The 90-Year-Old Jazz Musician Test

I asked Qbert where his drive comes from. Why doesn’t he just coast? He’s earned it. His answer was immediate:

“I had learned from an early age that success is an ongoing thing. You don’t just — alright I’m the man and fuck it, you stop… A jazz musician, they know to just keep going. These guys that are like 90 years old and they’re still playing like they’re in their teens going crazy. I was like wow, they can do it at 90, I got a long way to go. And they’re always learning.”

Read that again. A three-time world champion DJ looks at 90-year-old jazz musicians and thinks “I’ve got a long way to go.”

This is the mindset that separates people who peak early and fade from people who build careers that last decades. Qbert told me about DJs he’s known, really talented ones, who decided they’d made it:

“I know a lot of DJs that were really talented. They were like, oh yeah, I’m so good. I don’t have to make anything. I’ve done everything. And they suck now because they stopped. The arrogance got to them.”

If you’re reading this and you’ve been coasting on what you learned two years ago, this is your wake-up call. The craft doesn’t wait for you.

How Qbert Turned Chaos Into a Curriculum

One of the things I’ve always respected about Qbert is Scratch University (QBert Skratch University, look it up if you haven’t). He took something that seemed completely abstract and chaotic (turntablism) and broke it down into teachable fundamentals.

I asked him how he developed that way of thinking, and his answer was almost frustratingly simple:

“You can move the record forward, you can move it backward, back and forth. That’s pretty much how you move it. Then you got the on and off with the fader — one click, two clicks, three clicks, four, a million. So it’s just math.”

Just math. Forward, backward, fader clicks. That’s it. Everything else is combinations.

This is something I try to hammer home at Producer Dojo all the time: every complex skill is built from simple pieces. If you can’t break your process down into fundamentals, you don’t actually understand it yet. Whether you’re sound designing in Serum, arranging a track in Ableton, or learning to scratch: find the atoms. The smallest possible moves. Then combine them.

In your DAW, this looks like: before you try to build a full track, can you make a single 8-bar loop that actually grooves? Before you design a crazy evolving pad, can you make a simple sine wave sound good? The fundamentals aren’t boring. They’re the foundation that everything else stands on.

The Chef Mentality

Qbert dropped an analogy that I keep coming back to:

“From there I learned to always create and keep up with my art as if I was a chef. You got to keep on making better food all the time.”

A chef doesn’t cook one great meal and retire. They cook every single day. They refine. They experiment. They taste other people’s food and steal techniques. They throw out dishes that don’t work and double down on ones that do.

Your production practice should work the same way. You should be cooking every day. Not every meal needs to be a Michelin-star masterpiece. Sometimes you’re just making eggs. But you’re in the kitchen. You’re keeping your hands moving. You’re staying sharp.

Practice Until You Drip Sweat

When I asked Qbert how he’d train someone for a battle in two weeks, his first piece of advice wasn’t about technique at all:

“First of all, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. What matters is that you practice like a month or two. Maybe hone your skills. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose. And for some reason when you have that attitude, you end up winning.”

The paradox of not caring about winning being exactly what makes you win. I’ve seen this play out in music over and over. The producers who obsess over Spotify numbers make worse music than the ones who obsess over the music itself.

“Just practice. Practice to drip sweat or something. It’s impressive in the Bay if you can practice that you sweat.”

Close the door. Turn the heater on. Drink water. And go so hard at your craft that you’re physically sweating. When’s the last time you practiced that intensely? Not noodled. Not browsed presets. Practiced.

“I asked him, how do you get so fast? He said just sleep. Eight hours sleep a day will make you fast.”

Your body and brain need recovery time to consolidate skills. That’s straight neuroscience, not woo-woo stuff. If you’re grinding on four hours of sleep thinking you’re being productive, you’re actually slowing your own progress down. Sleep is practice.

Studio Separation and Clearing Your Head

Qbert used to have his studio in his house. He moved it out. Too many people, too messy, too blurred between life and work. I thought this was interesting since a lot of us have our studios at home and struggle with that exact tension.

His approach to creative balance is simple: when you’re overworking, go do something completely different.

“Tennis players, they practice all day, but when they get bored of it, they do 20 minutes of something totally different. So it clears their mind when they go back to it.”

Bike riding, swimming, video games, going to the park. Whatever gets your mind off the music. The key insight here is that stepping away is part of the creative process, not a break from it. Your subconscious keeps working on problems while you’re doing other things.

If you’re stuck on a mix or an arrangement, close the laptop. Go for a walk. Come back in an hour. The answer will be there waiting for you more often than you’d expect.

Making Gear Accessible

One thing I really respect about Qbert is his TRX mixer project: a stripped-down scratch mixer for $300. Most scratch mixers run $1,000-$2,000. His reasoning was dead simple:

“All these kids, they can’t afford that and they just want to scratch. So we said, hey, let’s just make a mixer that just has a good fader, because that’s all you need.”

This is something I’m passionate about too. The barrier to entry for music production shouldn’t be financial. You don’t need the most expensive gear to start learning. You need something that does its job well, and then you need to practice. A $300 mixer with a great fader beats a $2,000 mixer collecting dust because the kid couldn’t afford it.

Same goes for your DAW. Ableton Lite, GarageBand, Reaper. You can make real music on a shoestring. The gear matters way less than the hours you put in.

