For Rogét Chahayed, every hit record begins the same way: with a musician chasing an idea. Whether he’s digging through Kontakt libraries, improvising at the piano or jamming alongside fellow producers, his role is rarely to finish a song from start to finish, but to spark ideas that an artist can transform into a global hit.
It’s an approach that has made Chahayed one of modern hip-hop and pop’s most trusted collaborators, and he’s developed a workflow designed to capture inspiration the second it strikes. Looking back on some of his biggest credits, he explains how both technology and collaboration have become equally important parts of his creative process.
“I began as a piano player before shifting into keyboards, but realised that there was a whole world of VSTs that I needed to get into. At first, I was just showing up to sessions with one keyboard, but then it changed to a laptop loaded with Kontakt.
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“When I started making a little money, I’d go to Guitar Center, try the keyboards and find myself coming up with all these amazing ideas. I thought to myself, wow, if I had a studio with all these keyboards on a wall I’d be coming up with stuff all the time.”
“Since we built this routine, it’s been like an indestructible weapon”
Success eventually allowed Chahayed to build the studio he’d always imagined, and one that’s designed to capture spontaneous musical ideas before they slip from view. “I finally built my home studio, which is a really amazing place. I have two walls of keyboards with about 30 or 40 synths and a Steinway piano alongside a Fender Rhodes and a drum kit.
“Saying that, over the years, I’ve developed an amazing system with my engineer Julian Vasquez where I’ll just bring a Nord Stage 4 and my laptop, which has millions of sounds organised for easy access to strings, synths, brass, woodwinds, basses and guitars. It’s like I’m playing one of those games where you’re in control of an army and you have access to this whole artillery of sounds.”
Going deeper on his working process with Vasquez, Chahayed explains: “Julian’s usually recording me 24/7, so while I’m coming up with stuff he’s locking in a tempo and recording it into Logic just in case somebody hits on a moment. Then he’ll put it into Ableton and start building a session around it.
“Since we built this routine, it’s been like an indestructible weapon. We produced J Lo’s album This Is Me… Now, Bruno Mars and Rosé’s APT. and Drake’s Janice STFU on this system, which is designed to capture whatever’s happening in the moment through jam sessions.”
Despite all of the technology at his fingertips, Chahayed still believes the best productions are built on rhythm rather than technical virtuosity. “I’ve always strived to discover what they would call the perfect loop… four bars, eight bars, four chords or whatever, but I think it’s less about technique and more about rhythm. That’s why I think Scott Storch is one of the greatest producers of all time – the way he approaches production is so attractive to me because his rhythm is so strong.
“When I first started making beats, I was trying to be Oscar Peterson and doing way too much noodling and riffing. Mel-Man used to say to me, ‘Hey, they teach you how to play all these notes in conservatory, but they don’t teach you how to play with rhythm, and you have terrible rhythm’.
“You’ve got to fill the spaces in between and it’s probably harder than people think to consider how you’re going to contribute to a genre or sound and insert yourself musically. The cut-and-paste approach means you’ve got to find the perfect riff for the perfect bassline or few bars because rappers are always saying something different, and the beat is just a mattress for them to float on.”
This philosophy played a key role in one of Chahayed’s earliest blockbuster records: the opening of Travis Scott’s Sicko Mode, which began life as an improvised late-night studio session. “It started out as a session cooked up with Hit-Boy. We’re still friends today, but in this particular scenario it was just another night of going to his studio and making ideas without any aim or direction.
“On this occasion, we were at Chalice Studios in Hollywood sifting through sounds and I was looking through the Kontakt factory library and saw a sound called the Rapman Waw and thought, ‘That’s a cool name for a sound’. I didn’t know there was a Casio keyboard from the ‘90s called Rapman, but I pulled up the sound, played this chord and thought, whoa, I’ve never heard a crazy organ sound like that before.”
Chahayed completed the progression, layered it with bass and watched as Hit-Boy immediately jumped behind the laptop to transform the idea into the frantic, off-kilter foundation that would eventually become the opening movement of Sicko Mode.
From there, the beat took an unexpected journey before finally landing in Travis Scott’s hands. “Within a month or two, he’d sent the beat to Jay-Z who held onto the Sicko Mode part one intro beat for about a year, but didn’t do anything with it.” Chahayed continues. “After that, Hit-Boy took the initiative and sent it to Travis who called him the next day to say, ‘We’ve got a crazy song.’ It was originally for a track he made with Drake, but I didn’t hear a bounce of it until I heard Sicko Mode on the day his Astroworld LP came out.”
Throughout Chahayed’s career, not every success has happened overnight. His long-running relationship with Doja Cat stretched back years before either of them celebrated a mainstream breakthrough. We asked the producer how it all started. “I’m really grateful for my friend Yeti Beats because he’d been working with Doja since she was really young and approached me saying he’d love for me to meet an artist he was working with.
“I didn’t really know who Doja was, but she loved the sounds I was playing and her vibe and approach wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen. Her talent was clearly enormous and she wrote three or four songs to all the beats we’d made together in one sitting.”
That early faith was eventually rewarded, as years of collaboration culminated in the global success of 2021’s Kiss Me More. “As the years went on, I knew there was something really special there, and she had a big viral moment with the song MOOO! Fast forward to 2021 and Kiss Me More was our first big hit, which felt like a reward for all our patience, but she didn’t really have many collaborators in the studio – it was just Yeti, Kurtis McKenzie and Jerry, our engineer.”
“We’re just planting the seeds of good songs and ideas that will either end up finding their way to a really big chart position or get stuck on a hard drive forever”
By contrast, Chahayed explains how songs destined for pop’s biggest stars often take on a life of their own, evolving through countless revisions before reaching the finish line. “A good pop song can go through 14 or 15 versions. Even in the case of Bruno Mars and Rosé’s APT., we had a completely different version before Bruno got on it, but it went through a version that we thought was pretty special, although we didn’t think it was going to be the global hit that it was.
“One year later, Bruno hops on it and does his thing, so we’re just planting the seeds of good songs and ideas that will either end up finding their way to a really big chart position or get stuck on a hard drive forever.”
More recently, Chahayed found himself adapting his approach for Drake, with his ideas often pared back to let the vocal take centre stage – a process that was particularly evident on Iceman standout Janice STFU.
“In the case of Drake, I’d already played the horn riff on Laugh Now Cry Later, but there was also this Janice song. We didn’t hear his vocal or even know what the song was called, but we knew from our source that he liked the loop we’d sent. Basically, what I’ve noticed is that a lot of the sounds that we did for those songs got filtered to become more background.
For Chahayed, it’s a reminder that a producer’s job isn’t to dominate a record, but to give an artist the strongest possible foundation to build upon. “If you hear the original version of Laugh Now Cry Later or Janice STFU, the beat, synths and horns are really in-your-face, but after Drake did his thing, they’re used as support rather than the main riff.
“Drake’s voice is so much like an instrument that it needs support rather than to be led by a sound, so the delivery of an idea has to be big and crazy – and if they like it, they’ll take it from there and make it work for him.”
