Tone Deep Has Never Charged A Local Artist For A Beat. We Asked Him Why.

Tone Deep produced fourteen of the twenty-two tracks on Circle City Certified Vol. 3. He has never charged an Indianapolis artist for a beat. Not once, not a discount, not a back-end deal. Nothing.

The Picking Problem

This is the whole argument and it took him about forty minutes to get it out, so we are compressing.

If beats cost money, only people with money get beats. If only people with money get beats, he stops hearing from the seventeen-year-old with nothing, and the seventeen-year-old with nothing is, in his experience, where the interesting stuff comes from. The moment there is a price, he becomes a gatekeeper, and he does not want the job.

"Soon as there's a price I'm deciding who gets to make something. I ain't qualified for that."

The Sunday Records

He works off an MPC and a stack of records he buys at the flea market every Sunday without exception. He has gone every Sunday for four years. We asked whether he ever misses one and he looked genuinely confused by the question.

One Thing He Didn't Mention

In 2008 he sent B. Stacks a beat with no message attached. Stacks had been retired for two years. He wrote to it that night and did not stop for eight months, and The Haughville Tapes exists because of it.

Tone did not bring this up. We only know because Stacks told us, separately, three weeks later. When we went back and asked, he said "he was gonna come back anyway," which we do not believe and neither does Stacks.