It all started with a facebook message. "It said something like, 'Hey man, I hear you do beats. I do beats too, maybe we should get together sometime,' " John Fontein '08 recalled. Little did he know at the time, but John had just found his future production partner, Paul "Putt" Yancich '07.
Meet Putt. He and Fontein make up the "UnderGrads," the hottest up-and-coming hip-hop producers on the college music scene. They are currently working with Interscope records and have shopped their beats to the likes of Ludacris, Nas, 50 Cent, and many mainstream artists. Def Jam rapper Question will even be featuring an UnderGrad track as a single on his upcoming album.
Just from meeting Putt, however, it is surprising that this lifestyle is his reality. He is a slight kid, pale, skinny, 5'10" and down-to-earth. No bling, no chains, no pimped-out anything. He is engaging, friendly and understated to a point that even Fontein describes as "a little dorky." Putt's subtle style contrasts with the other, more image-conscious side of his personality. His room has all the signs of a typical college dorm — posters line the wall, Family Guy and Chapelle's Show DVDs are strewn across the floor, Grand Theft Auto and a PS2 lie underneath a TV in the corner. He's basically just like any college kid — except he is one who is on the verge of instant success.
Putt's success story begins long before the UnderGrads. He started as a senior in high school with an ideal that any stereotypical Princeton student could appreciate: "Yo, let's become rich."
"At that time," Putt recalled, sitting in his dorm room couch in Pyne, "I had no respect for production as a profession. It all seemed so easy." Over time, though, he learned there was a lot more to it than just a simple drum track. In fact, his dream quickly seemed to slip away as life in Princeton demanded too much from him. Only 10 months ago, in the spring of his sophomore year, did he fully commit to the music industry: "I always had inspirations, but I really needed to pump it up to breakthrough."
Putt spent the entire summer locked in his room, frequently forgoing hanging out with friends in order to build up a portfolio and hone his skills. It seemed to pay off. By the end of the summer before his junior year, Putt had sold two beats to local DJs "for only a few hundred dollars," and had two more optioned by a former teacher for a concept album. More important, however, were the connections Putt made that summer. The same professor put him in touch with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, a Cleveland rap group popular in the mid-90s, where Putt got to see the music business from the inside. A Princeton connection also got him into contact with a "fairly well-known" New York producer, who had worked with Faith Evans and Jennifer Lopez. These contacts, while not leading to instant stardom, were learning opportunities for an aspiring producer.
Not that hanging with stars didn't have its perks. When he did chance to go out, "I could get into any club I wanted, all I needed was a phone call."
Putt, born Paul Putnam Yancich in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, always had music in his blood. His father is a conservatory-trained timpanist for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. According to Putnam family legend, Putt first got his inspiration as a toddler banging along as his father practiced. "Though I'm not really sure how true that is," he admitted. He picked up the drums as early as three years old and has been playing ever since. At six, he started playing the piano, though he stopped several years ago. Though his family has obvious classical music roots, his parents listened to mostly Jazz artists like Buddy Rich and Miles Davis, who remain some of his favorite artists.
The city of Cleveland also helped shape Putt's aspirations. His neighborhood is 80-85 percent African-American, ranging from "dirt poor to upper middle class". Many citizens of the community were interested in hip-hop; it was this diverse climate that inspired Putt. "The first record I ever bought was Snoop Dogg's first album, 'Doggystyle,' in 1993," Putt recalled.
John Fontein, a Brooklyn native, can relate to Putt's influences from his diverse neighborhood. In fact, there's a lot more they have in common. "We talk the same, our paths have been remarkably similar, we both got inspired from our teachers," Fontein asserted. It is perhaps these similarities that make the team work so well.
Putt's facebook message in October hardly fazed Fontein. "I get them all the time," Fontein said. But Putt's insistence finally paid off as Fontein relented and agreed to meet. "At that time I was developing the idea of the 'UnderGrads' as a team of about eight college student producers around the country, and so this would get the ball rolling."
