{"id":25220,"date":"2022-03-14T17:45:40","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T21:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/?p=25220"},"modified":"2023-06-05T15:01:33","modified_gmt":"2023-06-05T19:01:33","slug":"dilla-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2022\/dilla-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Dilla Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently finished reading Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time<\/a>.<\/em> It’s a good one! If you are interested in how hip-hop works, you should read it. The book’s major musicological insight is elegantly summed up by this image:<\/p>\n

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“Straight time” means that the rhythms are evenly spaced and metronomic, like a clock ticking. (Think of a Kraftwerk song<\/a>.) “Swing time” means that the halves of each beat are alternately stretched and shrunk<\/a>. (Think of a Duke Ellington tune<\/a>.) “Dilla time” means that there are multiple rhythmic feels simultaneously, some straight, some swung, some on the grid, some ahead of or behind the grid. (Think of, well, a J Dilla track, like the ones discussed below.)<\/p>\n

You frequently see Dilla time described as “unquantized” or “drunk<\/a>.” My favorite description is from the intro to Kendrick Lamar’s song “Momma<\/a>.” As its heavily Dilla-influenced beat plays, producer Taz Arnold<\/a> says, “I need that, I need that sloppy, that sloppy, like a Chevy in quicksand, yeah, that sloppy.” Poetic though it is, though, this is not accurate. Dan Charnas makes clear that Dilla was never sloppy in his rhythms, that their deviation from the grid was intended and meticulously executed. Dilla “misaligned” his beats because it sounds good. But why does it sound so good? I am trying to figure that out.<\/p>\n

One thing to know is that Dilla time did not originate with J Dilla. Jazz and funk often use several different grooves at the same time. But in those musics, the time is organic and stretchy. I have tempo-mapped many jazz recordings in Ableton Live, and the time feel is never exactly the same from one measure to the next. Dilla was programming beats with computers, however, so his microrhythms are repeated identically, many times per song. Clyde Stubblefield<\/a> might generally rush or drag his snare backbeats, but he won’t rush or drag them by the same precise amount in every bar. Dilla beats do, and the repetition magnifies the impact of his microtiming. For Dilla, sometimes this was a simple matter of identifying a sample with a particular groove and looping it; sometimes it meant programming drums himself; and often it was a combination of the two.<\/p>\n

I have been hearing Dilla tracks since the 1990s without realizing it, thanks to his production work for The Pharcyde, Erykah Badu, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, and various others. When I started hearing Dilla’s name from my musician friends, I downloaded a few of his tracks at random. The first one that I connected to strongly was “Bars & Twists”, from the Donut Shop<\/em> compilation.<\/p>\n