Then he realized that James was using the drum machine to shift the timing of his sounds—the snare backward, so it rushed a little bit; the hi-hats forward—duplicating his patterns, modifying each of them slightly and then stringing them together to form a whole. Jeff’s discovery led to a deeper realization: everyone in hip-hop had heretofore been trying to cut, splice, and jam samples to accommodate the machine’s time grid, because producers were focused on mining samples for their sounds. But Jay Dee did the opposite: he bent the machine grid to accommodate his sample sources, because he was
...more
