It’s 11 am on a Wednesday in Staten Island when I speak with Stoic. Tonight, he’ll publish an instrumental hip-hop beat to YouTube, just like every other Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
The 29-year-old producer has followed this schedule for over seven years, with over 1,000 beats to his name—including one for Doechii’s 2024 BULLFROG that helped the song win a Grammy for Best Rap Album via Alligator Bites Never Heal. He has more than 115,000 subscribers, and over 100 million streams across streaming platforms.
I speak to the moustached beatmaker in August, a week before he releases PAELLA!, his debut solo album of smooth, soulful, and sometimes experimental hip-hop. He’s produced, mixed and mastered the LP, and collaborated with a slew of artists he admires, including Mick Jenkins, LIFEOFTHOM and Deante’ Hitchcock.
He’s excited for his fans and peers to hear the music. But he’s not hoping for compliments.
“It’s a cliché that everyone says like, ‘Oh, I don’t care about the numbers,’ but everyone cares about the numbers,” explains Stoic, real name Matthew Moleta. “You hope the numbers are good, and you hope the reactions are positive. But I like to see when my music splits the room. I actually think that’s a positive. It usually means you’re giving people something they didn’t know they wanted, or they don’t think they like. Being able to turn them is really cool. Hopefully we’ll split the room a little.”
That bold approach is prevalent from PAELLA!’s intro track, PEGAO, which combines a lazy hip-hop beat with fast-paced breaks and chopped-up jazz guitar. “All my favourite albums have that first intro track that sets the stage for what you’re about to hear. I think it’s so important,” he says.
Young Stoic
Moleta’s career started in 2015, when he began uploading ‘type beats’ to YouTube and selling them on Bandcamp. If you’re out of the loop, a type beat is an instrumental track that’s made in the style of another producer or artist. As Stoic, he’s uploaded MF DOOM type beats, The Alchemist type beats, Tyler, The Creator type beats, making his name and honing his skills by emulating his idols.
Before the type beats, Moleta had been making homemade demos as a guitarist and bassist. He’d learned how to use GarageBand after his mother encouraged him and his brother to “get out of the house” during summer break when he was 12. They ended up attending Apple Camp at the Staten Island Apple Store.
“I had such a fun time doing that,” he recalls, smiling. “That was my first time making a beat, and producing anything on a computer. That was a big day in my life.”
In 2015, Stoic posted his first beat to YouTube. At the time, he had no intention of using the platform to make money or launch a career. “I started it to just catalogue all the music I was making, so I could listen to it when I wasn’t home — in the car, or whatever.”
That same year, however, Moleta started putting some of his finished work on Bandcamp (you can still find his old profile, which reads “18 year old artist from New York. I make beats”). To his surprise, he sold his first track, Iron Mike, while he was at the mall: “I got this notification on my phone, [that said] ‘25 bucks from Bandcamp’. I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ To this day, I remember that feeling of like, ‘Holy shit! Someone just paid for my bullshit that I made in my bedroom!’”
By 2019, Moleta was in his last year of college and had begun the three-beats-a-week routine. A career in beatmaking was becoming more realistic, as he was seeing other online type beat producers making a living off their music on beat marketplaces. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’m making them already. Let me set up a beat store.’ But I was, like, whatever— I didn’t expect anything.” At first, he recalls $50 a month turning into $100 a month, then becoming $200 a month, and then $400 a month. He still remembers the first month he cleared $1,000, using some of the cash to buy his buddies drinks at the bar, and “feeling like a big shot”, he laughs.
Once the novelty of buying beers wore off, Moleta realised this was “real money”. It was the end of 2019, and while he’d been training for a career in the medical field, the music biz seemed to be calling.
“I was about to graduate. I was going to become a nurse, and I was ready to start working,” he says. “But by the time I graduated, I was making more money off of type beats than I would be as a nurse. And I hated nursing — it’s a very tough profession. If you have any nurses that are friends or family, give them a hug. That shit is not easy. But I thought, ‘lemme just go all in on this music stuff.’ I’ve been doing it the same way ever since then.”
Still cooking
Although he still produces and publishes type beats most days, he’s no longer trying to replicate the style of an artist. Now, he’ll make the beat and ask himself, “Who could I hear on this?” Sometimes, YouTube commenters will claim that the track sounds nothing like the artist that Moleta’s referencing. “You know what? Honestly, good,” he says. “Maybe it’s not the best for SEO or branding or stuff like that, but in my mind, it makes sense, and that’s all I care about.”
