Alexander Tumay was born on July 19, 1986, in Queens, New York City, New York. He is of Armenian and Puerto Rican descent. He was raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for most of his teen years. He learned to play piano and guitar growing up, as Tumay's father is a classical pianist, which influenced him to do so. He also listened to hip hop and heavy metal. He was in his high school's band and in small garage bands.[2]
Tumay could not find a major for college to satisfy his wants, and went through eight or nine majors in total before he dropped out. He was later working at restaurant jobs. One of these was a pizza delivery driver for Domino's Pizza.[3] One of Tumay's friends introduced him to Logic Pro, a digital audio workstation program. He was interested in the program, but could not figure out how to use it at the time. This became his inspiration to enroll in Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida one month later, to study audio engineering. Tumay graduated from the Full Sail in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in recording arts, and then scored an internship at Maze Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, to where he later relocated, and worked frequently with another record producer, Ben H. Allen, who taught Tumay more about recording and mixing for an additional three years. He also assisted Allen on projects for the experimental pop band Animal Collective and experimental musician Youth Lagoon, before fully going into working in the hip hop genre.[2][4]
Career
Tumay visited many recording studios around Atlanta with his résumé looking for another internship, and got one as a technician at DARP Studios (later renamed as UAMG Studios) through his manager, Monica Tannian, due to his work with Allen. As he was in DARP Studios often, he got the opportunity to work with major artists such as T.I., Waka Flocka Flame, PartyNextDoor, and Tinashe, among others. In 2012, he met Metro Boomin at UAMG Studios, which lead to Tumay working with more artists and record producers such as Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan, Migos, DJ Spinz, Southside, TM88, 808 Mafia, Sonny Digital, and many more.[4]
Tumay is Young Thug's personal and most trusted recording and mixing engineer.[according to whom?] He met Thug in early 2013, and the first song they worked together on was "Some More" from Metro Boomin's debut mixtape 19 & Boomin' , on which he also mixed most of the songs and executive produced it. Metro approached Tumay and asked him to record that song due to Thug having issues with his former recording and mixing engineer, whom Thug removed from that studio session.[5] Tumay has been working with Thug closely ever since, as well with Metro Boomin and more recently, 21 Savage, for which Tumay recently recorded and mixed their debut EP, Savage Mode.[6][7][8]
