LA beatmaker production techniques

[nowaysj]

I was gonna, need the cash, but, naw that fucker is a keeper

[crunkedxup]

i've been listening to this style of hip-hop for a longggg time and theres still one production element i will never understand. i wont understand why they do it, how it started or why it sounds good when it really shouldn't.

the little gaps and random jumps! so many times i've been listening to j dilla, 14kt, flying lotus, samiyam etc the song will jump into another distant part of the song or even another song completely for like half a second, or a millisecond of a vocal sample will come in at completely the "wrong" time, therell be a kind of "vinyl off" sound or the beat will just fall apart completely then re-assemble itself for the next bar.

by rights it should sound terrible but it makes it so much better!

prime example here at about 0:40



i wonder where it started, maybe the first one was an actual error and people just thought it sounded good haha.

[street_astrologist]

In terms of accidental origins, that effect can come from riffing on a pattern sequence selector. If you're cycling through 4 different loop patterns live for 4 bars each at a time like

1111
2222
3333
4444

you can sneak in a 4424 pattern sequence pretty easily instead with a flick of the wrist. Depending on your sequencer's granularity, you might be able to get it to spit out just a very few notes of pattern '2' there before returning to '4', or maybe it only shifts at the end of a full bar and you have to flip patterns to '2' halfway through the second bar out of the four, and flip back to '4' halfway through bar number three.

Once you have this happen a few times, it's easy to work it intentionally. In a DAW it can be even crazier than in a drum machine because you get all the automation from the other pattern for a second too, glitchy transitions to/from that automation, all that jazz.

[nowaysj]

yeah, but as to how you make it sound good... haha, that is still down to personal style.