Who is Dame Taylor?

Looking at Monster Sessions Founder Damien Taylor

Damien “Dame” Taylor is a Los Angeles-based music producer who has gone pedagogue. He founded and currently acts as Chief Executive Officer at Monster Sessions, a hands-on, career-focused, and innovative music institution, and SOUND by Monster Sessions, its second half that offers artist management and talent development. 

Monster Sessions runs various camps— including producer, songwriter, music industry business, and recording and mix engineer camps. These camps take place in world-renowned studios located in Los Angeles. SOUND by Monster Sessions, on the other hand, simulates professional, music-industry artist management and development for students who have become artists. Just as a record label manages their signed artists to create career opportunities, so does SOUND.

Quite some time before creating Monster Sessions, Dame was invited into the Universal Music Group building to meet with an A&R. He was intimidated, sweating. He pressed play on one of his beats, and before long the volume was cranked up. Employees walked over, asking, “Whose beat is that?” “That’s this guy right here,” replied A&R George Robertson. From that moment on, George became Dame’s manager, introducing him and his music to artists in the industry.

Over the span of his career, Dame produced or assisted in production for artists such as 50 Cent, Kanye West, Ludacris, Flo Rida, Akon, Pitbull, Nelly, T-Pain, and DJ Felli Fel which resulted in a gold single. Dame produced and assisted in production for record labels such as Interscope, Atlantic, and Def Jam. He licensed his music through Viacom, leading to placement opportunities over the course of nine years with MTV, VH1, NBC (and the Olympics), Nickelodeon, McDonalds, and Burger King, among others.

“I just understood,” Dame reflected on his ability to produce music on the highest level. “I knew how to listen to what people needed and I would literally stay up for a week straight making what they needed. I wouldn't stop. And I don’t think a lot of people approached it that way.”

Dame grew up in a musical household in Los Angeles. Nearly every man in his family and extended family immersed themselves in music and the music industry. His grandfather was a R&B and jazz musician. His father sang back-up vocals for R&B artists.

“I remembered these long nights in Paramount Recording Studios when I was seven or eight, just sitting there,” Dame reminisced. “My dad didn’t have a babysitter so he would take me and I would sit in the hallways till five in the morning while they were recording songs.”

Monster Sessions now teaches camps in those very studios where Dame’s father took him as a young child. But Dame didn’t ride off the success of his father, nor did his own success come easily. It took decades of dedication and resourcefulness.

Although as a young man Dame didn’t garner enough interest in R&B music to desire pursuing a career in music, he listened to hip-hop and freestyled for self-enjoyment. Dame hosted, and rapped in, freestyle sessions at his high school. Progressing his skill as a rapper and expanding his knowledge as a student of music, the freestyle circles grew and spread to nearby schools.

“I used to take the city bus ‘cause I went to school in L.A.,” Dame explained. “This 25-year-old dude used to ride the bus and he would hear us freestyling and he was like, ‘Yo why don’t you come to my house and freestyle with my friends.’”

After a friendship was made, these neighborhood rappers moved away, but they left Dame with a 4-track cassette tape to freestyle over. In order to befriend his cousins, who were serious about rapping and wanted to make albums, Dame decided to switch things up—he lied to his cousins by saying he made the beats on the cassette and that he could make more like them.

Intrigued by this newfound skill that Dame ostensibly possessed, especially since beats were in high demand, his cousins challenged him to continue making beats and even bought him a $600 drum machine, a Boss DR-5 Dr. Rhythm Section.

“I put myself in this situation and then I had the pressure to provide them with music. I had to learn,” Dame said. “I had nine of my cousins in the room asking for a beat. They went outside, and I learned how to use it in twenty minutes, made the first beat, and that was my job moving forward.”

Dame developed a variety of styles when it came to supplying rappers with rhythmic foundations. “This cousin wants East-Coast-Biggie-storytelling beats; this cousin wants gangster beats; this cousin wants a club anthem; this cousin wants something to play on the radio,” he enumerated. Soon his work was reputable around town.

Feeling accomplished in this artistic hip-hop street scene, Dame and his cousins arranged for meetings with L.A. record label managers to showcase their work.

“We would meet with them and play our beats on our little drum machine—and they would just tell us that our music sucked, tell us that our music wasn't good. I remember I would leave like a bunch of those meetings crying 'cause we really thought we were sick,” Dame recounted.

George with Universal Music Group was the first person from a record label to take Dame seriously. And that almost surreal experience, when all the employees in George’s office were digging Dame’s work, that was the first time the established music industry reacted the same way to his music as people from the streets.

Dame’s close and musically influential cousin, Vic, was murdered, provoking him to record and document his own life since little of his cousin’s life was left behind. Dame began posting videos on the internet, giving insight into the music industry to help creatives around the world.

Meanwhile, Dame accepted a job that involved some of his most impressive work: he was a producer, co-producer, recording and mix engineer, and studio manager for DJ Felli Fel while he was signed to Def Jam records. But Dame never signed a contract. And many of the songs and projects he worked on—he never got credit for, he never got paid for.

Dame would hear a beat he made or song he produced on the radio before he even knew a deal had been made. When he found out that two of his beats had been sold to Akon, having received no credit or compensation, he quit.

Dame decided to go back to school and to get a normal professional job. But as he began doing so, his online presence grew and countless people were messaging him to learn more about music production and the music industry.

He spoke to people in the U.S., Africa, Russia, Columbia, and Mexico. But he couldn’t keep up. Skype offered a more suitable means to answer questions, but Dame knew that in-person instruction would be the best method for teaching. This gave birth to Monster Sessions.

Born out of the awareness that traditional music school costs a fortune and might not lead to a career or even teach students how the music industry works, Monster Sessions focuses on hands-on learning in world-renowned studios, teaching students how to develop their craft as well as how to integrate into the music industry as professionals.

“I wanted to create something that was cost effective versus costs effecting,” Dame said. “We can simulate a lot of these opportunities and bring things out of creatives around the world that they weren't able to do on their own.”

By Kallen Hittner | Monster Sessions Creative Writing Intern