J Dilla Brief

The Brief 

This is a brief that I've set myself to be completed for J Dilla's birthday, which is on the 7th February. Therefore the deadline is on the 7th of February. I have to produce one beat that is at least 90 seconds long and design a piece of artwork for the music. The main reasons why I have set myself this task is because music and hip-hop is something that I'm hugely inspired by and music production is something that I want to progress with during level 6. Enabling myself to use music within projects is incredibly beneficial to me because it's heightening the skills that I want to adapt. I believe that making the most of this course what I want to achieve from it is very important. 

J Dilla is one of most well known hip-hop producers of all time because of the way he produced his beats. No one can ever replicate a Jay Dee beat, his techniques were too great. Because of his mass popularity and huge influence he has had on music a lot of people pay their respects every year on J Dillas birthday by producing their own Jay Dee inspired beats and artworks. People will often try to replicate a similar sound or use the same samples that he used on his beats. 

I don't want to assimilate his sound but I want to be able to produce a simple beat that can played over and over again. Dilla's music is so simple but it makes an everlasting impact. Here is a whole selection of J Dilla music videos, a lot of them have been made since his passing, which is why he isn't featured in them. 

This documentary on J Dilla that was made my Stussy sheds light on his come up as a producer and reveals the partnerships and friendships that he made during his career. One of these friends is hip-hop producer Madlib, who he collaborated with on JayLib. How the JayLib project came about is also detailed in this documentary. People also discuss his last album, 'Donuts' and explain how that record is like a death note, a goodbye message to the world. A worthwhile documentary that unravels some of the genius behind Dilla's work. 

Another reason that sparked my idea to do this brief was because of this documentry below. I downloaded a De La Soul record from bitorrent that featured Jay Dee production. This file I downloaded included a j dilla documentary that I had never seen before, which I later found out can also be seen on youtube. After I watched this documentary on Dilla it gave me the idea to pay homage to him by creating my own beat and work, I have then incorporated this idea into my Extended Practice Module. 

Research

I started looking at the artwork featured on his records because I wanted to find any themes that I could include into my own design. However it quite quickly became apparent what the main design themes were. Since his passing more and more records have been released with artwork that features the main visual associations to J dilla, which are Donuts, Samplers and Detroit. These themes are prominent throughout all related artworks to Jay Dee, I wanted to include these within my own design, however I felt that they were too common. I wanted to create a design that wouldn't look similar to all the others. Even though the Donuts were way over used on designs, I wanted to experiment with them because they can be made to look quite bold and eye catching.

Design Research

After coming across the T-Shirt designs that Stussy have released for J Dillas birthday over the years, it made me want to print my final design onto a t-shirt of my own. 

Design Idea & Development

From my looking at my design research I soon realised that Akai Samplers and Donuts were prominent throughout artworks and designs based on J Dilla. I was trying to look for different signifiers however nothing else was as effective as these 2 associations because of how closely related they are to J Dilla. I didn't want my design looking the other artworks that I came across because they are all so similar. The colourful vector tracings of J Dilla photographs are horrible, I wanted my design to be used on a T-shirt, therefore I wanted it to be simple and be in one colour. 

Drew my own sampler.

I decided to do a hand drawn design because I wanted to steer away from the cliche Dilla artwork and create a grittier aesthetic. The Sampler was going to be the main element featured in the design, therefore I started drawing it first. After doodling more T-Shirt layouts and visual associations, I decided that I wanted the word ‘Detroit’ underneath the sampler because it’s where J Dilla is from. The text was drawn in a bold 3D style and the Olde English style Detroit ‘D ‘ was included as it’s another element commonly associated with Jay Dee.

The ‘O’ in the ‘Detroit’ was also illustrated as a Donut too. J Dilla’s nicknames, music groups and albums were all drawn out by hand, scanned, vectored and placed around the Akai Sampler. This completed my design, which I then exposed onto screen printing screen. Unfortunately whilst exposing my screen some of the halftone dots that were used on the letters had rubbed off because they were too thin. Even though this reduced the texture on the letters, it still printed out fine when screen printing the t-shirts. I used black ink on my design because I wanted to print a very simple graphic that could be applied to different coloured t-shirts.

Final Design

The MPC and the hand drawn Detroit text are the main focus of the design. 

I placed J Dilla's nicknames, albums and music groups around the sides of the MPC. 

 Mistakes / marks

Producing The Beat

Similar to J Dilla, I also used my own Roland Sampler to produce my beat for this project.  I started off by loaded the drum samples onto my sampler and then collecting different samples for me to incorporate into the beat. My first idea was to use the first documentary I watched and sample clips of J Dilla talking about his music and also sample his friends talking about Jay Dee. After I had gather the samples from the Documentary I plugged my synthesiser into the Sampler and recorded a bassline. After this I started making different drum patterns until I made one at a comfortable bpm. I wanted a drum beat that would allow room for the vocal samples to sit on top of it without sounding messy. The bpm I went with was 84, which is quite a slow beat. 

Arrangement & EQ

Here's a look at the arrangement I used for the beat. I doubled up all my sections of the drums because I wanted them to be louder than the rest of the track. As I had sampled voice snippets of people talking about J Dilla I needed to cut off all the low frequencies because they were not needed, no bass is needed in vocal samples. The bass line I sampled from my Synth needed to sound punchier and become more prominent in the track, so I increased the low and mid frequencies.

Final Outcome

I feel that the final design that i've produced is strong because of the visual associations to J Dilla and because of the simple and effective use one colour. I feel that all the  visual references work well amongst each other, even though the final design appears to be slightly cluttered with words, I think it makes for a gritty aesthetic, which is what I wanted to achieve. This project  developed my fabric screen printing skills as it was the first time I had ever screen printed onto t-shirts. If I were to take this design further, I would increase the half tone dots on my positives so that they wouldn’t rub off the screen. I would also improve this design by making some of the details thicker, because they appeared too thin on the t-shirts. On the whole though, the design looks so much better on a t-shirt than it does on screen!

I’m pleased with the beat I produced for this project and I feel that the sampling techniques I used fit well within the context of the brief. However, I believe that I could a lot of improvements to it. Although the intention was to produce a lo-fi beat, there a lot of problems with the EQ, the main drum beat is too low and needs to be reduced.