Selfish such a perfect record too

You're misunderstanding what they're saying. They're not saying dilla was inspired by ye musically. They're saying ye inspired dilla as it made dilla want to show he was better

Nigga i can't believe this happened

F*** everything kanye is offially my goat.

You know how crazy of a sentence that is to be talking about dilla.

Pete rock highkey a hater tho, and i love that nigga. But people have definitely tried to give him his flowers

“A human can’t do that perfectly”

What the f*** lmao

Who said?

For one thing maybe your misunderstanding that most beats are loops? So the beat is going to repeat, thus wherever you place the snare in a loop, whether live or programmed, it’s going to repeat in the same spot lmao. And you can even set the snare loop for 1 bar so you can just record one snare in a weird place and then have it repeat over and over in that spot. So the stuff you’re saying doesn’t mean it’s definitely programmed and nudged. He could’ve been varying the loop length for each element. Honestly I think this is people with modern DAW brain trying to understand his stuff

Where the F*** is this idea that humans can’t play rhythms perfectly the way they want to coming from? This is a scary thought. It’s actually very easy to play a snare exactly where you want it each time if you have this thing called rhythm. The fact this is a foreign insane concept to you that no human could possibly do without a machine, is flat out disturbing

I didn’t edit the post but it’s not really what you’re talking about because I’m not focusing on the nudging or quantize because I think that was barely a factor in Dillas work

Especially considering a lot of his essential work wasn’t even made on an MPC. It’s programmed and elements and lived elements, not one element quantize at 80% and one nudged by 10%.

F***ing weirdo.

8 idiots liked the post. Trash ass people

Yeah but donuts was absolutely not the outcome of that lmao I’m telling you right now

Donuts was clearly the outcome of his Madvillainy inspiration which was well documented. It’s his take on a stones throw or Madlib project and Madlib was inspiring him at this point too

Motown beat tape was the one where Dilla was proving the point that he could do what Ye did and being competitive.

It’s so clear that these two projects, both made in 2005, were from these two inspirations. And to confuse them is dumb imo but I get it, it was all during a similar time period

Could some of this motivation been present in the making of donuts? Maybe but it feels like they’re just naming it cause it’s the well known project. Donuts is so left field and doesn’t even have drums. Doesn’t read as a project trying to compete with industry producers, but rather him seeing if he can go as far out and abstract as Madlib. Motown on the other hand has that bump that kanye was going for then

It doesn’t change the fact that you are a hoe

Perfect usage

Nah that’s hate. He hating too

unhinged energy in here, rip j dilla

You say no one gives Roger Linn credit but why do we even hold the MPC so high when talking about Dilla? He used many samplers and his most influential stuff like Fantastic vol 1 was done without it

@notbrock how do you and all the nudge nerds explain the fact that Fantastic Vol 1 definitely has the Dilla feel, but is made entirely on the SP1200, with no nudge capabilities and also no real time recording? Meaning those beats are entirely programmed with no variation possible on quantize and he didn’t even play elements live on there (one way you can tell because the beats are all strict loops and the kicks don’t vary as much as his beats for Pharcyde. he recorded live elements to tape for Pharcyde in the studio but the fantastic beats seem to be straight from the machine)

This is literally the tape that inspired the whole Soulquarians movement and therefore was huge in establishing the “Dilla drums” and “Dilla feel”

This was done WITHOUT an MPC!

And with no quantize settings for him to mess with. Extremely primative sequencer based sampler with none of the capabilities you’re referring to but he still had his sound

So what are we talking about here really? In this case he probably got the feel by chopping his drums from a specific start point so it hit how he wanted to, or some kind of methods like that. Plus when you’re sampling, especially from multiple sources, they naturally are slightly “off” from each other and the grid so there is already a human element built so you don’t have to “nudge” them for a human feel because they’re already imperfect. I don’t think the book took this into account at all.

But the point is he got this feel on every machine and even pro tools so why do we put this one tool on a pedestal and insist that the key to understanding Dilla is in the manual of it, which he never read?

