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||OT|| How many of you make music because of J Dilla? [revised]
Let’s start this up again. I’ll let @Stuntman_mike take the reigns if he desires.
Comments
For me J Dilla opened my ears and eyes to what is actually possible when you use a sampler as an instrument. At the time I didn't know who j Dilla was, but my now wife introduced me to SlumVillage during one of her DJ Sets early in our relationship, and I was just blown away by what I was hearing and feeling. This was music beyond what I was accustomed to. It fit in to that same compartment in my brain and heart that Digable Planets broke open for me in my youth...and it was great to be rekindled later in life.
This in turn led me down the rabbit hole of discovering J Dilla, Madlib, MFDoom, Madvillain, PNS, MosDef, Talib Kweli, DJ Krush, Mecca: 83, Stones Throw label and countless other bands which have influenced and inspired me as a creator.
When passion burns brightly to create the joy and love in ones heart, the world benefits ten fold from these manifestations of our spirits realized in to and for the world.
Gonna drop this here to expand the discussion, because it sums up what Dila did for me, and I love how Mecca:83 frames it all on the first track of this beautiful album:
FWIW: for me, looking back at what J Dilla opened up for us, in my mind, Mecca:83 is a product of this breaking of the mold which J Dilla created and evolved in his short time with us IMHO.🙏🏼💕
And yeah, I know this is a double post...but had to share some love and light in that other thread too
Also on Music:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/quiet-moments/1530005795
Anybody like Dust Brothers?
Nobody mention them?
@CracklePot just what the Dust Brothers did on Paul’s Boutique is enough to put them in the hall of greats. I remember not understanding It when it first dropped. Being the classic Bboy back then, I didn’t get the complexity mainly because I was too busy decrying the fact it didn’t sound as I expected/demanded. For clarification I offer a joke that encapsulates the classic Bboy attitude: how many Bboys does it take to change a lightbulb? 100, 1 to change it and 99 to argue about how the old one was better. Their style was so ahead of its time, it took me a while to catch up. Groundbreaking stuff always takes a while to fully appreciate. Even so, they get lost in the mix when discussions of the greats come up, but they should definitely be in the convo at least as far as I’m concerned.
I definitely listened to the Fight Club score a ton back in the day.
They produced some great stuff (as well as a few complete turkeys).
33% God (and that whole 12”) was absolutely seminal.
The reach of Dilla speaks for itself: he’s ubiquitous. And paved the way for some seriously thriving sub genres.
I did but it probably got lost in the ‘noise’.
Who ?
Well we could list a whole bucket load of favourite hip hop producers but it might be nice to keep this as a tribute thread to J Dilla.
Two of their best
Unreal how this happens
It is the conversational nature of this forum. Also the thread title does ask a question that seems to allow for some degree of discussion about influences but eh, I get it.
The answer to the question specifically for me would be no. As for Dilla specificly I hadn’t heard of him until sometimes last year when I think 3sleeves mentioned him. I never really thought much about ‘beat making’ until Beatmaker 3 came out. Really wish I had got into the whole MPC thing back in the 90s!
The least beat I made (over the past few evenings) involved a remix where I didn't have anything other than a 2 bar loop of the original sample source track. I chopped out everything that wasn't drums, ditched it and made the beat out if what was left. I did that on Ableton using a nice big monitor and a mouse... I most definitely didn't do it using a tiny LCD screen and a jog wheel 🤯
I listened to about 3 hours of music by him specifically or that he worked on. As a person that doesn’t actively listen to hip hop, that in itself was quite the journey!! I really enjoyed a lot of it, especially the instrumental parts because I could hear the music itself, BUT the rhythms thrown down for the rap artist to layer onto are...how do I explain it...like they are as moving as the rap itself. Rappers have their own style with being late or early off the beat...JD did the same thing with his beats, IMO. It has just enough movement to feel real. Like it’s his own.
The problem I have, and it’s because I’m a noob, is that I don’t know what’s a sample and what’s someone playing an instrument for the specific song I’m listening to. I guess that’s the magic, so consider me mystified!!
+1
Why even post then? I dont enter a forum about Metallica then say “not my thing, heres some Meshuggah”. Whats the point. @Max23
Heck I thought maybe Dilla was in the Dusties. I'll stick to app VS app threads as I'm an idiot.
So mentioning other great, innovative sample artists is upsetting now?
Wasn’t it the sidetrack to racism that was so upsetting before?
(I thought the plethora of counter-arguments to Max were enough, but I guess not)
You guys should just PM each other if you want your exclusive conversations. 🤣
His influence finds its way into a lot of my music, he was absolutely incredible and so innovative
Would be kind of fun to get a sample list from one of his most iconic songs and try to create our own musical interpretations from those.
Turning off quantization is a key piece of information. It means the decisions about rhythm
are made by the creator. It shows a connection between artist and product that's got a human fingerprint. You should be able to hear it if you're on the same wavelength.
All great artists tend towards making music that has their fingerprint and doesn't have the stamp of a factory process.
When I started to notice these Hip Hop beats that pushed my sense of time and created a gut feeling about my musical reality, I knew something new was in the air that transcended
the idea of re-purposed and mangled audio. It had an emotional connection that elevated
a craft into an art.
I can see now that J Dilla did that for the music beneath the rap. The rap was a distraction for me and I realize now there was a mastermind creating these beats that helped define and propel an art form into being.
Thank you @Stuntman_mike for helping me take this journey into your world and thank the video makers for documenting the history of this seminal artist.
America's hardest hit city from the effects of globalization produced art that defined a generation: Detroit.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about how hard it is to develop good swing feel (as in jazz/soul/r&b swing as opposed to machine swing -- which is a whole other thing) if you don't play music with other people that are better than you that have already mastered it -- because real swing is interactive -- it isn't rhythmically precise and in a song it will shift.
J Dilla was doing that same thing with machine beats and sampling. Listening to some of the examples that people posted, you can hear him developing a sense of groove that intentionally messes with people's expectation of groove -- being precise in one part and intentionally imprecise in another in such a way that it comes together in a very intentional way that grooves in a way different from the canonical grooves.
That example of Questlove showing how he had to rethink the kick based on that was cool.
Some people have a sense of groove unique to themselves that also speaks to others -- and Dilla clearly had it based on the number of musicians that went "Whoa"
Finding that JD was also a musician as well, able to play different instruments. Apparently he had a custom Moog Voyager that was donated to the Smithsonian as well as the MPC3K.
Not only that, but drum placement choices were sometimes “wrong” in the technical sense, not just off grid or swung. Sorta like he accidentally hit the pad and just left it in. This tendency, however technically wrong, made the beat more memorable. Part of his mystique to me was having the courage to make intentional mistakes and jerking the listener out of the analytical mind and into their gut. I know I wouldn’t have ventured there, especially at the time he did, for fear of appearing unskilled, sloppy or just plain wack. Guess that’s part of what makes the gods great, believing in their gift and being brave enough to share it even if it upends convention.
The thing is that because he was so deeply musical those "wrong" beats worked -- and he recognized when they worked. Someone without such a sense wouldn't recognize when it works and when it doesn't -- just like you hear a difference between great players that play "out" and players that try to play out but just sound random.
We’re on the same wavelength, my friend. I found a sample kit of his on Splice and started a tribute session. Would be cool to see noisemakers follow my lead