Race Jones
gangster. grace. alchemy
For a musician, their equipment is virtually an extension of their own body, whether it be a common instrument such as a guitar or a piano, or a producer’s MPC. Everyone of course has their weapon of choice, as is the case with budding producer Steve Lacy, who prefers to do virtually all of his work on an iPhone 6. But just who is this 18-year-old up-and-comer?
Well, last year Lacy was Grammy-nominated for executive-producing and performing on The Internet’s 2015 funk-R&B-soul album Ego Death. He has also been featured on J. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only and more recently even, Kendrick Lamar’s new DAMN. album — he produced “Pride.”
Since the beginning, Lacy’s Apple smartphone has basically been his personal studio, even to this day, as he now has access to all of the equipment a producer could ever dream of. “Why?,” you may ask. Well, Steve is aiming to prove a point, a point that tools really don’t matter. Ultimately, he hopes to remind listeners that the performance, song, and feeling matter more than the gear one uses to record it.
"I like to make music wherever I am," says Lacy, saying that he made beats on his phone before he got access to professional studios. "I got this piece called the iRig, I saw you could plug it into your iPhone, they got amps on here, see what cool guitar sounds I could get."
There's just one problem with the iRig: the model Lacy uses needs a 3.5mm headphone jack to plug into — and the newest iPhone 7 doesn't have one. (There's a new model that works with the iPhone 7.)
So now Lacy uses two phones — an older, cracked iPhone for recording guitar and bass through his iRig adapter, and a new iPhone 7 that he uses to listen and compose his tracks on through Beats headphones.