The Kickdrums may be hip-hop’s next big beatmakers. And they work out of a closet in Avon

They both dropped out at 19, around the time that they were introduced through a mutual friend. They bonded when they took entry-level jobs at a music studio in dilapidated Randall Park Mall. The work wasn't exactly groundbreaking: One client was an ex-con paying to threaten his former prison guards over a canned beat. Another was a ventriloquist. "He was this super hillbilly from Xenia, Ohio, with a creepy clown dummy," remembers Penttila. "He had this 'evil carnival' project he wanted to record."

After toiling there for a year, the duo quit to form the Kickdrums and soon found their bass-heavy beats perfectly complementing local street rappers. They were privileged 'burb dwellers laying the backdrop for tales of ghetto violence, pain, and braggadocio.

"That's the power of music," says Fitts. "I've worked with people that I would have never been in the same room with otherwise."

“Manifest Destiny” by Verbal (Produced by the Kickdrums):

As Penttila and Fitts perfected their unlikely niche, the work began to consume their lives. Lugging basement-produced CDs full of their beats, they drove to New York on pilgrimages of guerrilla self-promotion, sleeping in Penttila's parents' car or on friends' floors. Standing outside of record-company buildings, they handed out CDs to all who passed, hoping they were A&Rs or executives. "If they give you a weird look," says Penttila, "then you know it's a janitor."

As they gained low-level label contacts, they worked with A&Rs with fledgling career status similar to their own. "You start with the guys you can get to," says Fitts. "It benefits both sides, because then the low-level A&Rs take it to their boss, and it's like, 'I discovered this new talent.' Eventually, you get a call from a big-time A&R about the CD you gave somebody else."

As Penttila drives to the studio for an afternoon beatmaking session, he puts on a CD by '70s spazz-rockers Television. Somewhere in the first song, he begins to hear how he'll dissect and rearrange it. "That's a real good tripped-out synth," he says. "I'd like to take that part when the drums drop out . . . and rework it so it's completely unidentifiable."

This is Penttila's specialty. He's the master of the "loop," that section of an original, often classic song that's repeated to form the backdrop of a beat — like the Isaac Hayes bassline at the heart of Notorious B.I.G.'s "Kick in the Door." Penttila brings this musical skeleton to Fitts, who fleshes it out with more instrumentation and atmospheric sound. Then the fine-tuning begins.

The Kickdrums are painstaking perfectionists. Until the beat sounds perfect on a car's sound system — their testing ground of choice — it's not done. "A lot of producers make 10 beats per day," says DJ Joey Fingaz. But the Kickdrums "could spend a whole week on a beat. They won't let nothing leave the studio until they could hear it on the radio."

When their record crates are running low, Fitts and Penttila go "digging" — on road trips to buy vintage records from which to pluck samples. Their favorite spot is a giant store outside of Pittsburgh, the name of which they won't divulge. "You gotta go to a place where no other DJs and producers go," says Fitts, "or else it's already gonna be picked apart."

Once inside, they use what Fitts calls "the greatest invention ever" — the portable record player. They spend entire afternoons creeping through record stores, listening to old vinyl on the plastic device.

Then they have to get the samples cleared. An artist can demand 100 percent of a beat's royalties or kill a project altogether. A jazz flutist named Herbie Mann did just that when he heard the Kickdrums' sample of his riff on Ray Cash's street-hustle anthem titled "Dope Game." After some negotiating, Mann approved the Kickdrums' use of the beat, but only for a song by rapper Al Fatz called "I Got Fire" — which notably didn't mention crack dealing.

Sometimes Fitts and Penttila tool with a sample so thoroughly that it's virtually beyond identification. That's what they did to the beat for 50's "When Death Becomes You," which included a split-second, reversed Diana Ross sample. "Diana herself probably couldn't tell we sampled her," says Fitts. Nonetheless, the Kickdrums forked over a quarter of their royalties to the ex-Supreme.

The Kickdrums' trademark has become genre-busting experimentation. "Killa Flow," a track on Ray Cash's upcoming album, sounds like textbook modern gangsta rap: "I play the part of the barber," Cash raps, "Take a part out of your hair/Sit inside my barber's chair, let the .45 clippers clip a nigga." But then comes a droning breakdown with Fitts singing "I am a killer" in a throaty minute-long chant reminiscent of Trent Reznor. Fitts put it together alone in the studio, too shy to sing in front of even Penttila. When he played the completed track for Cash, Fitts didn't know what reaction to expect.