out music, even though we’re not doing thug music.
You are very lyrical, is that right?
Kash: Absolutely. Lyrical. You go East Coast, West Coast, South, Midwest, it’s all about the lyrics with us.
As far as your beats, what is your style?
Kash: Anything that makes you move. Go to beats4legends.com and check out our beats. Those are some of the hottest beats you will ever hear. As soon as you turn on a beat from any one of our songs, you’re just gonna wanna move immediately.
HB: We try to make it as new as we can. We never tell a producer to make like a 50 Cent beat. We don’t want that. We want an original sound. We choose our producers and we choose our personal production very wisely. We try to make sure that the tracks have a lot of emotion. We’re real lyrical, and we try to bring out certain emotions with our beats. You’ll hear beats that’ll make you feel motivated or you’ll feel sad or you might vibe with a negative emotion like anger. We try to bring a lot of emotion to the table. Whenever we make a club song we get that feeling of partying. In our beats you’ll hear a lot of different emotions and different kinds of sounds.
Do you bring the emotions with the sounds your use or by the melodies?
Kash: Both. A woman on her period can take the album and put it on and she’ll find something that she likes.
HB: “I Won’t Fail” is our debut album that’s dropping on August 5. It’ll be under the name HB Kash. I think that while we do have club tracks, the general sound of the album isn’t club. It’s more of a vibe where you can listen and relate to it, kinda like a Linkin Park album would be. We have a few club tracks in there with the bangin bass and the fast paced tempo and catchy hooks. We definitely have that, but I wouldn’t say the album was geared towards that specifically.
When you make beats do you use the same equipment and programs? How do you do it?
Kash: Me and HB both have different programs. HB has been using Reason for a while. Me, I’ve used Fruity Loops. As far as I can tell, Fruity Loops is just a sound generator that you can use to sequence beats together. There are hundreds and thousands of samples out there and different plug ins that you can use to create sounds, create noises. It’s all about creativity. I could take a pair of hair clippers and record it on my microphone and distort it to make it sound like a synthesizer. And then I could make a beat out of that. It’s all about creativity. Fruity Loops, Reason, Logic, all these different sequencers that you can use to create beats.
Which ones are easiest to use, in your opinion?
Kash: Fruity Loops is definitely the easiest one I have ever seen. A 4-year old could make a beat with it.
HB: There’s a lotta stuff that’s still complicated with Fruity Loops. But even if you have no real skill with sound engineering or technology, I think you could use Fruity Loops effectively. The best thing you could do if you don’t understand is go to the nearest college bookstore and get the manual guide that teaches you how to use Fruity Loops. It’s gonna blow your mind. That’s all you need, get the official manual. You’ll learn a lot about the program and you’ll also learn a lot about mixing and matching that you might not have known.
Fruity Loops is not an expensive program to buy?
Kash: It’s only about $200 to $300, depending on which version you get.
HB: And that is a steal because you couldn’t even have a have a studio without paying tens of thousands of dollars getting a professional keyboard, mixers, mic’s and everything. To be able to spend 200 bucks and get started is incredible. Just try to get the equipment for an analog system and see how much that costs.
I remember just to record one song in an analog studio would run about a thousand bucks. People used to spend thousands just to get a demo done.
Kash: Exactly. Everybody in America today has a computer. If you have a computer you just need $50 to get an interface and then another $50 to buy a cheap microphone, and you have everything you need to make a song. That’s the trouble nowadays, like what HB was saying about all the competition. You can go out and spend a hundred dollars and make a song. It’s not like before where you were spending thousands of dollars to make a professional sounding recording. I didn’t spend more than 200 dollars on my recording studio, and it’s the best quality that you can find.
Where do you see the music heading? Do you think music is moving forward into something new or is it stagnant or redundant?
HB: I personally think that Pop music is going in a cool way. You’ve got Lady Gaga coming out. You’ve got interesting original music coming out in the Pop world. I find that exciting. What I don’t find exciting is that Hip Hop and Rap in general are either going towards trying to be Poppy--I hear a lot of Hip Hop artists going Pop now--or they’re going towards this mediocre sound that’s just not very good. Right now it the time for new artists to pop their heads out. The new talent I’ve heard lately is really impressing me. For the past few years I’ve been waiting for something and I think now is the time. Things have been bad for a while.
