Home/Producers

The producers who built the sound

Rap is a producer's medium and producers are under-documented almost everywhere. These ten shaped how the genre has sounded for the last twenty years. DJ Premier, DJ Quik and DJ Screw are covered in the artist profiles.

• Metro BoominThe producer who made producers into headline artists, with four number one albums under his own name.
• Mike DeanThe engineer, mixer and synth player whose fingerprints are on Rap-A-Lot and on almost everything Kanye West has released.
• ZaytovenA church organist who became the primary architect of Atlanta trap, working faster than almost anyone in the business.
• MustardThe producer who made West Coast rap dominate radio again, twice, ten years apart.
• 9th WonderA soul-sample purist who built a label, taught at Duke and Harvard, and produced for Jay-Z along the way.
• SouthsideCo-founder of 808 Mafia, and one of the architects of the harder end of Atlanta trap.
• Pi'erre BourneA producer whose bright, video-game-adjacent beats defined a whole strain of late-2010s rap.
• Tay KeithA Memphis producer who went from local records to Drake and Travis Scott inside a year.
• WheezyThe producer most responsible for the melodic Atlanta sound of the late 2010s.
• HitkiddThe Memphis producer whose 2022 record with GloRilla became one of the year's genuine phenomena.