Virtuoso pianist Rogét Chahayed has found a unique niche as a classically trained hip‑hop producer.
“There are videos on YouTube of me playing piano pieces by Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Chopin and so on, and someone commented, ‘How did this guy go from this to “Broccoli?”’ I spent years of my life studying the rich, respected, sophisticated art form of classical piano, and to then get away with making smash hit songs with just two chords is a relief in many ways, because sometimes the best things are simple. And today I’m really happy that my discography reflects the many different kinds of music that I love, from R&B to hip‑hop to jazz to classical.”
Rogét Chahayed has worked with household names like Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott, Bruno Mars, Jennifer Lopez and many others. The most recent major hit that he was involved in is ‘APT.’ by Bruno Mars and Rosé, which was the biggest song worldwide of the end of 2024. Chahayed has also received nine Grammy nominations, including for Producer Of The Year, Non‑Classical, in 2022.
As one of the world’s top pop writers and producers, Chahayed’s unique selling point is his classical music background, which comes with serious keyboard chops, an abundance of chordal and melodic imagination, and a knowledge of orchestral arrangement. This classical background comes to the fore on projects like Jennifer Lopez’ This Is Me… Now [2024], but is much less apparent in many other cases, like his two‑chord breakout hit ‘Broccoli’ by DRAM in 2016, and the simple Korean pop‑rock of ‘APT.’
Crossing Borders
Chahayed was born in 1988 in Los Angeles to a father from Damascus, Syria, who grew up in Lebanon, and a mother from Argentina. “He sings in Arabic and plays the darbouka, and my mother listened to a lot of music. When I was seven, my dad enrolled me and my sister, who was four at the time, in piano lessons. I didn’t really have a choice, so I played piano as a kid, but did not really have a passion for it.
“This changed when I was 15 or 16, and saw the movie The Pianist and heard Adrien Brody’s character play Chopin’s Ballade No 1 in G minor. I said to myself, ‘I really want to learn this.’ I took studying and practising the piano much more seriously, and got deeper into classical music and discovered jazz and Bill Evans. I saw how French impressionism, like Debussy, and jazz related to each other, and got into the stylistic and theoretical aspects of music. I decided I wanted to do this full‑time, and went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where I studied Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Chopin, Prokofiev and many other great composers. I was extracting the little moments that made their compositions special harmonically and melodically. That became the foundation of my approach to pop and hip‑hop.
“I’ve always loved hip‑hop, but wasn’t really allowed to listen to it as a kid because my parents were pretty strict, and many rap CDs had these parental advisory stickers. So in secret friends of mine burnt me CDs with music by Eminem, Cypress Hill, Dr Dre and so on. When I was in conservatory I had friends who were opera singers, and who loved listening to rap and pop music. I wondered who was playing these sounds and chord progressions and riffs, and discovered Scott Storch, the Neptunes and other producers who inspired me sonically.”
Learning From The Masters
A chance meeting then changed the course of Chahayed’s career. “While studying, I would come back to LA for my Summer breaks and started playing in bands, and was a hired gun for anybody who needed keyboards on a track. I also got together with a group of friends to write songs. Those were my beginning stages. After I graduated I moved back to LA, and I was doing jazz gigs and teaching piano to support myself, and I’d go to the studio at night and make beats. I had a friend who owned a studio, and he gave me my own setup and taught me how to use Logic. I was fascinated by the fact that I could write a four‑chord progression and then add tons of instruments to it.
Rogét Chahayed’s Virtuoso Studio.
“My real journey started in 2013, when I was introduced to producer Mel‑Man, who had been a key contributor to Dr Dre’s album 2001 [1999] and Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP [2000]. Mel‑Man trained Scott Storch and Mike Elizondo. I worked with Mel‑Man for about a year, and one day he brought me over to Dr Dre’s Aftermath Studio. Dre immediately put me on the spot and asked me to add keys to a track. A few months later he hired me as his in‑house keyboard player, which I was for most of 2014. It was very demanding, but also an incredible learning experience.
“These two incredible mentors, Mel‑Man and Dr Dre, showed me the ropes and helped me channel my classical knowledge and expand my knowledge of sounds, and realise how powerful an accidental thing you play can be. I learned many elements of making music that I to this day take into every session I walk into. A lot of my time with Dr Dre was spent trying to find sounds, with people hovering over my shoulder, and that was very nerve‑racking at times, with a lot of anxiety. People pull up a drum beat with no music, so as a musician there’s a lot of pressure, because you have to provide the chords that the hook will be written to, using the right sounds.
“It made me realise the importance of having a massive library of sounds. I learned about Native Instruments’ Kontakt, and the many different kinds of synths. I was obsessively studying what sounds and keyboards and patches people like Dre and Pharrell and Scott Storch were using on songs. So I really learned about equipment, and then got into analogue synths. And I learned that when you use a sound, if you play or phrase it differently, or maybe put an effect on it, you won’t even recognise it as the same sound. It’s not necessarily about what are you playing and what sound are you using, but also about how you’re using it and in what context.”
Switching Modes
Chahayed’s next big moment occurred in 2016, when he co‑wrote and co‑produced the aforementioned hit ‘Broccoli’ by American rapper DRAM, which went on to go quintuple platinum in the US and receive a Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. The song is based on an ultra‑simple piano part that in no way reflects Chahayed’s advanced musical skills, but gave Chahayed his “first recognition. It was my first placement. Many people discovered who I was through that song.”
More placements soon followed, with tracks by artists like Travis Scott, Miguel (‘Sky Walker’), Kesha, Halsey (‘Bad At Love’), Calvin Harris, G‑Easy and more. Chahayed’s next big moment arrived in 2018 with ‘Sicko Mode’ from Travis Scott’s Astroworld album, a track on which his classical music background is very much in evidence. Chahayed and Hit‑Boy were responsible for only the first minute of ‘Sicko Mode’. Hit‑Boy gave his version of events in our 2024 July issue (www.soundonsound.com/techniques/inside-track-hit-boy).
“For me,” says Chahayed, “the most harmonically pleasing composers for piano are Rachmaninoff, who really evokes romanticism and big cinematic moments, and uses almost jazzy...
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