How J Dilla humanized his MPC3000

What you're looking at is an MPC 3000. It sits in a room amongst the most iconic relics of our country's musical history, and that room is on the fourth floor of the National Museum of African-American History in our nation's capitol. that MPC was owned by J Dilla, who composed some of the most revered beats in hip-hop history. Technology has just taken a giant leap forward. Hello I'm Roger Linn, and this is the MPC 60 MIDI production Center created by myself and Akai professional. The MPC is this compact machine that's a holding station for all types of samples which you can play with 16 touch sensitive pads. The very first model shipped in 1988 for just a few thousand dollars and it was Akai and Roger Linn's elaboration on the Linn drum machine. The concept though of taking samples of prerecorded sound and composing with them existed long before the late 1980s, but those machines were limited by their price and portability. The MPC was a different beast because it really put you in the driver's seat in terms of a sonic texture that you wanted to have. That's Brian "Raydar" Ellis, and that's his MPC Renaissance. You know really just make a mess of it. It's a fully customizable machine where as you look at maybe like the Linn drum or the Roland tr-808 which were specifically drum machines, the sounds came pre-loaded and you couldn't change them. In short, the MPC 60 was the musical brain of the studio. By 1994 when Akai introduced the MPC 3000 it was the tool of choice for many of the top hip-hop producers in the game including, J Dilla. I think the thing with Dilla that inspired so many producers is that he was able to use such a wide vocabulary of technique. J Dilla was a producer out of Detroit in the mid-90s through his early death in 2006 from a rare blood disease. He passed away just three days after releasing one of his most fascinating and beloved albums, Donuts. He worked with an astounding list of iconic artists and pulled off the majority of his sound with just a few simple instruments, machines, and digital samplers, one of them being the MPC. He knew how to get into every piece of the MPC and use it to a musical advantage. So let's talk about J Dilla's drum style first. He figured out how to humanize the drum machine by avoiding certain things that he could have done to make it more robotic, make it more stiff. For instance the MPC has this incredibly useful tool called quantization. What quantizing does is it takes your performance, let's say I'm playing my drum pattern, and when I'm playing it, sometimes it's a little ahead it's a little bit time. If your kick drums are off by a little bit, quantization snaps them in place. And so a lot of producers they use quantize, not as a crutch, but just they just weren't thinking about not using it and so Dilla was like yeah I'm just gonna turn this off. The result is a discography full of incredibly off-kilter drums. This loose strumming style was incredibly influential. When Red Bull Music Academy interviewed Questlove he said J Dilla's drumming technique single-handedly changed how he played. Whereas this part is normal sounding. It sounded like the kick drum was played by like a drunk three-year-old. I was like "are you allowed to do that?" So like that to me was the most liberating moment. Dilla was known for his signature low-end texture and his drums accounted for a lot of that sound. Here's just a regular sampled kick, here's what that same kick with the high-end cutout sounds like. You'll hear that kick in a lot of Dilla beats, like on The Pharcyde's "Runnin". The other half of Dilla's Low end came from his bass lines. He had a way of kind of getting the fuzz in the pump out of a bass line. The MPC gave Dilla the flexibility to create and manipulate his bass in a lot of different ways. J Dilla didn't just you know drop out of nowhere and just know how to do everything all at once, he was listening to a lot of the the legends. In fact, producers like Large Professor, they used this technique a lot to get extra mileage out of the sample. So right now I got this loop this is Gap Mangione "Diana in the Autumn Wind." In order to get a verse section what producers would do is they would filter out the high-end and they just leave this base space in here for the rapper to rap and then when the chorus came back around they bring all the frequencies back, so you have a verse section and of course section two-for-one sale. One of my favorite Dilla baselines though actually came from his moog synthesizer which was custom made by Robert Moog himself. Just focus on how much his bass line rattles the low end of the song and meanders in and around the beat. He's very meticulous about you know what was going to kind of ooze and lay back a little bit. You listen to his Moog bass and it couldn't care less if it got there on time, but somehow it does. He internalized every possible technique used in hip hop and expanded upon it, and he did so with just an intense love and curiosity of sounds, and a lot of patience. If we look back at E=MC2 we've got an incredible sub bass-y low end and example from an incredibly off-the-wall song by Giorgio Moroder. Something that that makes this record stand out is the "equals" how he extended it, because if you just listen it kind of only goes for a few beats, and he was able to extend it as far as he wanted. There are so many songs that showed J Dilla's ability to flip a sample, but there's one that gives me goosebumps every time I hear it. A lot of people think sampling is easy because they're like oh they're just listening to the melody on top and they're not thinking about what the instruments below that lead melody are doing and how they're playing a role in the beat. The first 40 seconds of "Don't Cry" is just a few long loops of The Escorts "I can't stand (to see you cry)" - he barely did anything with them. He's basically saying "this is all I have to work with" at 40 seconds though he says "now look what I can do with this MPC." Instead of chopping to the melody, he chopped up a handful of kicks and snares throughout the entire song regardless of the melody on top of it, and like little puzzle pieces, he resequenced those kicks and snares to create this entirely new dreamlike song. I think Dilla was just like super funky a lot of that had to do with you know him being willing to not care if the record speeds up or slows down as long as it feels good you know and just throwing that care out the window and just being like "forget quantize man, it does what I say it does" and just rocking like that. Akai has released a steady stream of MPC since the MPC 60 and 3000, they've gotten glassier, more high-tech, more portable, and more integrated into digital audio workstations than ever before. But those 16 pads and scroll knob have persisted, and that tactile design has even influenced the design of countless other pieces of audio software. In the instruction manual for the MPC 3000, Roger Linn gives an introduction, and in that introduction he asks the people that use the MPC to treat it like an instrument - it's like the modern-day piano or violin. And even though a lot of people say J Dilla never read the manual for the MPC 3000, he still internalized that same idea. He used his MPC like Jimi Hendrix played his guitar, or John Coltrane played the saxophone - it was an extension of himself. That's probably why out of all the MPC's used by countless hip-hop producers and beat makers over the years, J Dilla's is in a museum. Hey thanks so much for watching the video, I want to give a special thanks to Brian "Raydar" Ellis. In addition to being a professor at Berkeley, he is also an emcee and producer and I've linked his work below in the description. You will also find all of my sources and a lot of amazing links to further reading about J Dilla if you want to learn more about him. I didn't make a Spotify playlist and that's because one of the greatest ones about J Dilla already exists. I've linked to that one in the description below it's like 16 hours long it's amazing.

Channel: Vox

Views: 4,004,513

Keywords: J DILLA, DONUTS, Q-TIP, The shining, common, erykah badu, mpc3000, sampling, how to, drums, bass, bassline, sythnesizer, moog, akai, mpc60, mpc renaissance, drum machine, digital, vinyl, record, slum villiage, tribe called quest, busta rhymes, madlib, jaylib, the pharcyde, boom bap, jazz rap, beats, chill, e=mc2, don't cry, detroit, motown, soul, funk, coltrane, jazz, flying lotus, kick drum, chopping, james yansey, dilla, jay dee

Id: SENzTt3ftiU

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2017