4-Sight Records

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4-Sight Records is a Miami Bass/Old School electro rap record label based out of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Owner Billy Hines initially owned and operated a record store named Royal Sounds in the Lauderhill Mall, where he had open turtables hooked up to the P.A. system of the store. Billy's son Adrian (also known as MC ADE) often tested new records out in the store, and young customers hung around either waiting to hear new records, or DJ'ing in the store themselves. Billy's allowing the store to be use as a hang-out acted as a way to keep customers inside spending money, but it also doubled as his ear to the ground to find out what records to order for future customers. This in turn became a sort of "home-base" for up-and-coming rap artists near the Ft. Lauderdale area.

In 1984, Billy realized that the local supply for electro and rap records was larger than the amount of local suppliers, so he quickly moved into forming his own record label to be ran from within the store. Although his son Adrian was his "ear to the ground", so to speak, Adrian was not yet a full fledged producer. Billy sought out local producer Frank Cornelius to spearhead the records, and the regular customers became many of the artists, DJ's, writers, and later, producers for the label's releases. Adrian was seen as key in the label though, as his role of creative director was employed throughout the early years on each release by every artist before becoming an artist himself.

With the 1985 success of MC ADE's Bass Rock Express, the label stumbled upon the first official Miami Bass record, and became an inspiration for future labels such as Luke Skyywalker Records. Shortly after, Billy closed the Royal Sounds record store, and moved into the record label business full-time.

During this era, future Freestyle music superstar Stevie B approached the label for a deal, but was denied. Before Stevie could find fame with Party Your Body, he created a MC ADE diss record under the alias Freddy Kruger, referencing a Nightmare on Elm Street themed record MC ADE had just recently released. Despite this one-time beef, Stevie and 4-Sight went on to work together with a label mysteriously known as Secret 4-Sight Records.

When Miami Bass changed its sound between 1987 and 1989, 4-Sight Records became caught in the middle, crippling its direction. Before 1987, rap records in South Florida were created a number of ways, and the Bass records that followed relied primarily on the use of the Roland TR-808 drum machine. During this time, Frank Cornelius dominated the sound of the label, but in 1987, equipment manufacturers E-mu released a "drum sampler" known as the SP1200, and Frank did not update his equipment and sound right away. Between Eric G's production of Dynamix II's Just Give the DJ a Break, and Afro-Rican's Give it All You Got (Doggy Style), the tonal sound of Miami Bass became the new trend. But only after producers found a loophole in the SP12000 that allowed maximization of sample time did this trend change to a new palette of sounds altogether. Now Frank Cornelius's sound was beginning to outdate itself. 4-Sight mined the new sound when a couple of Royal Sounds' customers had formed the production team known as The Whiz Kids, and were available to create this new sound for the label. Proving that sometimes, it can hurt to be up on trends too soon, The Whiz Kids' production on Gigolo Tony's 1988 album proved to be too ahead of its time for the 4-Sight audience, nearly breaking the company financially. However, they followed by producing MC ADE's 1989 album, which became highly successful, virtually saving 4-Sight from ruins.

After this brush with failure, Billy began to use extreme caution with his releases, often missing trends altogether. Albums began to go under intense amounts of creative direction from Billy, who did not have his finger on the pulse of the youth anymore. As a result, the label went into a slow decline and closed shop in the 1990s.