Where do you fit in? Do you feel like you’re part of a wave of movement that’s coming up or are you in a world of your own?
Kash: I feel like the music industry is finally ready for us to come out. As far as Hip Hop goes, the music has been going downhill with mediocre artists. It’s time for something fresh. It’s time for something new, and I think we’ve got exactly what everyone is looking for.
HB: I totally agree. I feel like we have a sound that people are looking for right now because when we play people our music people get so excited and hataz get so mad and the fans get so crazy. When you hear our music you either really love it or there’s a small percent that say they don’t like it. It’s crazy, I get fans crying on the phone, saying how much we mean to them. When you do emotional music the fans really grab onto you and wanna hear everything you say. I think we have a sound that’s really right for the times right now.
When you say emotional music, is it more on the sad, melancholy level or on the happier side?
Kash: Me as an artist, I’m the emotional side of HB Kash. I feel that HB is the harder side. He’s the type that people don’t want to get in his way because he’s gonna run them over like a freight train.
Is that true, HB?
HB: It’s true in a lotta ways. If you enter my market you’d better watch out. When it comes to business I’m quite cutthroat. I’m gonna make sure that my friends are getting somewhere. Any time someone tries to get in my way and says they’re gonna stop me from doing something, I just laugh. That just feeds my motivation. I’m gonna do what that guy thought ten times over. I’m gonna do it bigger than you could imagine. I’ve done that again and again. We did it on Soundclick. We got some promotion from some guys, then they stopped promoting us. I said I’m gonna take that over. We took over Soundclick at number one, that’s great. Then I made a book on how to promote on Soundclick. I just got over. Now I have the number one beat selling website that I know of. It has the highest range of traffic I’m excited about that. There’s kind of an agreement between me and Kash that this is our time and we’ve gotta make it happen right now. If you get in my way, beware.
Are you planning to network and work with other artists? If I’m a rapper and I call you up, would you be interested in working with me?
Kash: Absolutely, for the right price.
HB: It depends on the situation. There are artists that we would work with for free. If you send us some music, we’ll listen to it. The chances that we’ll do it for free right now are minimal because we’re working so hard right now, we don’t have a lot of time. We usually charge, we’ve been doing it for years. We have a big enough fan base to ask for that. We have a lotta artists asking us for collaborations. Don’t take it offensively if you don’t get on your tracks, but send it to us and we’ll be happy to listen.
HB Kash is just the two of you doing everything?
Kash: For the most part it’s just us. We’ve been working together since high school I’m only 23 years old. HB’s 21. We hooked up in high school. In high school a lotta kids are going through issues, either at home or with bullies at school. That’s where our foundation came from, in high school. And that’s where a lot of our audience is coming from, that age range.
What music were you listening to when you started doing this? What inspired you to make music?
HB: There’s a lotta talent on the internet that inspired us. We’ve always been listening to the internet radio. For me personally it was the Linkin Park type of music. I listened to a lot of Linkin Park. I listened to a lot of Tool, which I know isn’t Rap but the emotion that they bring to the table, I love Tool. We have a broad music range, I listened to all different kinds of music. Any time I’d hear a great song on the radio that’s what inspired me. We try to listen to all different kinds of music so we can have the greatest ear that we can.
Kash: I grew up listening to a lot of Eminem. Tech N9ne was obviously a darker style. Even though I’m a Hip Hop artist I love Rock music. Truck Company is a big Rock band that I’ve listened to. And Stain. Those are some people that motivated me to do music.
I see less of a division now in music. People that listen to Rock also listen to Rap music. Do you listening to different kinds of club music like Diplo or M.I.A.?
HB: I like a lotta the new music that’s coming up right now. This is one of the best periods I’ve seen in music in a long time. Artists like M.I.A., I love her music. Nicki Minaj is really great. She blows my mind cause she just kills verses. But there’s still a lot of music coming up that’s terrible.
How can people find your album when it comes out on August 5?
HB: It’ll be available on iTunes, so be sure and pick it up. And go to beats4legends.com if you want to check out our beats. If you want to learn more about how to sell beats online, then go to sellbeatsnow.com. That’s our other website.
