Izy Beats, Dre Day Reveal They Produced & Mixed Koffee’s Hit “Toast” In Their Tiny Home Studios
Music producer Izy Beats has revealed that he did not use expensive equipment or an elaborate studio to create the rhythm for Koffee’s mega-hit Toast.
Instead, Izy says he created the beat using his “comfortable home set up where all the ideas reside” using Pro Tools and low budget Sam Ash equipment.
“Something about these small home rooms… You don’t need that much to make a “HIT” song. Just keep an open mind, stay consistent and it will all fall into place #justknowthat,” Izy wrote on his Instagram page recently beneath a photograph of two studios, one tiny and the other large and outlandish.
The section of the image featuring the smaller studio was captioned “I produced Koffee’s toast here, while the larger studio was marked: “not here”.
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Izy’s attestation that small rooms were the best to work in, was seconded by several producers including his colleague Dre Day, who has the distinction of mixing four of the five songs on Koffee’s Grammy Award-winning Rapture EP, including Toast.
“Dem whaa see where i mixed koffee toast lol blessings man. We passion fi it bro,” Dre Day wrote in response to Izy’s post.
Izy, whose given name is Andron Cross, hails from Hellshire in St Catherine, and is a Greater Portmore High School past student. He started creating beats in 2001 after a friend introduced him to digital software to create beats during a visit to the US.
Last August Izy told the Jamaica Observer that the Toast beat was initially never intended to be shared with Koffee and her team. He said that at the time he was working on the beat for another artiste, but his manager accidentally sent it by email to several persons including Walshy Fire, who later sent him the song.
“Once we heard it the first time it was clear. There was just something magical about the song and we couldn’t deny it. The label clearly didn’t expect it to take off in the way it did and used it as a kind of warm-up. But the song clearly had other plans and just kept going in an organic way, and is still rising,” he told the newspaper.
Dre Day whose given name is Andre Ennis, said in an interview last year that while he is able to mix songs anywhere, he prefers to “mix songs in the comfort of Jamaica”.
“It is not the biggest studio in the world, just a normal room with two speaker box and my equipment, I like the sound of the room. I like it better than a big state of the art studio anywhere overseas, Jamaica is the place, it has a special energy,” he said at the time.
When Koffee won the Best Reggae Album Grammy Award in 2020, which made her the first woman and the youngest person to take home that award, Dre Day also received a Grammy statuette and was designated a Grammy Award recipient due to him contributing more than 51 percent of the production work on the album.
He also mixed Koffee’s W single featuring Gunna, which was also produced by Izy Beats.
Dre Day has also done production and mixing work for numerous Reggae and dancehall artistes many labels and artistes including Vybz Kartel, Sizzla, Aidonia, Tarrus Riley, Konshens, Popcaan, Govana, and Agent Sasco.
Among his major production hits were Konshens’ Jiggle Jiggle, Kalado’s You Make Me Feel and Bad inna Bed and Aidonia’s Tan Tuddy between 2012 and 2014. He also worked on Sean Paul‘s Cheap Thrills, and produced the artiste’s So Me High track, which is his most streamed international production internationally so far.