SXSWORLD

3 2 SXS W O R L D | M A R C H 8 , 2 0 1 8 | SXSW.COM "I've been going to SXSW since back when Interactive wasn't even a thing. You just walked down the street and saw new bands," says Gimel Androus Keaton, aka Young Guru. Best known as Jay Z's go-to recording engineer, he will speak this year at SXSW about the intersection of technology, music and education. At 44 years old, he has grown out of the first half of his stage name and stepped into the second. He received the nick- name "Young Guru" during high school when teaching an African history course to other students. By that point he had already been DJing for several years but hadn't settled on a moniker — Young Guru stuck. He continued DJing while studying engineering at Howard University, then had his first big break in 1992 while DJing for female rapper Nonchalant as the opening act for the Fugees "Ready or Not" Tour. From there, he started to spend more time in studios but felt there was a void to be filled. "At that time as I was going into studios, the engineers didn't really respect hip hop. It wasn't even a genre at that point," he says. His journey into hip hop production began with two weapons of choice: the classic Em-U SP1200 drum machine and the Akai 950 sampler, which allowed him to edit and truncate funk drum breaks. It helped that he already had musical training, which he credits to his mother for always keeping an instrument in his hands (trumpet, piano, and drums). Enrolling in an audio engineering school completed his skill set, and Young Guru began working profes- sionally: "The biggest piece of advice I ever got was 'vibe over money'. 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." 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. 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." Young Guru: Teaching More Than Just Beats By Dan Gentile 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." 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 tradi- tional 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

• Cover