Studio

One night in Lau, during one of my many trademark all-nighters, at about 5 AM I was wandering the first floor. My brain had stopped functioning, and I needed a break. I strolled into the section with dozens of computer monitors and heard a faint sound of music coming from a corner room. I followed the sound to the recording room (that I didn’t know existed), and for a few moments I stood outside, nodding my head to the brilliantly dynamic hip-hop track being engineered inside. I decided to knock on the door to commend the two artists on the shockingly amazing track they were cooking up, and they proceeded to show me various other projects they were working on and let me in on their creative process. Since then, I have joined one of those two, David Peake, a Georgetown graduate of 2017, in the Lau 1 recording rooms on a multitude of occasions. In fact, it’s 6:30 AM and I’m currently writing this from the library studio. I have developed a passion, arguably an obsession, with hip-hop music over the last few years, and with that I have become infatuated with every step of rappers’ creative process, their backgrounds, and their networks. How these artists interact and represent their regions make up an intricate puzzle that I am constantly trying to piece together. I wish I had the inherent talent to contribute to the genre myself, but, alas, I don’t. There’s nothing more exciting and engrossing then experiencing first-hand the long hours and meticulous engineering that go into the making of the dynamic, multifaceted rap music that I so cherish. The visuals of the many sonic layers in GarageBand or Logic Pro that make up the cohesive unit of sound are just as much pieces to the puzzle of the final product. Watching the many stages of the music-making process brings new depth to my own listening experience and to my appreciation for the artistic process in hip-hop. I’m going to have to spend plenty more all-nighters here in my next few years here.