When he first met with Putt, Fontein was amazed by what he heard. "I said to myself, 'Damn this kid is talented.' " They produced a track together the very next day. In the past three months, they have already created over 40 beats together. That averages into about one beat every two days, which leaves them with little time for schoolwork. Putt is "120 percent committed," according to his partner.
At the time, Fontein was already represented by Lippman Entertainment, the county's premier producer-management firm, which works closely with Interscope. But Putt had a manager of his own, Matt Pearlman, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. Though he signed with Lippman, Putt is still working on a contract with his original manager. "See, Lippman is all about the high-powered connections," he explained. "They work from the top down. But Matt is hungry, he knows the people on the ground, like other rappers and producers," such as Cam'ron, R. Kelly, and Twista. Mike Rudoy '07, a mutual friend of Putt and Matt, who made the original connection, elaborated: "Matt is able to get Putt feature articles in magazines and can reach out to those able to release his music." In hip-hop, as in the Indie rock scene, most artists start on a grassroots, "street" level, which not only begins to create a buzz but also lends credibility to a struggling artist. As such, Putt and Fontein are in an ideal position, straddling the line between the big money at the top and the legitimacy of the street, if such could be said about two white kids who go to Princeton.
But the Putt-Fontein relationship works for more important reasons — mutual respect and an ever-growing sense of friendship. In our interview, Fontein exclaims that Putt "is a genius" and has a "perfect personality." Sometimes too perfect. "When we're together all we do is talk about girls and Jack Bauer," which has led them to start working separately in their own rooms, swapping files online to work on each other's stuff.
Musically, too, their relationship is symbiotic. Fontein explained: "Putt is more technical, I'm more musical." Typically, Fontein finds the music to sample and then Putt "chops" it, or reorganizes the main riffs into a solid hip-hop track, adding the basic structure of the song with different effects and sounds. Then the track goes back to Fontein for the fine tuning — adding fills, tightening up bass lines etc. They meet to do the final editing.
And yet, behind his technical prowess, Putt confessed to have never read a single manual on any of the equipment he uses, which is quite extensive. "I like looking at the pictures though," he rationalized. In his room, his desk is a mini studio, covered by a Mac computer (a producer's top choice), two keyboards and a drum sequencer machine. In addition, Putt uses numerous software programs, such as ProTools, Fruity Loops, Reason, and Cool Edit Pro. Fontein agreed, "to this day we still don't know exactly what we're doing. Do you know what the hell a DeEsser or a Limiter is?" Well if it works, it works.
What's unique about their music — by their own confession — is that it isn't unique. Based mostly off classic soul samples reworked to a point where the original tune is hardly recognizable, their work is replete with horns, soft keyboard arrangements and female vocal backgrounds that appears to be aimed at soulful duet ballads rather than gangsta rap. But Putt argued that they could "make hardcore, traditional R&B, clubs songs with synths or real hip-hop." As such, their diversity is intentional. When an artist is trying to start out and make it, it's a smart idea to "make music with artists in mind," Mike said. "You make music in different styles for different artists in order to shop your music to them." But, Mike went on, "Putt uses samples intelligently, he doesn't allow them to rule the songs," which is what initially led Mike to contact his manager friend Matt.
Putt seems to be a musical contradiction. He tells me that it is important to not have a "uniformity of style." And yet, he knows that "every producer needs to bring something new ... he needs to push the boundaries. Hip-hop needs to evolve; it can't stay the same forever." Trying to find a balance is what Fontein calls a "constant struggle." This dynamic of creating something new yet familiar is a tough one and is exacerbated by the challenge of finding a viable beat. "A producer needs to be able to construct a melody so it doesn't get boring after three minutes but it all can't be too complex," Fontein said. "It can be hard for a producer to be remarkable."
In a world where a single beat could yield anywhere from $50,000-$100,000, both Fontein and Putt talk eagerly about the prospect of "blowing" the industry. "Each day there's the question, 'Should I make a beat or study ancient Christian exegesis?' " Obviously torn between his immediate reality and his future, Putt comments, "Where I am now, there are literally millions of dollars sitting below the surface. Any day, we could be millionaires. What would you do?"
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