From Choir Boy to Beat Machine: The Port Harcourt Producer Shaping Afrobeats' Next Sound

The studio where Tobi Wariboko — known to the industry as Tee-Bless — makes most of his beats is a converted bedroom in his parents' house in Port Harcourt's Rumuola area, soundproofed with foam panels he bought secondhand from a closing recording school and egg cartons his mother still occasionally asks him to return to the kitchen. "People imagine a producer's studio is this glamorous glass room," he says. "Mine has my junior brother's school bag in the corner because there's nowhere else to put it."

Tee-Bless's musical education began, like that of a huge number of Nigerian producers and singers, in church. He played keyboard for the youth choir at a Pentecostal church from age eleven, learning chord progressions by watching the senior pianist's hands rather than from any formal instruction. "Nobody taught me theory," he says. "I learned by stealing with my eyes. If you can't afford lessons in this country, you learn to steal with your eyes, and then you practise until the stealing becomes skill."

Teaching Himself in the Dark

He got his first pirated copy of a music production program at sixteen, from a cybercafé operator who sold "loaded" flash drives on the side, and taught himself the software through grainy tutorial videos downloaded overnight when data was cheapest. He failed his first set of WAEC papers partly because, by his own admission, he was staying up until 4 a.m. most nights trying to recreate the drum pattern of a song he'd heard on the radio. His father, a retired civil servant, was furious; his mother quietly let him keep the laptop she'd bought for his "studies."

His breakthrough did not come from Lagos, where most of the industry's attention sits, but from a university cypher video filmed on a phone at the University of Port Harcourt in 2019, where a then-unknown rapper used one of his beats without credit. The track went modestly viral on Twitter. Tee-Bless, watching from home, recognised his own drum pattern within the first four bars. Rather than pursue a legal complaint he couldn't afford, he commented on the video asking, politely, to be credited. The rapper did — and then hired him for the next three records.

"Nobody in this industry hands you a shortcut. You make the shortcut by being so undeniable they can't afford to skip you."

Since then, Tee-Bless has produced records for a growing roster of artists based in and around Port Harcourt, and increasingly for Lagos-based acts who seek him out specifically for what industry writers have started calling his "wet drum" sound — a bass-heavy, percussion-forward style he says comes directly from highlife records his grandfather used to play on a turntable in Degema. He is cautious about overstating his success: he still lives at home, still splits most of his production fees between studio equipment upgrades and his younger siblings' school fees, and has yet to own a car.

Staying East While Everyone Moves to Lagos

Most producers at his level of recognition eventually relocate to Lagos, where label budgets, A&R meetings, and collaboration opportunities concentrate. Tee-Bless has resisted this, partly out of loyalty to Port Harcourt's small but fiercely proud music scene, and partly, he admits, out of fear. "Lagos will either make me or eat me alive, and I don't yet know which," he says. "I want my sound to be strong enough that Lagos comes looking for me, not the other way around."

That strategy appears to be working. In the last eighteen months, two Lagos-based A&R representatives have flown to Port Harcourt specifically to work in his home studio, egg cartons and all. He has started, cautiously, saving toward building a proper standalone studio space behind his parents' house — not to leave the city, but to finally stop apologising to his mother for borrowing the kitchen's cardboard.

Tee-Bless is also conscious of the practical gap between himself and Lagos-based producers with similar levels of buzz: better access to session musicians, more frequent studio collaboration with established engineers, and a deeper pool of artists physically available for same-day sessions. He has tried to close that gap by building a small, loyal collective of Port Harcourt-based vocalists and instrumentalists who rehearse together regularly, treating the limitation of distance as a reason to build depth locally rather than simply waiting for an eventual relocation to solve the problem for him. "If Lagos producers have ten session players to call, I want my five to be sharper than their ten," he says.

He is also unusually generous, by industry standards, about mentoring younger producers coming up in Port Harcourt, running a loosely organised Saturday session at his church where teenagers with nothing more than a phone and a cracked copy of production software can learn basic drum programming from him directly, free of charge. He traces this generosity back to his own cybercafé days, when a stranger once let him finish a tutorial download for free after his data ran out mid-session. "Somebody extended me grace when I had nothing to offer back," he says. "I am just passing along what was given to me."