“I’d Get $900 — I’m 16 Years Old”: DJ Rek Explains His First Lucrative Production Gig
Long before composing songs for Dwele and Layzie Bone, making a sought after/unreleased Freddie Gibbs and Young Jeezy track with DJ Quik, or scoring repeated production credits for Tech N9ne’s Strange Music label, San Diego pioneer DJ Rek’s first taste of the producer life came as a 12-year-old DJ. After spending a brief time learning crowd control and training his ear to mix different sounds together, Rek jumped into beatmaking as a motivated 7th grader.
Unable to afford any glamorous gear at the time, the California native made due with the tools he had available to him. “I started making music in ’89,” he tells me. “Pause-tapes, that was probably the very first thing I ever did. Then I bought a cheap Yamaha keyboard that had four little sampling pads on it.”
Although he was driven, Rek’s skills weren’t quite on par with his unmatched ambition. “It was some of the worst beats ever,” he says with a laugh. “But I liked ’em and the little people around me liked ’em too. That inspired me to keep doing music.”
“I’m a freshmen or sophomore getting paid while I’m at school. I was like, ‘Yo, I can get paid for making music? I’m never doing nothing else again!’”
Rek credits a unique high school music class and a key mentor/teacher for helping him take his production to the next level when he entered his fresheman year in 1991. “They had a class at Oceanside High called Commercial Music,” he explains. “They had these Yamaha QY10s —it was basically a mini production station. It had probably 16 keys for you to play the piano and they had a hundred and twenty something sounds and drums. That’s the first time it actually sounded like professional stuff because the sounds in the the QY10 were really good.”
Beyond helping Rek master more advanced equipment, Commercial Music also taught how to be business savvy. “That’s when I started really making money doing music,” he says. “I used to charge kids that went to my school to work with me during lunch. I’d charge them cats 50 bucks and it’d be like five or six rappers coming into the little recording studio. Everybody’d chip in their $10 apiece.”
Realizing that he was making good money doing what he loved was a watershed moment for the young Rek. “I’m a freshmen or sophomore getting paid while I’m at school,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yo, I can get paid for making music? I’m never doing nothing else again!’”
“I started working at recording studios when I was 14 or 15 years old.”
Rek’s Commercial Music instructor Mr. Phelps noticed the teenager’s unusual drive and gave him special access to the school’s resources by letting him come in for unsupervised weekend sessions. “I’d catch the city bus or get dropped off at the high school at noon,” he says. “Nobody else is at the school. He would unlock the music lab and let me work in there for hours. And I’m 14 or 15 years old. He really trusted me.”
After establishing his dominance on the high school level, it wasn’t long before local recording studios noticed Rek’s skills behind the boards. “I started working at recording studios when I was 14 or 15 years old,” he says. “Because I was so young and I knew what I was doing, the different engineers at these studios would always invite me to come through whenever I wasn’t even in for a paid sessions. So I used to go to all these recording studios on a regular basis and have access to their equipment.”
Realizing that he had the tools necessary to build himself a lifelong career in music at his fingertips, Rek wasted no time learning the ins and outs of any gear he could get his hands on. “I made it a point to learn how to use every single piece of equipment in every studio, so no matter what happened, if I ended up going to a whole ‘nother studio I’d never been to before, I would know how to work the equipment when I got there,” he says.
“He would unlock the music lab and let me work in there for hours. And I’m 14 or 15 years old. He really trusted me.”
His willingness to spend countless hours teaching himself the ropes paid off big time when San Diego’s Bottom Up Records gave 16–year-old Rek a lucrative production offer. Working alongside area pioneers like Damu and Mitchy Slick, Rek’s gig with Bottom Up involved an unheard of payment rate for an aspiring producer in the early 90s. “They were some baller cats so they actually had a full fledged studio,” he says. “They used to have someone drive all the way down to Oceanside and come and pick me up and drive all the way back down to southeast San Diego and pay me $300 a beat.”
The arrangement was simple, and just as he had done with his Commercial Music teacher, Rek proved he was worthy of a level of trust not often given to teenagers. “They would drop me off in the studio and be like, ‘OK, the studio’s yours, just call me when you want me to come and get you,’” he says. “They’d just leave me in there for a few hours”
Rek would often crank out three beats in one session, making him more money in a single day than many adults could dream of. “I’d get $900 — I’m 16 years old,” he says. “They’d break me off with that bread and then drive me all the way back to the house and be like, ‘OK, let me know when you can come back up again.’”
Fans of Rek will be sad to learn that his discography for Bottom Up Records never saw official release. Although it’s a shame his earliest music is in a vault somewhere, working for a label at a young age gave him invaluable on-the-job training and helped established a level of trust he maintains with current clients. “I’ve had a lot of situations kind of like that, where people just trust me to do whatever I’ma do. I don’t know what it is exactly,” he says. “I guess people think I’m pretty solid.”
Connect with DJ Rek on Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, and on Twitter @djrek.
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