Kash: Also check out HB Kash’s website, hbkash.com. Find us on Twitter, find us on Facebook. All you gotta do is search on Google.
Interview by Black Dog Bone
Nick Kashar and Kyle Artzt (HB)
hbkash.com, itunes.com/hbkash, beats4legends.com, sellbeatsnow.com
You are in a group together but you are in different cities. What’s the deal wit that?
HB: Me and Kashar have been making music for a long time together, but we’ve always been on different coasts. We met up in Boston. We both had studios at our houses, and with today’s technology it’s become easy to record like that. We’ve been working together for years from a distance. Currently Kashar’s in California stationed with the military and I’m over here in Seattle, Washington.
You don’t ever perform together? You just make music in your studios and send it back and forth?
Kash: We had a performance together before in Seattle. I moved out with HB for a couple of weeks and we did a show together after our first collaboration album.
What role do each of you play in this?
HB: I try to handle more of the business side of things. I take care of the marketing, promotions. We’ve been promoting for a long time and we’ve managed to get millions of play actually using websites like soundclick and myspace. We’ve been promotin on the internet for a long time and that’s where our main fanbase is. I’m a marketer myself. I have a couple of businesses—I actually sell beats online and I sell information on how to sell beats. And Kashar’s and amazing artist. There’s a certain feeling you get when you get an HB and Kashar track together. When you get HB Kash—his sound and my sound merge together really well.
Both of you make beats. Does one of you do more of the vocals?
Kash: Most of the time I’m known for doing the choruses really well. I can’t sing as well as some R&B artists, but with the sound that we bring to the table I can go and put a chorus together in no time at all. And the feedback we get on Soundclick, Myspace, all the message boards, the fans love every song that we do together.
You both are on every song in the album?
HB: Not every song. We like to show what happens when we come together. It’s really a phenomenal sound that happens when me and Kash get on the same track. We definitely both have singles on the same album where I might have done one song solo and Kash has done a song by himself. As for production, we both make beats and we’re both good at mixing and mastering. But we also like to go out and get production from different sources, so we work with different producers too.
You seem to be using the internet as your main promotion tool. What sites do you recommend other independent artists to use when they’re trying to get their music out there?
HB: If you’re a Hip Hop artist the best place to start is soundclick.com. It has over a millions producers on there, a million rappers, it gets a huge amount of traffic. Me and Kash have gotten to the number one spot on Soundclick many times! I can tell you that when you’re up there you’re getting thousands, if not tens of thousands, of plays. Especially if you’re promoting as a producer. Tens of thousands of plays per day, and those are real fans. And then if you’re promoting an artist you’re talking about hundreds of downloads per day. Then you have to think about where those downloads go. And the social networks are also a huge part of our promotion. Right now we’re running a Twitter campaign that’s been successful. Soundclick, Twitter, Myspace and Facebook right now are all the best places to get promotion. All you have to do is come up with creative ways to promote yourself that other people haven’t thought of yet. Then you’ll make it every time.
All of the outlets you mentioned are free to use. Just like you, there are millions of people promoting there. Who has the time to go through all that music? Each human has limited time in the day to look at websites and listen to new music. Do you think it really works?
Kash: There are billions of people in the world and there are hundreds of thousands of people who think that they are real artists, who think that they can rap. But people like myself and HB who have been doing it for a long time with a very strong background in music, we make the time. No matter how hard. Myself, I’m in the military. I just came back from surveying a tour in Afghanistan. I am still making the time to market myself, to go on these social networks and to advertise. That’s something that you have to have heart as an artist to do. You have to make time in your day to put your name out there. What you put into it is as much as you’re gonna get back.
You’re an artist and you want to get your name out there, but all of that promotion online is free. There are millions of artists doing the same thing you’re doing. How do you get the public to take notice of you and how do you make money out of all of this?
