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The Alchemist

Gazillion Industries · September 20, 2026

A producer who made his reputation on hard New York drums spent the last decade making records with almost no drums at all, and became more influential doing it. The swing setting he works at is a number you can type into your own sampler.

Alan Maman, who produces as The Alchemist, was born in 1977 in Beverly Hills, became Mobb Deep's DJ and in-house producer in New York, and has spent the years since making collaborative albums with one rapper at a time: Alfredo with Freddie Gibbs, The Price of Tea in China with Boldy James, Haram with Armand Hammer, Covert Coup with Curren$y. He worked on an Ensoniq ASR-10 for the whole of the nineties, moved to the MPC and Pro Tools later, and works fast enough that he does not bother naming his files.

The short version

The ASR-10 years

He used an Ensoniq ASR-10 as his main machine for a very long time, well past the point where it was current. His own account of the constraint is the useful part: the sampler gave him only a handful of tracks to work with, and he was still making records on it for major artists years after everyone else had moved to computers. Alongside it, a Korg Triton, which he has credited with beats that were mostly empty and still hit.

That is the same lesson as every other producer worth studying: the limitation was not something he tolerated, it was the thing that made the records sound the way they do. Eight tracks means every decision is a subtraction.

The numbers he works at

Two specifics worth stealing, both his.

Swing at 62 or 63 percent. That is his stated comfort zone, and it lines up with the setting the designer of the MPC recommends for a loosened, relaxed feel. Anyone can type it into a groove control tonight. See the creation of the MPC for where that number comes from and what it actually does to the sixteenths.

Quantize one element, leave the rest loose. Rather than a beat that is all on the grid or all off it, he locks one part and lets the others sit where they land. That is the same principle a lot of people attribute to J Dilla, and it is a much more practical description than turning quantize off entirely.

How he builds one

His arrangement method is almost embarrassingly simple and it is the reason his beats go somewhere. Start with two bars. Make it four. Make it eight. Make it sixteen. He describes it as building a race course for a driver: the rapper is going to drive through it, so it needs corners at predictable intervals and it needs to change often enough that nobody falls asleep at the wheel.

For chopping he leans on mute groups, so one chop cuts off the last, which is what stops a chopped loop turning into a wash of overlapping tails.

Gazillion Industries makes plugins for exactly this speed of working: a knob, a result, and back to the next one.

The drums question

He is the producer most associated with drumless rap, and the story is more interesting than a style choice. He has said that he started wanting to appeal to people who do not care about snares, and separately described the drumless approach as necessity becoming the mother of invention.

It is worth being accurate about the limits of that, though: a lot of his published instruction shows a producer who often starts with drums and builds outward. The honest version is that he has both modes, and that the records people call drumless are a deliberate subtraction from someone who knows exactly what he is removing.

How the beats reach rappers

In bulk, and remotely. He sends batches and waits to see what moves somebody's pen, and he auditions his own beats by putting other people's vocals over them to hear whether they hold. On the most productive of his partnerships he has put his hit rate around eighty or ninety percent, which tells you the batches are not speculative: they are aimed.

That is also the practical explanation for the one-rapper album format he has made his own. If most of what you send a particular artist works, you may as well make the whole record together.

Questions people ask

What equipment does The Alchemist use?

An Ensoniq ASR-10 for most of his career, a Korg Triton alongside it, and Akai MPC hardware into Pro Tools more recently. He has credited another producer with teaching him much of what he does in Pro Tools.

What swing does The Alchemist use?

He has named 62 or 63 percent as his comfort zone, which is close to the setting the MPC's designer recommends for a relaxed, loosened feel rather than a full triplet swing.

How does The Alchemist arrange a beat?

Two bars, then four, then eight, then sixteen, building a structure for the rapper to move through. He quantizes one element and leaves the others where they fall.

Why do his beats have no drums?

He has said he wanted to reach listeners who do not care about snares, and has described the approach as necessity turning into invention. He is perfectly capable of hard drums and often starts with them; the drumless records are a choice.

What to take from it

Set your swing to 62. Quantize one thing and leave the rest alone. Build two bars into sixteen rather than looping two bars for three minutes. And consider what the beat sounds like with the drums muted, because one of the most in-demand producers of the last decade built a second career on that exact question.

Eight tracks on a sampler nobody else was still using, and a catalog most producers with unlimited tracks would trade for.

Keep reading

• The creation of the MPC — The machines that failed first, what Akai and Linn each did, and how swing works.
• J Dilla — The life, the machines, how the drums really work, and the claims that do not hold up.
• How to flip a sample — Five moves that change what a record means, not just where it starts.

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