It’s essentially the same mindset that led to PAELLA!. The album is a collection of Moleta’s favourite beats and favourite people — from his musical collaborators to his mom, who reads out her own Puerto Rican recipe for paella on the album’s skit, THE RECIPE. He took the “most rappable” tracks from his catalogue, and worked with his favourite people to bring the record to life.
“Sometimes as producers, we overproduce just because we’re having a good time. PAELLA! was beats that are just unique enough to still have an artist on it and make sense,” he says.
11 years on since his first Bandcamp sale, Moleta’s achievements are compounding. He jokes about his “15 minutes of fame” from his Grammy win; he’s thankful for working with his favourite artists and releasing his debut solo album, and he’s ultimately now living his dream.
A reasonable question might be ‘What’s the next big thing?’
But today is Wednesday. And all that matters to Stoic is posting that beat at 8 pm.
How to be a Stoic
Banging out multiple beats every day is now part of Moleta’s routine. It’s fairly disciplined, which you might expect from a producer who named himself after a philosophy based on moral discipline and improvement. But his reasoning is less philosophical than you might think.
“I didn’t want to be the producer that starts making music at midnight and doesn’t end till five in the morning,” he explains. “There’s a lot of studio rats, and I respect it, I love it, and I have a lot of friends like that. As for me, I always wanted to structure it like a nine-to-five, because all of my friends and family are nine-to-five, and I figured that would be the only chance I would get to have a regular workday and then go see them.”
This is how a Stoic workday usually goes down:
- Pre-work: “Stumble out of bed, get some cold brew, and a big jug of water”
- 9 am: “If we’re being honest with each other, I usually start my day with half an hour of YouTube, just general browsing. I’ll sit there, watch some videos, some music-related, some not, and then I’ll get right into it right after that.”
- 9:30 am: “I use this website for samples called Tracklib. I’ll browse through there, download four or five tracks I think could be cool, and then start sampling them. I keep doing that for about four hours.”
- 1 pm: “Usually hit the gym around 1 o’clock… Us producers can get stuck in our chairs all day. But if you take just even 30 minutes or an hour to yourself and go for a walk, or ride a bike, or hit the gym, whatever it is…I think your mind and your body are so connected in that way. If you don’t move your body, the gears in your brain are going to stop turning after a while…Staying active definitely helps me with posting a beat every day and having new ideas and all that jazz.”
- 2 – 5 pm: “Come back for lunch, and then work the rest of the day until my wife gets home from work…Usually, my process is that I’ll lay down a drum break and then chop the sample over that. I’m really looking for the most unique sounds I could find in the sample. I’ll go through on Serato and ‘favourite’ moments, then I’ll reshuffle it a couple of times and see what I find. Once I have about 8 to 12 chops that could really fill 16 bars of music, I lay those down, then take the drum break out and then make my own drums. Once I have that, the beat is essentially finished, besides some sound effects, and maybe play in a bass line or a guitar lead.”
“I mix as I go. I know some people don’t do it like that, but I need to hear the sounds as clear as possible, and how they’re interacting with each other. Honestly, my mixing is literally just EQ, levelling, panning. That’s about 95% of it. I think mixing really is simpler than people make it out to be.” - 8 pm: “I set myself to the YouTube schedule [of posting a track every Monday, Wednesday and Friday]. No matter what, I’m putting out a beat at 8 pm that night. One or two months a year, I’ll do something special with my subscribers where I’ll post a beat every day of the month. Those are tough, but very fun and very rewarding.
“Producers will report getting ‘beat block’ for days or weeks at a time, and it’s definitely a thing. No one has new, fresh ideas every single waking moment of their life, especially after making thousands of beats at this point. But I think that it’s something that you acknowledge. You say, ‘Okay, I’m not too hot today, but I was amazing yesterday. I think I could get back to that point.’ It’s about finding the confidence in yourself to know that, even when you think you suck, you’re gonna get out of it.”
Learn more at stoicbegood.com
Sam is the Commissioning Editor at MusicTech, where he’s helped shape the publication’s editorial voice since 2019. With nearly two decades of music-making and a degree in music technology behind him, his focus is on the stories behind studio gear and the artists who use it. He’s spent way too much time sampling disco records.
