Ammar Junedi is a Dutch producer from the city of Rotterdam who caught his first major placement last month on Ariana Grande’s sixth studio album, positions. Junedi landed a production credit for the song “west side,” alongside fellow producer Xavi. The 20-year old producer got his first taste of playing music at age two thanks to his father, who bought him a keyboard.
As he approached his teens, Ammar took piano lessons to refine his skills and discovered the production software FL Studio around age 14. Despite initially making EDM music, Ammar quickly gravitated towards making hip-hop and R&B, deciding to post his music on YouTube around 2017. From there, he managed to score a song with one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. Genius spoke with Ammar over the phone to discuss his come-up on YouTube and how he wound up working with Ariana Grande.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview by shy ink.
Genius: What made you start putting your music on YouTube?
Ammar Junedi: I was just looking for a way to get my music heard because I was already making beats for like four years, so I had some experience. I started putting it on YouTube as “type beats,” everyone is doing it now but back then in 2017, it was a little easier to get some exposure. Within the first year, I had 1,000 subscribers. A year later, I had 10,000.
Did that lead to any placements around that time?
Not really, early on I didn’t look at placements. I had some lowkey stuff with some pretty underground artists, this is all last year. Even early 2020, that was with TYuS and Ye Ali, just two underground R&B guys, because I was making a lot of R&B at the time, I still am. The bigger placements are just happening now.
How did the Ariana Grande placement come about?
I think it was the end of 2019 when this producer, Xavi, hit me up. He found my stuff on YouTube. He’s always looking for people to work with. Back then he had a couple of placements but he wasn’t big as right now. He found my channel and he was looking for R&B stuff. He told me he was f-cking with my sound, he had a vision for bringing back some old school R&B vibes. I was actually doing the same thing so we really clicked on that, having the same vision for beats, trying to bring back old school sounds.
From there on, we started working regularly and I kept sending him melodies, loops, and samples. I think it was January when he told me to get on a call with him because he was making stuff happen with Tommy Brown and Ariana Grande.
It was funny because he just texted me randomly, “Yo we got a beat with Ariana Grande.” I was actually shook, like, “No way.” I didn’t believe it at first. So many times you hear you have a placement or you get a song with someone and it never drops, so I didn’t even get my hopes up.
Time goes by and [Xavi] keeps telling me about it. Slowly but surely it started to hit me like it’s a real possibility. A little bit of time goes by and I think around summertime, he told me it’d drop around March. It hadn’t dropped by then so I didn’t have my hopes up.
Then all of a sudden, he called me again. Ariana had also tweeted that she was going to drop the album. [Xavi] actually got confirmation, I don’t know how he got it, but he told me and I didn’t know what to say because I’m still in my room just making beats for YouTube. He gave me a chance, he had the same vision for music as I had, so that’s how it all fell into place.
I want to take it back to the session, I’m guessing you made the melody for the beat?
Yeah, I did the melody and [Xavi] actually used some of my drum sounds from my kits, because I make drum kits too.
That’s fire, what a plug for the drum kits!
I have to say, the bird chirps were his idea, that was Xavi.
What was the mindset when you were making that melody?
[Xavi] just told me he was looking for R&B stuff and he told me to do my own thing. With that in mind, I just started making melodies and loops. Honestly, that melody that’s on the track, I made it in like five minutes. It’s just some chords that I played in an Omnisphere patch and I reversed it, so it was simple. I didn’t think it’d land with Ariana Grande because I actually had some other beats with him [Xavi] that were way better or way more exciting. I was surprised that one was the one she picked. It was really like a throwaway basically.
I was surprised when I heard the song because it sounded like something Kehlani or 6lack would flow on, with those reversed chords.
Yeah, I heard people say that a Drake feature would go hard on it.
Did you send Xavi that melody in a big pack of samples?
Throughout the time I’ve worked with [Xavi], I send a pack every month or two. I was sending some new samples in a batch of four to 10 samples. I don’t send too much out, I just keep it simple, I send what I’m making in a month. I don’t mass produce, when I feel like it, I make it and send it out. That was probably in a small pack and it was a throwaway I put in it.
I think he sent four or five beats that he played for [Ariana]. She picked that one, but there was another one that I actually thought was going to be on there. So when I heard it I was actually surprised as I thought it was going to be a different beat. It’s kind of confusing but it’s still funny to me.
So you didn’t know it was that beat that she was going to use?
I completely forgot to mention that, I actually thought it was going to be a different beat because [Xavi] sent me a beat and he said [Ariana] recorded on that beat as well. So all the time I was thinking it was going to be that beat. Then last month when my lawyer sent me the contract and I heard what it was I was actually like, “Wait, that’s the beat?” ‘Cause it was kind of different, I didn’t expect Ariana to pick that beat.
What was your reaction when you first heard the song?
I didn’t know what to think to be honest. It felt so weird because I’m still just in my room in Rotterdam making beats on my laptop. I still feel like a YouTube producer and she’s like the biggest pop star in the world right now. So I heard it and didn’t know what to think.
How do you think things are going to change moving forward?
A couple of people have hit me up, a couple of A&Rs and stuff but nothing crazy yet. I don’t even know what to expect yet but I hope to go back and forth to LA, link up with more people because I will probably actually be able to finally. I really hope to make music a bigger part of my life, being able to do it every day and move out. I really love it so that’s what I’m really looking forward to.