Kash: You’re right. There’s a lot of competition as far as how you stand out and how you can get to where you’re actually making money off your music. You’re absolutely right. There are millions and millions of Hip Hop artists out there. Anyone can pick up a pen and start writing and rapping. How do you stand out? In the internet it’s all about the charts. If you’re trying to promote and get serious exposure you’ve got to get up in the charts. No one is going to search through a million pages to find you. You’ve got to be on the first page, and you will get a lot of exposure from that. There is plenty of money to be made on the internet. Right now we make a lot of money sellin beats and also selling these information packages. We’ve never come out with an album on iTunes. We’ve always done this promotional thing, we’ve built this big fan base that way. As for the cash flow it‘s always from these beat websites, we make anywhere between 3 to 5 grand a month. When it comes to record releases, I think it’s underestimated how much money record labels put into promoting. A lot of people need to get with the idea that you’re gonna have to spend money in order to make money in the record industry. It is an industry based on connections, but if you’re gonna have a huge record release you’ve got to put the money down, buy the advertising, and get yourself situated. We’re gonna do online promotion as well, but we’re not gonna rely on that--we’re doing the print advertising like in Murder Dog as well. Online ads do help, especially with digital distribution. You can make money on iTunes and everything.
Do you do much with Youtube and videos online as well?
HB: Youtube is also an excellent tool. Look at how many people go online just to hear the audio side of the music as well as the visual. They can go on you tube and physically see what we’re doing as an artist, as a group. The type of music that we make is music that people can relate to. We’re not talking about Lamborghinis and diamonds because we don’t have those things. The average person nowadays does not ride around in a Lamborghini. When you hear our songs and we talk about things that are going on in our lives, millions and millions of people around the world are going through the same thing. They can relate.
Rap is crossing over and fusing with other types of music. Are you doing straight Hip Hop or something different?
Kash: We’re definitely bringing Hip Hop back. That stuff that you hear on the radio, that “Snap Your Fingers”, that Soulja Boy style that everyone is listening to--we don’t do that. We’re bringing Hip Hop back to where it was before when you could hear a song and relate to the lyrics. That’s what it’s all about, bringing the old school back. You see a lotta people wearing the old school Converse, that’s bringing old school back. That’s what we’re doing, we’re innovating the old school. It’s the new old school.
HB: Anybody trying to promote themselves in today’s industry should know that there’s more competition than ever. With programs such as Protools it’s so easy for anybody to pick up a laptop, get a cheap keyboard and start making music. You have a whole home studio for under a thousand dollars. It’s a lotta competition, but I would also say that it’s a good thing in a lotta ways. The independent industry is doing really well right now. We might be seeing the numbers fall within the major industry, but the independents are really starting to come together. With online distribution anyone can sell nowadays. I would say don’t get discouraged by the numbers. Just try to find ways to promote yourself in big ways. Think big, as big as you can. Try to reach hundreds of thousands of people all at one with a purpose and a strong product. Do it right. Don’t waste your time. Write up the business plan and get yourself situated. It is possible. People are coming up in today’s industry.
You were talking about Soundclick. What are some other sites that people use for other types of music? Are there other sites that are important?
HB: I like Reverbnation. They seem to have a more diverse base. They have it so you get paid for the amount of plays and downloads you get. So that’s cool. I think Reverbnation has a lot of features that would work for any artist. A lot of tools and resources that are gonna help you promote yourself. But honestly I don’t know of a whole lotta other places to promote yourself on the internet. It’s all about PR. You’ve gotta get in the magazines and you’ve gotta get interviews and reviews. You gotta get as much ink as possible. We want to be in magazines like Murder Dog. Most record labels nowadays are using PR as their main promotional outlet. It’s about gettin the press kits make, sending them off, making the phone calls, Put in the time and effort and try to get that first piece of ink, Once you get that first magazine to write about you it will be a lot easier to get the next magazine and the next. Start local, hit up any college newspapers, anything like that. Getting ink will help you tremendously as an artist.
As far as your sound, who do people compare you to? Do people compare you to other artists?
Kash: No. Not at all. We sound like HB Kash.
HB: If we get compared to anything it might be Linkin Park’s style of music. At times we get like Royce Da 5’9” or Eminem. Nas kinda has a similar rhyme scheme. But what Kash says is right. We don’t really resemble any other music that I’ve heard. A lot of people who like Tupac like out music, even though we’re not doing thug music.
You are very lyrical, is that right?
Kash: Absolutely. Lyrical. You go East Coast, West Coast, South, Midwest, it’s all about the lyrics with us.
