Meet the Man Behind Your Favorite Wildcard
Mad Speed isn’t a magician, but he can help make your recorded track sound the way you hear it in your heart
Most beatboxers find their calling during a YouTube deep dive. Others meet a beatboxer at school and have to try it. Others still discover gimmicky trash on Tik Tok and wonder if there are beatboxers who actually take their art seriously. But one place that you wouldn’t expect to find a love for beatboxing is physics class. To be fair, nothing about Mad Speed’s beatbox journey is expected.
Mad Speed, aka Joe Walker, was suffering his way through sixth form (the UK equivalent of the end of high school) when a physics teacher changed his life. “We were learning about sound and harmonics,” says the 22 year old beatboxer and sound engineer. “And he said that ‘sounds at the same pitch sound different because they have different harmonics. And if you ever get the chance to go into it, do it, because it's really interesting.”
Go into it he did.
Fast forward a few years, and Mad Speed is now the premier audio engineer in the beatbox scene. His work is ubiquitous. Wildcards for the Grand Beatbox Battle, Online Beatbox World Champs, American Champs, Loop Insider and Beatbox United battle rounds, Beatbox League shoutouts, he’s done them all, and many of his products have won wildcards and battles.
“He's just a natural at what he does,” says King Inertia. “It's like second nature to him.”
As the beatbox scene has grown, the desire for higher quality content has grown in tandem. Just as battle organizers have upped the audio and visual quality of their battle videos, individual beatboxers have begun to get their shoutouts, wildcards, and solo projects mixed and mastered.
It’s simple, says King Inertia—who worked on his viral track It’s Too Late in person with Mad Speed—even if the visuals are good, “nobody's gonna want to hear a video that sounds shitty.”
It is in this climate, where beatboxers need to record their music as meticulously as they compose it, that Mad Speed has found prominence.
“It's almost a magical feeling” to work on a new track, says Mad Speed. Beatboxers put an enormous amount of trust in him, to take their art and polish it. For many of them, the mix and mastering process can be anxiety provoking, because they know so little about it.
As a beatboxer himself, Mad Speed can appreciate the precious feeling of working for months on a track and hoping it comes out okay. Growing up in Newcastle, Mad Speed couldn’t burp, and found his way to beatboxing by mimicking burp sounds with “evil bass.” He was six years old at the time, and would enjoy a little more than a decade of beatboxing without ever joining the greater beatboxing world.
Once he did join the beatbox world, he found it hard to break in as a competitive beatboxer. He recorded a few shoutouts in a tophat, and participated in the 2017 UK under 18 championship, but it wasn’t like Mad Speed was a household name. And then, the Physics lecture.
“That one sentence. I can replay it in my head over and over, it changed my life.”
Mad Speed learned about harmonics in physics, and from there he embarked on the journey that would make him beatbox’s most in-demand audio engineer. He dropped out of sixth form, and transferred to a college to study music production. There, he took a mastering course, and fell in love.
By 2021, Mad Speed was ready to try his hand at mixing and mastering beatboxing. He knew the moves, and he was ready to show it off. When Swissbeatbox opened the wildcard competition for the 2021 Grand Beatbox Battle, Mad Speed offered free mixing and mastering to any and all comers.
Nearly sixty loopers and solo beatboxers took up Mad Speed’s offer, and he dedicated “at least an hour” to each. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, aka PSn, was one of those first clients, and, though he had no experience working with a sound engineer, he found it to be “a very fun experience.” PSn’s semi-viral wildcard, Retro, just barely missed the GBB, but another loop wildcard that Mad Speed worked on, KBA’s track Hallucinate, made it in.
From there, Mad Speed took off. He mastered half the winning wildcards for Swissbeatbox’s Kickback battle, including Juliet, PSn’s top-ranked wildcard. “I was there at the beginning,” said PSn, “and it was very nice to see him grow after that. [Now] everyone wants Mad Speed audio.”
In addition to the many wildcards, Mad Speed serves as the head of sound for Loop Insider and Beatbox League, jobs that have both opened doors for him to work with new talent, and also helped him build out a deep portfolio of well mastered tracks. With this bulked up resume, Mad Speed is now charging all clients for mixing and mastering work.
Robbie Anderson, Mad Speed’s roommate and classmate in music school, says that the intuition that his roommate developed is what set him apart. “He can troubleshoot problems very easily. He’ll listen to a track and instantly know what he wants to do with it.”
Anderson, who is not a beatboxer, and the other collaborators Mad Speed has worked with at Newcastle College University Center, have given Mad Speed a template for his work mixing for beatboxers. While beatboxers are often paying Mad Speed to produce wildcards, musicians like Anderson and his band Apothecary are focused on releasing studio tracks for public release.
This crucial distinction manifests in the type of work Mad Speed can do for beatboxers. In most wildcard competitions, engineers are not allowed to automate any of their processing, which limits the work Mad Speed can do for his clients.
“I offer a standard mix,” says the engineer. “That's the wildcard stuff. Then I offer a slice mix, and I call it a slice mix because I literally cut up every single sound. If you look at King Inertia’s It's Too Late, I sliced up something like two thousand sounds individually.”
For artists who have ambitions for their music to find listeners outside the beatbox community, this slice mix, which involves cross-fading sounds to make it all sound coherent and together, provides an opportunity to make tracks that are as accessible and easy to listen to as beatbox gets. And that, says Mad Speed, is the whole point.
“I think as quality increases, it'll get more attention, more views. People will demand more money, people will get more money, the amount of money flowing around beatboxing will increase, and more people will be able to actually support themselves beatboxing.”
No event recap this week, I’m on the lookout for recaps, so if you’ve been to an event, let me know.
Reminder!! I will be in Toronto this week to cover the 2023 Canadian Beatbox Championship for the newsletter, so if you’re around, come say hi!!
Upcoming Calendar: Events
Canadian Beatbox Championship. Toronto, Canada. March 11.
East German Beatbox Championship. Berlin, Germany. March 11.
Show Your Creative. Seoul, South Korea. March 11.
Crossroads Beatbox Battle: Kansas City, USA. March 17-19.
The Razzones & Friends. Berlin, Germany. March 18.
CLIP Only 505 Loopstation Battle S2. Clip Discord Server. March 26.
Florida Beatbox Festival: Agen, France. March 31 - April 1.
Circlejam Beatbox Festival: Klagenfurt, Austria. June 9-10.
Vokal.Total 20th Anniversary Edition. Graz, Austria. July 18-22.
Beatbox Battle World Championship: Berlin, Germany. August 2-6.
Beatland in-person final: Bali, Indonesia. August 25.
Grand Beatbox Battle: Tokyo, Japan. October 18-21.
Upcoming Calendar: Wild Cards
GBB Wildcard Announcements:
Crew, March 11.
Loop round 2. March 25.
Solo round 2. March 26.
Clip Only 505 Loopstation Battle S2: Open until March 8th.
Loop Insider Showcase Battle: Open until March 28.
Beatland: Open until March 31.
If I missed any upcoming events or Wild Cards, hit me up on Instagram, I’m @HateItOrLevitt or @SpeshFX.