How J Dilla's Donuts Influenced Hip Hop

How J Dilla’s Donuts Influenced hiphop is about a legendary producer. His Moog synthesizer and MPC 3000 sampler are featured in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and and Culture. That alone should help you realise the impact this man had on music as a whole

He’s worked with some of hip hops greatest artists and been revered by critics and fans alike. Pharell named him his favourite producer of all time, Kanye said “One of the best days of my life was when he handed me a record with drums on it”.

This video is firstly an introduction to J Dilla if you don’t already know about him and secondly will be a detailed analysis of some of his tracks from a hip hop classic, Donuts. J Dilla born, James Yancey ,was a product of Motown, a style of music that fused soul and pop elements in the 1960s that was immensely popular

His dad Beverly Yancey worked for the ford motor company for 40 years and was a friend of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy. His dad was a vocal coach who played upright bass, and his mother Maureen sang in various styles. including jazz, opera and gospel. His parents were strict and pushed him into any musical endeavour they could from a young age to keep him out of trouble. How J Dilla’s Donuts Influenced hiphop is a look into a master musician.

J Dilla sadly passed away at 32 of Lupus, an autoimmune disease that can damage any part of the body and has no known cure. He released Donuts 3 days before he passed on the 10th February 2006. He spent his last 9 months in Hospital

Despite this He produced 29 of the 31 tracks on Donuts and other unreleased volumes using this simple portable equipment while bedridden.

He’s often been compared to Mozart, who himself wrote part of Requiem while on his own deathbed. Two musicians separated by generations but linked by devotion to sound.
So before we get into Donuts – what actually was J Dilla’s speciality? They were his Basslines, Non-Quantized drum beats and his sampling style. So lets start with basslines. He often made his Basslines contrast to the melody of the sample used

He used to also lack quantization his beats, for example on Untitled/Fantastic by slum village look at how the upbeats of hi-hat and kick drum patterns occur slightly after the eighth-note divisions and the snare pattern occurs slightly before beats two and four.

Knowing this, let’s jump into Donuts and certain tracks on it to study his intricate skills
Donuts was named after the 45rpm vinyl and one of his favourite snacks. Donuts, like the food, is circular: in the musical case it can be played on loop seamlessly. The first track Donuts outro and last track Welcome to the show even use the same sample.

The album appropriately features key themes on Death, love and self reflection. J Dilla knew his fate for some time – just read the tracklist and see songs such as Don’t Cry and Last Donut of the Night – you quickly realise his self awareness. J Dilla often uses a horn sample of the rap group Mantronix’s 1985 single “King of the Beats” which appears numerous times on the album – his own subtle proclamation as the King Of Beats
Jordan Ferguson the author of 33 ½ Donuts book series notes that a lot of the tracks have less in common with hiphop and more in common to the Pierre Schaeffer. Pierre Schaeffer was an ElectroAcoustic French composer who is widely recognized as the first musician to utilise recording and sampling techniques

He uses certain points to always begin a new sample – laid out by a consistent drum pattern with the snare drum on beats two and four of each measure and kick drum on beats one and three of each measure. He does this on other tracks such as Waves and Bye, where despite the original sample being 6/8 or another compound signature, their placement feels regular and separated to the beat. His Sampling also introduces complex composite melodies that build upon the basics of the original samples he uses. On don’t cry, the original sample uses a I, IV, and V chord progression in the key of D-flat major

The harmonic qualities however are much more tonally ambiguous, using mainly a harmonic ostinato that alternates between E-flat and F minor triads. The melodic components are also more simplistic, with E-flat being featured prominently. This is just one example of how he loved pushing boundaries within his own tracks. For donuts and while in Hospital Dilla utilised the extensive effects present on the Boss SP-303. These range from more commonly-used effects such as compression and delay, to more unorthodox effects like ring modulation.
"If you hear any song [with] a glitch in the [drum] pattern? That was Dilla," he explains. "If you hear bouncy, filtered bass patterns? Dilla. Offbeat snaps, offbeat claps? Dilla. J Dilla then, certainly laid new foundations for modern hiphop producers and in doing so left a legacy that will forever be a part of the genre itself.

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