“I would try to count the amount of instruments that I was hearing. “I started imagining a symphony orchestra,” he says. “I never thought I was actually learning my trade back then, but I really was.”ĭeputy has always had a great “ear,” an ability to pick out individual instruments on recordings, and arrange instruments in his head. “We would do that for hours to pass the time because we lived in the country and there wasn’t really anything to do.
“We would all beatbox and then free-style rap over the beatboxing, take turns and go in cycles,” he explains. That was the birth of that whole thing, and hip hop is definitely still a big part of my music.”īefore teaching himself to play guitar, he was imitating hip hop stars with his brother and his friends. “I was in second grade when MC Hammer and The Fat Boys were coming out, back when people used to beatbox covering their mouths, doing that in-and-out breathing. I grew up on that stuff, Stevie Wonder, Donnie Hathaway. Ray Charles is one of my favorite singers. “When I really got into music, I got into funk and soul and jazz. “My dad listened to Motown, James Brown,” he recalls. His father brought the old soul music into the mix. On an island town, everybody plays reggae and stuff there.” “I grew up listening to Afro-Cuban, salsa, meringue, calypso, mambo, and all this stuff like it was normal. “I’m from an island town, and I think that in itself influenced me,” he says. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, and her parents from Puerto Rico. Most of my teachers really liked me, they just didn’t really like me in their class because I was kind of non-stop,” he laughs.ĭeputy was born in Savannah, GA, and raised in nearby Hilton Head, SC. That’s still my main instrument.”ĭeputy recalls having beatboxing competitions in the third grade, seeing who could make the coolest drum beats with vocal sounds. “I’ve been singing since I’ve known my name. So I like to do that, play drums with my mouth, play trumpet and some guitar with my mouth. “We have the ability to make pretty much any sound that we can think of, any noise that we hear,” Deputy says. Then he sings, and adds live guitar and percussion, on top. In his one-man-jam-band shows he uses his voice to create and stack drum beats, bass lines, horn sections, guitar riffs and backup vocals, with help from a Boss RC50 looping machine. “It can emulate any and everything.” Deputy is living proof of that. “The voice is a pretty crazy thing,” says Zach Deputy.
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