Green, Nature, and Killing Writer's Block

This was one of my favorite moments in the conversation. Qbert has a theory about the color green and creativity:

“How do you get rid of writer’s block? I read this thing about just look at the color green… If I go in nature, there’s a bunch of green grass and nature and trees. Something about green that will open up your little blocks.”

He keeps a green screen in his studio. The video use is obvious, but his real reason is that the color green literally surrounds him while he creates. He says he never gets writer’s block in that environment.

Now, whether this is the color itself or just the association with nature and growth… honestly, who cares? If it works, use it. Put a plant on your desk. Go produce in the park on your laptop. Paint your studio wall green. Whatever gets you making music instead of staring at an empty arrangement.

We actually see more shades of green than any other color, roughly twice as many. There’s probably an evolutionary reason for that, and it’s probably connected to why being in nature makes us feel more creative and less stressed.

The QFO and the Open Mind

Qbert designed a turntable shaped like a flying saucer.

Think about that for a second. In 2004, he partnered with Vestax to build the QFO: a circular, self-contained turntable-mixer hybrid that you could strap over your shoulder and play like a guitar. They made roughly 800 of them. Try to find one now. Good luck.

The QFO came from the same brain that made Wave Twisters, the 1998 album that became the first turntablism-scored animated film in 2001. The plot: a crew of hip-hop heroes fight through inner-space wielding an ancient weapon called the Wave Twister, a tiny turntable worn on the wrist. The villain? Lord Ook. The record label? Galactic Butt Hair Records. I am not making any of this up.

Then came Extraterrestria in 2014, a concept album documenting “music from different alien races.” The whole project was framed as a collection curated by something called the Galactic Skratch Federation. It earned Grammy consideration. The packaging was interactive, with picture discs designed as phenakistoscopes that actually spin and animate.

In our conversation, Qbert lit up talking about UFOs and cosmic consciousness. He’s genuinely fascinated by the possibility that we’re not alone. Some people hear that and write it off. I think they’re missing the point entirely.

There’s an old Zen story about this. A professor visits a master to learn about enlightenment, but he won’t stop talking about his own expertise. The master pours tea into the professor’s cup and keeps pouring as it overflows onto the table. “You are like this cup,” the master says. “How can I show you anything when your cup is already full?”

That concept has a name: shoshin, beginner’s mind. And it maps onto Qbert’s entire creative philosophy with eerie precision. In interviews, he talks openly about karma. He describes DJing as meditation, as “connecting with the God-force.” He treats scratching as something closer to spiritual practice than performance. That’s not an affectation. When you watch him play, you can see it. The focus is total. The ego is gone. There’s just the record, the fader, and whatever’s flowing through him.

Qbert keeps his cup empty. He stays open to ideas that most people dismiss on reflex, and that exact openness is what lets him look at a turntable and see a flying saucer. It lets him imagine alien DJs scratching across galaxies. It lets him keep reinventing an instrument he already mastered decades ago.

There’s another Buddhist thread woven through this whole conversation, even if he never uses the word. Remember what he said about battles? “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose.” In Buddhist practice, that’s upadana: the teaching that clinging to outcomes is the root of suffering. Letting go of the result frees you to actually perform. Monks have practiced this for 2,500 years. Qbert figured it out on turntables.

You can’t build the QFO if you believe turntables have to look like turntables. You can’t write Wave Twisters if you think DJing has to stay inside a club. The willingness to entertain the impossible, even when people think you’re a little out there, is the same muscle that drives creative breakthroughs. And the willingness to let go of the outcome is what keeps the whole thing joyful instead of grinding.

That’s the beginner’s vibe he talks about later. Empty the cup. Stay open. See what comes in.

The Golden Nugget: Serve the People

When I asked Qbert what advice he’d give his younger self, he didn’t talk about technique or business or networking. He went straight to philosophy:

“Stay humble and always work to make the world a better place… The more you put out there to make people happy, the more it affects you. So might as well invent stuff that makes the world a better place.”

“You got to stay hungry and stay with the beginner’s vibe. We’re not like these great lords or whatever. We’re here to help the people and serve the people.”

A three-time world champion turntablist pioneer saying “we’re here to serve the people.” He’s been doing this for decades, and he genuinely believes his purpose is service.

This reframing changes everything. If you think of your music career as climbing a ladder to get somewhere, you’ll burn out or get bitter when you don’t arrive fast enough. But if you think of it as service, making something that helps people feel something, escape something, connect to something, then every track you finish is already a win. Every set you play is already meaningful.

The Takeaway

What I walked away with from this conversation, distilled:

Stay a student forever. The 90-year-old jazz musicians are still learning. You should be too. The moment you think you’ve arrived is the moment you start declining.

Break complex skills into simple pieces. Forward, backward, fader clicks. Find your atoms and master them.

Practice with intensity. Not noodling. Real, focused, sweating practice. And then sleep eight hours so your brain can consolidate what you learned.

Serve people. Make music that moves people, teach what you know, give more than you take. The karma comes back around, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because it’s the whole point.

Qbert has been at this for decades and shows zero signs of slowing down. If the greatest scratcher alive is still in the lab every day treating himself like a student, what’s your excuse?

— ill.Gates

Want to sharpen your craft alongside other dedicated producers? Join us at Producer Dojo where we practice the beginner’s mind every single day. No egos, just growth.