3 Techniques J Dilla Used In His Beats

today i'm going to cover three j dilla beat making techniques that you can start using in your own beats [Music] right off the bat i just want to start off by saying that i'm somewhat uncomfortable making this video i have a huge amount of respect for jay dilla he's one of my favorite producers of all time i don't want to come off and pretend like i have some sort of secret insider information or knowledge here or anything like that after listing a tons of his music i just happen to pick up some really interesting and useful techniques that he uses that we can all use no matter what style of beat that we all make that's exactly what i want to showcase in today's video so here i have this beatmate that implements a few of his techniques [Music] [Music] adela went through a lot of different styles in his lifetime and this video here is mainly gonna look at that late 90s beat tape style so let's take these techniques one by one and by the way if you enjoy my videos and you get a lot of value out of them think about subscribing it's just one click away to unsubscribe if you get tired of seeing my videos but it really does help my channel out so the first really interesting technique that dilla used was that he would have this really interesting way of filling up space in his beats this is a really subtle technique but can be really useful if you use this in your own beats here i'm going to isolate this one particular sound in this beat [Music] now from what it sounds like what he would do is something similar to this where he would just take this one small tiny fraction of a sample and repeat it over and over again throughout the entire beat you guys can hear if i were to play this entire sample so what i did here was i just found one tiny section of this sample that's pretty quiet right in the beginning part right here and i just played it over and over again i also isolated a pretty narrow bandwidth of frequencies with this sound as well and that's how we get this result here [Music] and it's pretty subtle but you can hear what a difference this is gonna make if i didn't have this in my beat the beat starts to feel more bare and less complete this technique is just such a great way of making your beads sound full but doing so in an unobtrusive way the sound sort of acts like something in between a pad and a hi-hat it's sort of like a pad because it does a good job of filling up space almost in the background of the beat like a pad would but it also acts like a hi-hat in a different way it's constantly playing throughout the entire beat and also provides a sense of rhythm in the beat much like a hi-hat would this type of pattern here is similar to what we would see if we were trying to program a hi-hat for example and if you want to hear this idea being used in one of his actual beats if you listen to are you listening you can hear this idea being used in a pretty prevalent manner in that beat the second technique that i want to cover is the ideas for his bass lines that he used in many of his beats now if you guys watched my prior video on making boom bap beats you will remember me talking about bass lines in that video and how many of the beats back in the day sampled jazz and how jazzier types of basses were commonly used like an upright bass for example but what was different with a lot of j dilla's beats from this era was that he chose a subier synthy base instead and he paired this with the more common jazzier instruments and samples which is really interesting and this was a pretty unique combination listening to this beat here this is what i tried to do as well as you can see with this bass pattern right here [Music] not only was his base selection unique but the way he played it was pretty interesting as well his patterns would commonly span across multiple octaves rather than just stay within one so in order to implement this type of idea into eurobeat first finding a synthy base would be a good idea but obviously not everyone has access to hardware dela famously used a mini moog but within something like omnisphere you can find some pretty comparable bases for example the one that i'm using here is called nice moog base now likely if you use this type of base and play them in this style you'll need to do a couple of really important things or this can easily mess your bead up for one i took an eq and cut out a lot with a cynthia type of base like this they at times have some amount of presence in the mid and high end but to get this particular type of dilla aesthetic it can be helpful to cut those frequencies out so all you're left with is the sub ear part of the base as well if you create a baseline that spans multiple octaves like i mentioned prior you might run into another issue let's take a look at the overall output of this baseline [Music] you guys can see once we start playing those higher notes the output increases those notes are just louder in the beat even though the velocities are relatively the same so in this situation you'll likely want to compress the bass line mainly to control these peaks and bring everything down to an equal level or what i did here was just a lazy version of that i just slapped a limiter on and brought the ceiling down so everything sort of just gets squashed equally but obviously this is not the best way of doing it compression is always going to be a better idea for this type of situation nonetheless you guys get the point you want your baseline to be a lot more consistent because when using these types of bases they can easily go out of control now lastly let's cover some ideas when it comes to drum programming this is where i will probably get some people disagreeing with me now i know dilla was known for having unquantized drums and the way a lot of people try to replicate this idea in their beats is to completely turn quantization off and let the drums just fall wherever they may but in my experience i've just had more success in trying to emulate the style of beat when i really quantize certain sounds and then let the rest of them be unquantized for example if we take a look at my snares here relatively speaking these are very on grid and very consistent they're just a few snares in this pattern that come a tiny bit early but other than that i have everything very quantized and with the kick pattern you may look at this and you'll see all the unquantized kicks but i also made sure to quantize certain kicks and have them be really on time what this does is it helps create a context and might beat a consistency again in my experience this will help the unquantized sounds have something to actually stand out against if every single sound in the beat is completely unquantized and off the grid no context is created just in my experience i've had better results quantizing a handful of sounds and then getting loose with the other sounds as well i know a lot of people like to use swing but personally i do things a little bit more manually using drum machines like what was used in the 90s made it a lot harder to be as exact as we can be today and so if you were using hardware like an npc back in the day using swing was probably a more effective and functional idea but with modern daws it's just much easier to take your notes and move them and adjust them as you see fit and just be more deliberate and hands-on so just turning up the swing and not doing anything else might not be the best way to implement this specific feel into your beats especially with what's possible with modern technology nowadays therefore if you like the way this drum pattern sounded this was my approach to achieving it having said that there's obviously more than one way to skin a cat so i'm sure you can find other ways to emulate this feeling and sound in your beat this video is just covering some of the things that i have found to yield good results for me and that's it guys if you've enjoyed this video like and subscribe if you want more advanced tutorials head over to betterbeatmaker.com i have a full online beat making program there where i go a lot more in depth and talk about every single step of the beat making process and break down every single thing that you need to know my free drum kit's available in the description box below as well as a link to the discord if you want your beats reviewed live i do that every and i will see you guys next time

Channel: Navie D

Views: 37,705

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Keywords: How to make J Dilla type beat, J dilla beat tutorial, How J Dilla make beats, J dilla tutorial fl studio, How to J Dilla drums, J dilla tutorial, How to J dilla, Beatmaking, how to make beats, beats, beatmaking tutorial, j dilla

Id: 8hlwivtfV0w

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021