As far as your beats, what is your style?
Kash: Anything that makes you move. Go to beats4legends.com and check out our beats. Those are some of the hottest beats you will ever hear. As soon as you turn on a beat from any one of our songs, you’re just gonna wanna move immediately.
HB: We try to make it as new as we can. We never tell a producer to make like a 50 Cent beat. We don’t want that. We want an original sound. We choose our producers and we choose our personal production very wisely. We try to make sure that the tracks have a lot of emotion. We’re real lyrical, and we try to bring out certain emotions with our beats. You’ll hear beats that’ll make you feel motivated or you’ll feel sad or you might vibe with a negative emotion like anger. We try to bring a lot of emotion to the table. Whenever we make a club song we get that feeling of partying. In our beats you’ll hear a lot of different emotions and different kinds of sounds.
Do you bring the emotions with the sounds your use or by the melodies?
Kash: Both. A woman on her period can take the album and put it on and she’ll find something that she likes.
HB: “I Won’t Fail” is our debut album that’s dropping on August 5. It’ll be under the name HB Kash. I think that while we do have club tracks, the general sound of the album isn’t club. It’s more of a vibe where you can listen and relate to it, kinda like a Linkin Park album would be. We have a few club tracks in there with the bangin bass and the fast paced tempo and catchy hooks. We definitely have that, but I wouldn’t say the album was geared towards that specifically.
When you make beats do you use the same equipment and programs? How do you do it?
Kash: Me and HB both have different programs. HB has been using Reason for a while. Me, I’ve used Fruity Loops. As far as I can tell, Fruity Loops is just a sound generator that you can use to sequence beats together. There are hundreds and thousands of samples out there and different plug ins that you can use to create sounds, create noises. It’s all about creativity. I could take a pair of hair clippers and record it on my microphone and distort it to make it sound like a synthesizer. And then I could make a beat out of that. It’s all about creativity. Fruity Loops, Reason, Logic, all these different sequencers that you can use to create beats.
Which ones are easiest to use, in your opinion?
Kash: Fruity Loops is definitely the easiest one I have ever seen. A 4-year old could make a beat with it.
HB: There’s a lotta stuff that’s still complicated with Fruity Loops. But even if you have no real skill with sound engineering or technology, I think you could use Fruity Loops effectively. The best thing you could do if you don’t understand is go to the nearest college bookstore and get the manual guide that teaches you how to use Fruity Loops. It’s gonna blow your mind. That’s all you need, get the official manual. You’ll learn a lot about the program and you’ll also learn a lot about mixing and matching that you might not have known.
Fruity Loops is not an expensive program to buy?
Kash: It’s only about $200 to $300, depending on which version you get.
HB: And that is a steal because you couldn’t even have a have a studio without paying tens of thousands of dollars getting a professional keyboard, mixers, mic’s and everything. To be able to spend 200 bucks and get started is incredible. Just try to get the equipment for an analog system and see how much that costs.
I remember just to record one song in an analog studio would run about a thousand bucks. People used to spend thousands just to get a demo done.
Kash: Exactly. Everybody in America today has a computer. If you have a computer you just need $50 to get an interface and then another $50 to buy a cheap microphone, and you have everything you need to make a song. That’s the trouble nowadays, like what HB was saying about all the competition. You can go out and spend a hundred dollars and make a song. It’s not like before where you were spending thousands of dollars to make a professional sounding recording. I didn’t spend more than 200 dollars on my recording studio, and it’s the best quality that you can find.
Where do you see the music heading? Do you think music is moving forward into something new or is it stagnant or redundant?
HB: I personally think that Pop music is going in a cool way. You’ve got Lady Gaga coming out. You’ve got interesting original music coming out in the Pop world. I find that exciting. What I don’t find exciting is that Hip Hop and Rap in general are either going towards trying to be Poppy--I hear a lot of Hip Hop artists going Pop now--or they’re going towards this mediocre sound that’s just not very good. Right now it the time for new artists to pop their heads out. The new talent I’ve heard lately is really impressing me. For the past few years I’ve been waiting for something and I think now is the time. Things have been bad for a while.
Where do you fit in? Do you feel like you’re part of a wave of movement that’s coming up or are you in a world of your own?
