Lee Milla - Mel Cooke

Hellshire, St Catherine, is the place where life is a beach, and fish and festival are always ready. A bit away from the beach, though, Lee Milla builds beats at home, determined to one day "run the music, like how Dave Kelly did back in the day, or a Timbaland era."

It is not a home studio, since the creator of rhythms like the Evil Heads (on which Vybz Kartel did A Wha Do Dem) and other rhythms does voicing in a professional studio environment.

However, Hellshire is the place where he sets the mood with Timbaland, Swizz Beats, Dave Kelly and Sly and Robbie productions, then lays down the drum loop to start a new rhythm. On that bedrock, he then lays keyboard phrases.

He has come a far way from his first sensible rhythm, the 2007 Poco Poco which had songs by Scratchy B and Twin of Twins, Deva Bratt and Fambo. And even before that, the 22-year-old had gone through the learning curve at the Toronto Audio and Recording Academy (TARA), where he started his eight-month training in September 2005.

Milla is not the typical music fanatic who knew his calling from the days when he would make what he thought were killer beats, but his teachers thought was just noise on a desk at Camperdown.

master at work

He was interested in music then, but as a rapper in the Syko Squad, with a group of friends. However, his mother, Margaret Seymour, worked at King of Kings studio in Princeville Plaza, Constant Spring Road, and he would get the chance to see well-known producer, Cordell 'Scatta' Burrell, at work.

Watching Scatta work at ProTools, he was convinced that he could do it too. Now finished with high school, when his mother asked Lee what he wanted to do, he said music. She was not surprised, but told him whatever aspect he chose to go into, he had to be serious about it.

too shy

"I said, me too shy to be an artiste, so better me do it behind the scenes and still contribute," Milla said. So he chose engineering and went off to Canada.

There, he was exposed to rock and roll, techno and blueg****, in addition to the reggae, dancehall and hip hop that he was already comfortable with. It was at TARA that he actually started building beats, along with a Canadian schoolmate named Bradshaw. "Everybody start with Fruity Loops," Milla said, laughing. He got valuable feedback at school on the projects he did at home.

Now his home projects are taken to the studio for full production, the latest single being Run Whe De Bway, with Laden, on the Mid-70s rhythm.

Milla says although he is currently deep into dancehall, over time, he will probably go into the more cultural side of music as "me love the one drop thing". He also plans to go back to school to learn to play the keyboard professionally. "The next instrument me would probably want to learn is the guitar," Milla told THE STAR.