Dude really said a human being can’t possibly play the snare in a Dilla beat lol have you ever seen an actual drummer? Bro placing the snare a little early is not that hard. Especially in Dilla context cause it’s not even random it’s just funky

Matter of fact @notbrock I’m sorry to blow you up but can you show me which Dilla beat you’re talking about when you say it couldn’t possibly be played by a human? I need to hear this cause i never heard that one

Also I bet if I practice fingerdrumming it for a day I can prove you wrong lol

The fact is people get too caught up in the “how” and miss the “why”

Dilla used many methods to get his sound depending on the machine, but none of those methods are WHY he had that sound.

He had that sound because he felt music differently and had impeccable rhythm, shaped by his musical upbringing, so he used whatever was at his disposal to create music how he felt it and heard it in his head

And the book does give too much credit to the MPC as though it was its innovations which made Dillas sound possible, which is wholly untrue because his sound predates his MPC work.

The book itself basically says this but just kind of glosses over the implications of any non MPC work which wouldn’t fit the chosen narrative of the book, which was disappointing. Having a book called Dilla Time advertised as looking at his rhythms, and not looking at any of his 6/8 to 4/4 flips on Donuts in any detail, instead opting to explain every detail about his bowel movements and the condition of his testicles during his illness, was disappointing.

The whole book was building to the chapter “Dilla time” and then that chapter is literally just about him dying and drops the musicial a***ysis. Good biography, bad music book. The advertisement as a “music book” was damn near false advertisement and charnas don’t know s*** about music straight up.

Rick Rubin, who is a friend and former associate of Charnas, even challenged/corrected him in their interview about the book, saying that by Charnas definition of Dilla time, all live recorded music is in Dilla time because everyone is a little off time from each other, so this isn’t new and always existed. You could tell he was very skeptical about the theory that Dilla created this. Rightfully so because his non musician theory of “Dilla time” is stupid and makes no sense to actual musicians.

So much good music here

I still don’t think you understand what I’m talking about

A human being cannot play perfectly on time down to the millisecond. A human cannot play something perfectly quanitized. You can be on time but when you take that recording, drag it into a daw and line it up on a grid you’ll see your not perfectly lined up to it. That is what gives live instruments a human feel

I’m saying they noticed (I think it was that “digging the greats” channel) that certain elements of Dilla beats hit at the exact millisecond everytime like they were quanitized but they were slightly off the grid which means he nudged them

I’m not arguing anymore about this because we both agree Dilla’s bounce came from his natural rhythm and he had beats with his swing before using an mpc

Also if he’s playing in the snare live for half a bar then copying that and duplicating it for the rest of the loop then that’s still just programming it and not that different from just nudging it lol

Do you make beats or used an mpc before?

if you hear kanye influence here youre off a perc

It’s not that different but that’s kinda my point, I feel like people like Digging the greats are looking at it a little too much from a modern perspective and assuming it’s nudging when really it’s some other more intuitive stuff happening most of the time. Yes I’ve used an MPC. That milisecond thing can easily be explained by live recording into the sequencer as opposed to nudging so why assume it was nudging when live playing makes way more sense?

I’ve seen digging the greats videos and seen him recreate Dilla beats with some modern drum kit type sounds lol. A huge part of the Dilla feel comes from the fact that he’s sampling the drums from records and so they have their own inherent groove which can work with or against another sample in an interesting way. The closest I’ve personally got to a Dilla feel in years of study and attempting is chopping different drum sounds from different breaks and live recording a very simple 1 bar hat pattern, live but almost as if programmed as you say, and then playing the kicks and snares all over the place live from feeling for like an 8 bar loop or so, with a couple variations on the kick sound. Then some maybe some layering and processing. I’m not saying Dilla was never nudging or never experimenting with the quantize percentage or swing setting but I think people overemphasize it majorly, because of the book and it’s desire to tell a good story. And the fact authors aren’t necessarily musicians qualified of explaining such things.

I believe his feel comes down to the way he chopped things and the way he played things live more often than they had to do with nudging or quantize, which he only got access to later in his career

Edit: I made an edit cause I worded something confusingly I made a mistake with a couple words

The assumption by digging the greats that just because a loop repeats exactly means it’s programmed/nudged and not played live is really wild though. You can loop The Funky Drummer and then the snare will hit exactly the same on the millisecond. It’s still a loop of live playing though lmao. People really lose the plot with this stuff. And I can’t fully blame digging the greats, he was misled by that terrible Dilla time book, as many will be. Ah well.

Said “nobody”