by Dominic Petry
During the summer after my eighth-grade year, the summer of ‘23, I became interested in sample-based beat-making. I had been binge-watching YouTube videos and TikTok clips of Tracklib sample breakdowns, and an artist who happened to float through the air in the comment sections of these videos was J Dilla. However, if I remember correctly, it wasn’t until I saw the sample breakdown for J Dilla’s song “Don’t Cry” that I truly felt like it was something I wanted to try. So, around the last two weeks of summer, I had been (very loosely) messing around making beats on my phone.
My work wasn’t inspiring, despite a couple of half-decent ideas. But beyond trying to impress my friends, I still enjoyed just messing around during the early months. Believe it or not, my biggest advantage at this time was my lack of knowledge and organization when making beats. It was beneficial to have a lack of musical knowledge because that allowed me to just hear sounds rather than music, music being a much more narrow matter. Producing (as implied by Rick Rubin) is essentially confidence in one’s taste and ability to express how they feel. At this time, I had gross confidence in my taste, except my taste only consisted of old-school rap and random Wes Montgomery songs in the shuffle here and there. As far as my mixing experience, I’d often do a “headphone check” for the mix, which became a huge problem down the line. The “headphone check” is a test where I listen to my track on my earbuds to make sure the mix cuts through. The issue with this was that I’d use Powerbeats Pros, a higher-end earphone, and anything will cut through those speakers, so a lot of unintentional distortion goes unnoticed.
The loudest goal I always rush to achieve with my tracks is rhythm and sentiments, thinking deeply about specific sounds, instrumentation, and time signatures. Just Blaze heavily inspires me, and my big takeaway from his production is the groove and the “Super Bowl-stadium-marching-band” type energy he brings. That type of energy and punch is something I’m constantly thinking about how I can achieve in my own DNA. Another particular thought process I have, or “mantra,” is that it’s all a learning process. I’ve constructed so many ideas that I hated. Even though it’s a sucky feeling when my ideas don’t work out, it’s wonderful for me because it breaks up my workflow.
I think critically when making tracks, but (if you could even call this a “technique”) it’s helpful to me to go blank sometimes and not try. Not “not care,” but allow myself to wander and hopefully discover something new. Aside from this, a hands-on technique I use is “rhythmic chopping,” which I use for most of my tracks. I’ll chop up a sample along its percussion hits and align them with the grid so the sample is on time, making it easier to lay percussion on top, despite being time-consuming. Another notable technique I’d like to mention is time modulation. Time modulation is where I chop up a sample in ¾ timing and play it at 4/4 pace, essentially playing it faster by a quarter bar. This is fun to do and produces interesting products, but most importantly, it allows me to add 4/4 drums or at least makes it a lot easier.
I don’t have the widest music vocabulary and didn’t grow up around music outside of my sister’s One Direction obsession. I almost always listen to the same music (unless I’m sample-digging), which can put me at a disadvantage. Absorbing J Dilla’s works helps me to compensate for this because his work opens me up to new ways of recontextualizing samples, which is all that sample-based beat-making is. When listening to music and not “digging the crates,” J Dilla has me thinking more about what I like about the music in its production. The mix of the beat, the lyrics, and the cadence of the artist’s voice on the beat. Some may see that as a burden considering how much I think about what I’m listening to sometimes; perhaps it robs me of the musical experience. However, I think it’s an advantage because it allows me to appreciate other pieces of music I would otherwise consider an abstract record/acquired taste.
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