Photo by Maggie Vaughn
Last week, Milwaukee’s hip-hop scene learned that one of its oldest traditions is coming to an end. The Miltown Beat Down, a series where producers and beat makers compete against each other to win over crowds, will end its 10-year run with one last battle in November, the organizers announced. Producers are typically some of the most overlooked players in hip-hop—the nerds who clock countless hours alone in the studio, hunched over soundboards and computers while their rapping counterparts hit the town, as the old stereotype goes—but the Miltown Beat Down gave them a rare turn in the spotlight. For the event’s top competitors, a championship win could open real doors.
Mike Regal can attest to that. After he dominated the 2014 Beat Down, opportunities started pouring in. “It definitely raised my stock as a producer,” Regal says. “After that, a lot of people reached out to me looking for beats, including a lot of artists I didn’t know or hadn’t worked with before.” Over the next year, Regal raked up production credits with a host of Milwaukee rappers, including Reggie Bonds, Dana Coppa, El-Shareef, Cool Tay, Mic Kellogg, Genesis Renji, Yo-Dot and AR Wesley. He’s quickly emerged as one of the city’s most prominent producers.
Regal raps, too. He’s finishing up a full-length project called Premonitions for release this winter, and he stirred some interest from national hip-hop blogs this summer with his single, “Gold,” a hard-slapping, cloud rap number in the A$AP mold. But while rapping seems likely to occupy more of his attention going forward, he still considers himself primarily a producer. On average he creates about a beat a day—sometimes three or four if he’s in the zone—and aims to finish at least seven or eight a week. He keeps the ones that speak to him the most for himself; the rest he shares as he sees fit.
“Whenever possible I like to work with artists in person,” he explains. “I never work by email with artists who are in the area; I need to have a session where we can meet up so I can read the vibe. So typically an artist swings through my studio and I’ll play them some tracks or sometimes something I’ll make up on the spot, then I’ll go by their reaction. I pay a lot of attention to their body language. Like, if my homie AR Wesley likes a beat, he’ll be in his phone, writing bars as soon as he hears it. But if he’s just talking to me while listening to it, like, ‘Yo, I like these drums,’ then I know he’s not really into it. You can tell when a track really clicks because the ideas start flowing.”
Rappers are drawn to Regal in part because of his versatility. His production draws generously from the last quarter century of hip-hop—from the reassuringly familiar boom-bap of the ’90s to the digital thump of the ’00s and the thunderous release of modern trap. He’s a bit of a chameleon. His warehouse studio is down the hall from an EDM producer, so increasingly some of those influences have worked their way into his production, too.
“It helps to have that versatility because artists all come in with different feelings,” Regal says. “They’re all at different points in their lives and you want to tap that. A guy like Cool Tay might come in and want to do a song with some party energy. Then a guy like AR will come in and say he wants to do something deep, so you have to go deep, too, and stir up some personal feelings to give him that energy. It can take a lot of focus, but I love being able to express myself in so many different ways through music.”
Mike Regal will compete at the final Miltown Beat Down on Saturday, Nov. 7 at the Miramar Theatre
