Editor’s Note: Elite is the producer of Jadakiss & Styles P’s Shootouts, Jadakiss’ Why (Remix) and J. Cole’s Heartache, amongst other joints. I had been trying to get him to tell his story for quite some time then he decided to drop a collection of his instrumentals and things just fell in place.

“The Groundwork” was a project I initially decided to put together based on requests I would always get for my Instrumentals. I never released any of my instrumentals. I’m not even sure why, maybe because I somehow knew they would hold some value eventually. As I began to put together the track listing and sequence out the tape, it became apparent that this was more than a collection of beats. To me, it was my foundation. After reflecting on this body of work I think I finally began to feel as though I had “paid my dues”. Almost 10 years in, and it’s about damn time!

Once you reach that point, the sky is the limit. It’s not just about feeling like I’ve established a name for myself, but knowing that I’ve honed my skills to the point where I feel confident enough to tackle new things. For me “The Groundwork” represents step one in a long long long journey. The next step is going to really shock people, but right now is a time to sit back and reflect on a period of trials, errors, triumphs and development.

I figured I’d select a few tracks from the mixtape and share some of the stories behind their creation. As a fan myself, I love to hear/read how other creative people go about their process. Stories behind the song can add so much more magic to it. I remember hearing that “Billie Jean” was recorded in ONE take, which to me gave it the ultimate mystique. I can’t quite compare any of these songs or stories to THAT… But hopefully I can add some color to a few of these pictures for you.

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The best place to start would probably be “Fireman” since it was the first beat I ever placed. It was somewhere around 2001, I was either 18 or 19 years old. At this point I wasn’t even making beats, I was rapping, which is actually how I got discovered by Alimah Deen (sister of Ruff Ryder CEO’s Dee & Wah). In college I was apart of a group on campus, and we basically just needed beats to spit on. The beat for “Fireman” was supposed to be our first real song. But when Alimah heard it, she decided to try and shop it around. I still remember the shock I felt when she told me that Drag-On wanted to use the beat. It literally had to be the 10th beat I had ever made. Ok maybe the 15th. But the point is, I was not expecting this kind of recognition so quickly.

I shifted my focus instantly from rhymes to beats and began to really take production seriously. It actually took a real long time for “Fireman” to come out, but between the time I placed it and the time it was released, I had already secured joints with almost all of the Ruff Ryders artists.

Being in the studio while Drag recorded, I remember him stopping the beat during a take and asking through the talkback. “Ay, whats your name again?”… I responded nervously “….Elite…..” ….. “Ok… E—Leet… where we at baby? Lets get it” was now the recorded intro. He definitely showed love from day one!

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The story of “Shootouts” was well documented in my “Boiling Point” article for Scratch Magazine. And as frequently as I get asked about the beat, the main thing people say is “it’s crazy how you replayed that sample”. Which is funny because up until this point, nobody knew what the original sounded like!

I have to say, getting that sample replayed had to have been the most daunting task I’ve had to face in my career up to this point. What people don’t understand is that Queen (the group I sampled originally) was probably one of the most sonically advanced groups of all time. Brian May single handedly developed an entirely new type of guitar amp and sound. The guy is a genius. Recreating his sounds is just about as hard as recreating Freddy Mercury’s voice (which I actually found to be impossible… Thus the scratch hook).

Thank god for Hanan Rubinstein, a friend of mine that I met through college, who is a musical genius in his own right. Hanan helped me with all of the sound design for “Shootouts”. We spent an entire day in his garage tracking tom sounds, trying to get those epic HITS that set the mood so crazy. After we spent a day tracking them, we had to process them… Develop them… Make them SOUND like they did in the song. This was the case with every instrument… From the guitars to the strings, keyboards and beyond.

The main thought in my head I was racing against was “is it as good as the original?”. The answer always seemed to be “no” to me til the very end. And this was literally after a solid month of daily studio sessions. A moment of vindication however would finally come during the final mix of the record, when Styles P approached me and said: “Yo, you did a good ass job with this… This shit sounds way better than before”. Cue biggest exhale of all time.

To this day, I like parts of the original version better, and parts of the album version better. But now you can decide for your self!

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Riding high off the initial buzz of “Shootouts,” it came time to tackle the “Why Remix”. Jada’s hit “Why” was everywhere, and in-house it was known that a remix had to be coming soon. All the Ruff Ryder producers were taking a stab at it. I remember Neo Da Matrix made a really dope beat sampling Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”. You know the part where it goes “why, why, why”. That shit was hot too!

The original idea was that they were going to get Alicia Keys to sing a different hook, which would totally change the song. But I loved this idea and went crazy trying to come up with something. My original remix was a dark, piano driven melodic take on “why”. I placed it with Jada’s original Acapella, and it gave the song a whole new undertone. I really loved it, to this day I wish they would have considered that approach, Alicia Keys, Nas, Common, etc. on this dark ass melodic beat would have been one for the ages. That same beat actually later got turned into a LOX song that might be on their next album, so you will still get to hear it one day! But anyways, the word from Kiss and the rest of his team was that they wanted something really similar to the original. They didn’t want to stray too far off, which in hindsight I can understand.

I immediately went in and re-chopped Havoc’s sample, gave it a bit more of a Premo dicing and added some more dramatic drums. A little string melody, bass line, etc. and there you had it. Pretty simple on my end I must say (especially following the creation of “Shootouts”).

When we were mixing the record, all we had was Common, Kiss and Styles on it. Nas was “supposed” to be on it, but the song was being mixed and it was starting to seem more and more like a hope than a reality at this point. It had to be done by the end of the night. Still no verse from Nas. I had given up hope, the lineup was still dope but man… Adding Nas would have really shot it into classic status. When I say “Last minute” in this case trust me it’s an understatement. I think I was downstairs playing Fight Night or something ready to pass out when someone finally let me know “They got the Nas verse!”. Man I was hype lol. I would still love to produce solo songs for both Nas and Common. Two of my favorite artists, but to have them both on one track was really insane.

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On to the more present times. The beat for “Playground” was one that I had sent to J. Cole a while back, and he always liked it… But never wrote to it. One day during a session at the crib to record for “The Warm Up” he decided he wanted to try something from scratch, a new approach to writing. Jermaine is a notebook writer, all his raps are written down on paper and then read from the book. But this time he wanted to try the Jay-Z/Lil Wayne approach and just think of the raps in his head, and record them as they came… 4 bars or so at a time. So I pulled up the beat for playground, knowing that he liked it and there it was. I was amazed at how quickly he was able to put the verses together. You have to understand, just a few years before this Cole was only doing songs every once in a while. This was a moment in which I really realized how much progress he had made in that time.

Before long the song was complete, and was planned to be released on “The Warm Up” until like the week before it was done. Since I also had “Heartache” on there, I wasn’t too upset. Especially after listening to the mood and overall flow of the tape, I understood that “Playground” really just didn’t fit. Everything truly happens for a reason though and I think it ended up finding a great home on “The Groundwork”

Make sure you check it out! And keep your eyes peeled for much more in the future from myself, Dreamville and The World!!!!