Lowkey (Birth name William W.J) is a music songwriter, composer, engineer, and producer. Born in Hong Kong, but spent this teenage years in San Francisco, California. At the tender age of 9, he has already been educated in music such as classical piano and violin. And at age 10, he begin to paying attention to music on TV and radio in Hong Kong, and found many genre and style that he fell in love with, such as alternative Rock, and Pop. While practicing the classical piece that he was taught, he would sometimes throw in a few extra melody here and there from tunes he heard from the TV or radio, which displeased his teacher and end up getting whip with bamboo sticks. Later in life, when he moved to San Francisco with his family during his middle school year, he then fell in love with Funk, R&B, and Hip Hop. The rhythmic beats and rhyme skim in many of these music help motivates him to learn English as well as help him better digest the culture of America Some of his favorite artist and producers were Roger Troutman and the Zapp, Timberland, Neptunes, Just Blaze, 9th Wonder, Dr. Dre, Jermane Duprie, Babyface, and Battlekatz.
During his early year in high school, one of his friend from middle school, knowing that William was good with piano and keyboard, invited him to hang out with him and his cousin, who were actually doing Northern California Hip Hop music. This was the first time William got exposed to music studio (sort of, though the set up was basically a 100 dollar microphone, a 6 channel mixer, a half broken computer, a half broken MPC, a Yamaha keyboard, and a stick of foams they stole from UPS stores). Since then he would spent days and night at that studio, sometimes even cutting school just to be there to write new synth lines and melodies. ‘Lowkey’ was the name given by his friend, because of William’s personality in the studio: soft spoken, quiet, spent more time with the keyboard than with human beings (not a joke), as well as the fact that he’s great in cranking out funky bass line within seconds of hearing whatever the rest of the team is doing.
After 2 years, the group fall apart, members all went on to different places, but they left Lowkey with a keyboard, a piece of mind, and a new found goal ambition. Music is the only thing that motivate him to live, and breathe, might as well turn it into an actual career and occupation.
At the age of 16, Lowkey begin producing beats and instrumentals and promoting them on different music online forums, and made many cross state and nation collaboration with people from all over. Although he was never able to work face to face with these people, he was able to garnish enough experiences on how to work with different kind of artist and doing different styles of production.
During his college year, he ran into a man name Patrick Orara, a.k.a Murasaki. And from there the 2 realize that they shared the same dream of a 9 to 5 life in making music … thus the beginning of one of the greatest songwriting production duo in the world …
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