Kash: I feel like the music industry is finally ready for us to come out. As far as Hip Hop goes, the music has been going downhill with mediocre artists. It’s time for something fresh. It’s time for something new, and I think we’ve got exactly what everyone is looking for.
HB: I totally agree. I feel like we have a sound that people are looking for right now because when we play people our music people get so excited and hataz get so mad and the fans get so crazy. When you hear our music you either really love it or there’s a small percent that say they don’t like it. It’s crazy, I get fans crying on the phone, saying how much we mean to them. When you do emotional music the fans really grab onto you and wanna hear everything you say. I think we have a sound that’s really right for the times right now.
When you say emotional music, is it more on the sad, melancholy level or on the happier side?
Kash: Me as an artist, I’m the emotional side of HB Kash. I feel that HB is the harder side. He’s the type that people don’t want to get in his way because he’s gonna run them over like a freight train.
Is that true, HB?
HB: It’s true in a lotta ways. If you enter my market you’d better watch out. When it comes to business I’m quite cutthroat. I’m gonna make sure that my friends are getting somewhere. Any time someone tries to get in my way and says they’re gonna stop me from doing something, I just laugh. That just feeds my motivation. I’m gonna do what that guy thought ten times over. I’m gonna do it bigger than you could imagine. I’ve done that again and again. We did it on Soundclick. We got some promotion from some guys, then they stopped promoting us. I said I’m gonna take that over. We took over Soundclick at number one, that’s great. Then I made a book on how to promote on Soundclick. I just got over. Now I have the number one beat selling website that I know of. It has the highest range of traffic I’m excited about that. There’s kind of an agreement between me and Kash that this is our time and we’ve gotta make it happen right now. If you get in my way, beware.
Are you planning to network and work with other artists? If I’m a rapper and I call you up, would you be interested in working with me?
Kash: Absolutely, for the right price.
HB: It depends on the situation. There are artists that we would work with for free. If you send us some music, we’ll listen to it. The chances that we’ll do it for free right now are minimal because we’re working so hard right now, we don’t have a lot of time. We usually charge, we’ve been doing it for years. We have a big enough fan base to ask for that. We have a lotta artists asking us for collaborations. Don’t take it offensively if you don’t get on your tracks, but send it to us and we’ll be happy to listen.
HB Kash is just the two of you doing everything?
Kash: For the most part it’s just us. We’ve been working together since high school I’m only 23 years old. HB’s 21. We hooked up in high school. In high school a lotta kids are going through issues, either at home or with bullies at school. That’s where our foundation came from, in high school. And that’s where a lot of our audience is coming from, that age range.
What music were you listening to when you started doing this? What inspired you to make music?
HB: There’s a lotta talent on the internet that inspired us. We’ve always been listening to the internet radio. For me personally it was the Linkin Park type of music. I listened to a lot of Linkin Park. I listened to a lot of Tool, which I know isn’t Rap but the emotion that they bring to the table, I love Tool. We have a broad music range, I listened to all different kinds of music. Any time I’d hear a great song on the radio that’s what inspired me. We try to listen to all different kinds of music so we can have the greatest ear that we can.
Kash: I grew up listening to a lot of Eminem. Tech N9ne was obviously a darker style. Even though I’m a Hip Hop artist I love Rock music. Truck Company is a big Rock band that I’ve listened to. And Stain. Those are some people that motivated me to do music.
I see less of a division now in music. People that listen to Rock also listen to Rap music. Do you listening to different kinds of club music like Diplo or M.I.A.?
HB: I like a lotta the new music that’s coming up right now. This is one of the best periods I’ve seen in music in a long time. Artists like M.I.A., I love her music. Nicki Minaj is really great. She blows my mind cause she just kills verses. But there’s still a lot of music coming up that’s terrible.
How can people find your album when it comes out on August 5?
HB: It’ll be available on iTunes, so be sure and pick it up. And go to beats4legends.com if you want to check out our beats. If you want to learn more about how to sell beats online, then go to sellbeatsnow.com. That’s our other website.
Kash: Also check out HB Kash’s website, hbkash.com. Find us on Twitter, find us on Facebook. All you gotta do is search on Google.
