Slaughterhouse: The Sum Of Its Parts

Royce Da 5’9

Joell Ortiz: Let me tell you something about Royce. When I came into this group, it was “I’m Joell Ortiz, this is what I rap about, this is how I’m going to approach it. It is what it is.” But I can say like, listening to the way Royce creates records, verses, anything artistic involving music…it’s just a different way, man. He just does it a different way. I mean, I never seen nobody deal with a stop and go with direction within a verse. Take you on so many different trips as far as flows, cadences. It’s just a wonderful display of penmanship that Royce brings to this shit and I am still learning from that brother. When I do my next album, don’t be surprised if it’s executive produced by Royce Da 5’9.
Crooked I: Yeah, Royce is definitely a producer, and you know in this game, sometimes you got to wear many hats. You can’t just be like, “I’m just gonna rap, that’s it.” Well if you do that and you run up against a producer who just makes beats, now it’s a rapper and a beat maker in the studio and it ain’t no producer there. You know what I’m saying? So if you can learn to become somewhat of a producer yourself, then if you get that beat maker, he can go home and you can stay in the studio, put in the work and you can still produce the song and take it to another level with the ideas and the arrangements and the vocal arrangements and all that kind of shit, and Royce does all that. It’s to the point where I could send a skeleton to Royce and be comfortable knowing that he’ll listen to that shit and take it to another level. Where as, you can’t do that with everybody. Like some certain beat makers, they’ll send you a beat and that’s it. They don’t have no more input on how to arrange the song once you’re done laying your vocals down and sometimes that leaves for some lacking. So, I definitely learned how to put on a producer hat too in the lab and try to take my own personal music to the next level and that’s something I got from Royce.