This post is part of a 4-part series on the rhythmic style of J Dilla.
Part I: (History) · Part II (Theory) · Part III (Grooves) · Part IV (Application)
So far I’ve been discussing some of the advanced rhythmic concepts found in the work of Dilla and other hip-hop, neo-soul, and jazz musicians. To try some of this stuff out, I decided to make my own lo-fi hop-hop beat.
This post is part of a 4-part series on the rhythmic style of J Dilla.
Part I: (History) · Part II (Theory) · Part III (Grooves) · Part IV (Application)
In this post I want to take a look at some transcriptions of Dilla feels found in the wild to break down what they’re doing.
The transcription methodology for these tunes was to pick a four bar section where the beat is clearly audible and align it to a beat grid in Ableton. I then recreated the grooves on separate tracks by looking at the waveform to determine where individual hits occurred. When the waveform was unclear, I placed a sample in the approximate location and then adjusted it until it no longer made an audible flam against the track. For some of the songs with sampled drums, I isolated the samples and aligned them via phase cancellation.
This post includes screenshots of the Ableton live sessions and standard notation for each tune. For the standard notation, I focused on creating intuitive and easily digestible summaries of the grooves rather than notate them literally. I experimented with a couple different approaches for notating subdivisions and microtime including written descriptions, approximating to the nearest subdivision, and using special symbols to mark when notes fall behind/ahead of the written beat.
Continue reading “The Dilla Feel, Part III: The Grooves (Real-World Examples and Dilla’s Influence)”
This post is part of a 4-part series on the rhythmic style of J Dilla.
Part I: (History) · Part II (Theory) · Part III (Grooves) · Part IV (Application)
Swing refers to a type of rhythm where alternating subdivisions are given unequal durations, creating a long-short-long-short pattern. In jazz it’s typical for 8th notes to be swung and rock and hip-hop sometimes feature swung 16th notes. The most common type of swing is a triplet swing in which the first note has twice the length of the second note. It is often notated like this:
This post is part of a 4-part series on the rhythmic style of J Dilla.
Part I: (History) · Part II (Theory) · Part III (Grooves) · Part IV (Application)
The Dilla feel has its origins in the late 90s with the legendary hip-hop producer J Dilla and the neo-soul/RnB/hip-hop collective The Soulquarians.
Continue reading “The Dilla Feel, Part I: The History (J Dilla and The Soulquarians)”
A transcription of the head and shout chorus of Wayne Shorter’s tune “This is for Albert” from the record Caravan by Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers:
The horn voicing on this tune is great. Really good examples of triadic and spread voicings for jazz sextet. For more information, check out my post Five Ways to Voice Horns For Small Group Jazz.
Some general approaches to voicing for a 2 to 3 horn jazz group, including Unison/Octaves, Fourths, Triads, Spread, and Parallel/Cluster. To create comparable examples, I used an 8 bar section of This Is For Albert by Wayne Shorter (get the original transcription here) and re-orchestrated it using each of the different techniques.
Continue reading “Five Ways to Voice Horns For Small Group Jazz”