For over 20 years Quincy Jones III, aka QD3 has helped redefine urban entertainment. A breakdancer and producer during the pioneering days of hip-hop, QD3 went on to produce for the legendary likes of Tupac, Ice Cube and Prince, has scored television and film titles like "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" and Menace II Society and masterminded the groundbreaking QD3 film collection that birthed documentary DVD classics Thug Angel and the BEEF series among others. This week 24 Hour Grind tapped QD3 to talk about filmmaking, scoring and being a part of hip-hop history.

Never Underestimate How Much Patience Scoring Takes
Most producers like to run in the studio, smoke a little weed and do whatever comes to mind. When you’re scoring, you have to change the rhythm throughout the piece and everything has to hit and coincide with different points in the film, it’s hard to do that at the same time as staying on beat and having it feel musical. It’s almost like a Rubik’s Cube where you keep twisting it and then the other part is out of sync, change that back then another part goes out of sync, so it’s a lot of fine tuning. To do thirty seconds of a feature film can take you like four days. Patience is the main asset for anyone trying to score. Where it looks simple while you’re viewing clips it takes a long time especially if you have action scenes where everything has to hit.

The second thing I would say scoring requires is variety, I see a lot of hip-hop DVD's where you get pretty much hip hop beats all the way through the whole thing. With any film it gets better if you can slow it down when it gets more emotional and draw in the drums and just have more of an underscore feel and then you use beats to punctuate more aggressive parts of the film. Those dynamics of having the music vary throughout helps a lot. When you’re doing television they may ask you to do reggae salsa or rock music for different parts. One tv show you may have to do four different genres of music for one episode. You have to do it well for it to come across believable so it’s a good way if you are a producer and you take time off to do television you learn so much because they force you to do different so many kinds of music. That’s how I really learned to use keyboards and use musicians on my recording tracks. When you’re doing television you get paid like a regular job you get paid up front, then if it does well you get paid when it reruns on tv. It’s a passive income generator. I did “Fresh Prince” since I was like 19 years old and that kept the lights on while I was trying to do the record thing. Film, television and video games are a great way to earn money without having the pressure of the music business. It gives you work ethic too. You have to deliver, otherwise you lose the job.

Too Short and QD3 working on Get In Where You Fit In

Greatest Moments in QD3 History:
Scoring Menace II Society was dope. I had my studio in the Jungles in South Central. I had been there three or four years and I heard the Hughes brother wrote the script. I got a copy of the script and I loved it because it was explaining exactly what we saw when we looked out our window where we were at. I remember taking them out to dinner and telling them I’d really like to do it. I think Dre and Shock G were up for the job as well. They had all of us submit a sample reel. They gave us a scene from a mafia movie and they said if you can score this musically we’ll consider you for the job. I turned in my submission and ended up getting it, so that was dope. I was actually working with the Hughes brothers when Tupac and them had the fight. I was in the studio when that happened.