Young Guru: Teaching More Than Just Beats

Young Guru trained during the days of analog equipment, but even though most of today’s gear is digital his approach to teaching young engineers hasn’t changed. He appreciates the old-school approach of producers like Adrian Younge but doesn’t bemoan the digital revolution and disagrees that it’s ruining a generation.

“I don’t think kids have short attention spans, it’s that the vehicles in which they express themselves have limited them to 30 second clips,” he says. “If someone becomes interested in something, they’ll spend a Saturday on YouTube and learn as much as they can in a year of college.”

'If the vibe isn’t right, there’s no amount of money that should make you do it, because you’re hurting your brand. The money will come.”

That style of self-learning resonates with a younger generation, but it doesn’t always equal success in traditional classroom environments. “These young people make music in their bedrooms,” he explains. “They’re already engineers… they just don’t know what skill they’re using.”

That is an easy line of logic to accept from someone with two Grammys and Jay Z’s cell number, but it can be hard for traditional employers to see the connections between music apps like Garageband and electrical engineering. That is where Young Guru’s new project, Sleeping Giants, comes in. A partnership between brand consultant agency The Marketing Arm and youth empowerment entreprise Era of the Engineer, the new initiative hopes to serve as a bridge between companies and urban youth to encourage the type of talent incubation typically only seen in the world of athletics.“I can go to MIT and get the greatest mind that’s there, but the NBA doesn’t wait until a kid is in college to identify him,” Young Guru says. “They identify him in junior high school, then groom him. If companies took a vested interest in kids, there’d be a direct funnel and you’d have a better and more diverse workforce.”

Although his work with Sleeping Giants will be the focus of his SXSW appearance, it’s impossible not to mention Young Guru’s relationship with Jay Z, and their partnership dates back to the Blueprint era in the early 2000s. What’s the most fun thing about working with Jay Z? Young Guru says that it’s having a direct line without industry middle men. When pressed for a less professional answer, he diplomatically drew comparisons to working with younger artists.

“Jay Z is a human being who knows what he wants to talk about and who he is,” says Young Guru. “Sometimes young artists are talented but don’t know who they are. They know they can sing really well but don’t know what they want to sing about. Your job is to guide their talent.”

Young Guru was a Featured Speaker in the Music Culture & Stories track at SXSW 2018. Watch below: