Your favourite least-liked drum programeurs
Young_Phonics
8,039 Posts
Let's start it off.Timberland: Dude can't be fucked with, from killing it with the whole syncopated steez, to having some trully unique and ill kicks and snares. The drums alone on "Brush your shoulder" put dude in the top 10.Pete Rock: In his prime his drum programing was so damn fluid. Ironically, my favourite LP of his beats was a album where every joint has the loudest hi-hat imaginable, The Main ingredient.Just Blaze: I've basically study the drums on "P.S.A." to death and wondered how can such a slow beat can have so much movement, i've realized it might the reverb on the snare. Regardless, that one little hit is murderous and dude really knows how fit drums with samples.Dilla: even though his drum programing has been copied to death, at one time that shit was so damn original and amazing..... thus spanning the timmy dig-a-lots myspace wobble wobble dudes.Daz-I-Kue: This might cause the most amount of shrugs, but if anyone really fucks with broken beat you have to give it up to dude. I can't even follow the programing he's got going on and just the amount of nuances and variations dude brings really make his beats great to listen to.Least Liked:9th wonder: Do I even have to explain?Swizzy: yeah I know.....his patterns are dope and his beats accomplish what they intend to do but damn, it' like he does the same pattern every time.Those Fort Knox Five guys, again really some niche producers but they make tracks with the most sterile Frickin' drum sounds and patterns ever. It might not even be Fort Knox that does it but it's a lot of those dudes who make corny FUNKY GROOVY BEATZ
Comments
i first read P.S.A. as P.S.K. and i was thinking..."yeah Schoolly D did use alot of reverb and that shit was dope."
good post
MOST:
Marley Marl (duh)
DJ Pooh (way under-rated)
Large Professor
DJ Shadow (not a "drum programmer" in the same sense, but a master at adding small nuances to his drums and making a dope break even better)
Thes One (all the programming on Lifestyle Marketing is dope and the drum sounds are next level.)
Bomb Squad (keen sense of how to take a break, do very little to change it, but make it sound perfect)
Mannie Fresh (master of the snare rolls)
LEAST:
Most producers who can't escape the words "boom-bap"
The Neptunes (catchy at first, annoying as hell in retrospect)
Countless others who repeat the same stale patterns and sounds over and over.
What I need to do is kick the bitch in the tummy.
I know what you mean I guess, but even if you only take this one example, his drum programming on 'Guns Blazing' off the Unkle album was the very definition of
Not to detract from Shadow, but that's a straight loop pretty much I think.
Just to counter that - given that I have heard the guns blazing track and also have the record he took those drums from, I can pretty much certify that it is not a strtaight loop.
Beatnuts
Sam Sever (supposedly did a bunch of programming on the early Mantronix records)
Big cosignature on Mannie Fresh
Dilla- He could loop, program or do whatever the fuck he felt and it usually turned out dope.
Primo- Had his own way of turning the familiar breaks into his own.
Prince - c'mon, he was one of the first to get funky on the Linn
Timbo -
Dilla - sloppy goodness
Primo/Marley - kings of boom bap
Least Favourite:
Me - I'm in a rut at the moment
Exile - I'm still playing "Dirty Science". I had to go back and start collecting the Sound in Color 12s for the Exile tracks. I know people call him Dilla derivative, but I feel like he's such a master of the stuttering pulsing rhythms that he brings it to his own level.
sorry to keep going down this tangent, but what about the number song? He did a pretty good job chopping those out. His chop of the Road Home drums for the Meiso remix was pretty nice too. I like how he picks some things that aren't obvious.
mantronix - & sure, mannie fresh
rza - so wrong, yet raw/right
marley marl - rethinking 'the break' in the context of production. all the influence'd & the era thereafter..
preem - obvious (or would be..had not so many people bit, or straight lift, his drums/style for a period.)
pete - not to be glossed over. past stuff still surprises me. breaks over programming. tuned drums. complex filters, layers, balance, & all-importantly his "bounce".
quik - inimitable quality/studio-aesthetic. >dre..imo
jdilla - better left as once cited by ahmir: 'he was innovative. he was humorous, he was loud, he was drunk, he was straighter than 6'o clock, he was incorrect and correct all at once...and that was just his drumming'
Jel
Shadow
Panzah Zandahz
pete rock
Sixtoo (check duration)
and my all time fav = el-p
Rza
Giz from Audio two
Bomb Squad
Dust Brothers
Least favourites: 9th wonder (already mentioned, Current Pete Rock (what happened? maybe it's me) and the Heatmakerz (they've got some loops, but their drums are STIFF. that production video that was posted with them a while back really made me cringe).
For Mannie, the shear fact that he made "ha" on the sp-1200 still blows me away. I always dug that track, even when I was rocking fondle 'em speedo's. but going back and then figuring out that it was all made on a basic-ass-fuck drum machine, NEXT LEVEL
and yeah co-sign on Battlecat, Quik and other assorted west coast dudes. I woudn't put them as drum gods but still excellent producers.
im trying to think of people outside of who have been named.
tribes drums. The programming of the classic breaks were dope, but also the mixing by bob power was on some next level shit which made the drums smash. Using untraditional envelopes on the kits adding a unique sonic character to them.
easy mo bee could program a track mean as fuck.
dr. dres drums are crazy. His shit isnt programmed all crazy but it hits hard.
prince paul had a unqiue sound to the breaks he flipped or programmed.
mark the 45 king has some dope drums and flips breaks nice.
j-swift from pharcyde.
paul c. ultramag and organized drums - banging.
dante ross and the stimulated dummies used to have some banging drums on the remixes they did.
maceo from de la. Simple but i always dug em.
Been digging marco polos shit for a minute. I like what he did with that masta ace joint, i think its called "nostalgia".
squarepusher and prefuse do some sick programming. I like the way prefuse did the glitch edits on his first two albums.
people im not feeling:
kanyes most recent drums sound like shit. His snares sound like they were sampled off of am radio.
scott storches shit is hot garbage. drums sound like straight ass that a preschooler programmed.
madlibs shit is pretty tired. Straight loops with real shitty fidelity is wearing thin.
mathamatics from the wu i think always sucked and they were always off.
showbiz. His beats were legendary and he has some real dope tracks but the drums were just straight loops that didnt switch up for the most part. Wasnt really feeling that out of the whole DITC crew.
thats bout it for now. gonna go finish this bottle of cutty sark and program my own wack ass drums. PEACE
i hate that dude. Call me jealous, but that dude is average and really hasn't made anything that amazes me. I think he even loops his drums off of like breakbeat scratch records.
damn, how could I forget.
May be a little off base - but the drums on The Prodigy's "Fat Of The Land" are amongst the best ever heard. This mainly has to do with the mix.....but jesus. The drums on Smack My Bitch Up alone are beyond retarted.
Danger Mouse absolutley killed it on the Grey Album, no question in my mind. The way he chopped those Beatles tracks still blows my mind. Maybe better than the original Black Album on the whole, though the Rick Rubin and Just Blaze tracks are dope as hell.
Everything else he has done is pretty mediocre though, and I want to know if he is sampling off compilations, because he's jacked some pretty rare beats off known grail-level libraries that never ever come up, but are on some European comps. I really hated the Gnarls Barkley in large part because he took some great songs and did a real mediocre job with them, and the whole record was mastered with an iron-clad brickwall limiter. It just sucks when you play a great track and people go "ooh, is that a Gnarls Barkley song??"
He really doesn't deserve to be up there with the best drum programmers though. He's all about finding good melodic samples, drum-wise he's simplistic (but generally not bad).
And Phonics I am listening to the Main Ingredient instrumentals and they do not touch Mecca & The Soul Brother.
please dont get me started, every ones on his jock, but all he has done is loop big name library records poorly,
remember this is the guy people were talking up because he put nas over portishead loops like it was
getting back to the questio n
not like i am adding any one whom hasnt been named but these are my personal favourites
dilla for his afore mentioned lazy style
pete rock not so much for his patterns but his sound
premo do i need to say any more than know my steeze?
hi tek cant put my finger on what it is i love
timberland for some reason it took me until hola hovito
Mario Caldato JR simple but i feel a little slept on
Thes I just like his patterns and the sounds, but most of friends dissagree.....
Ced Gee RAW!!
Marely Marl dont need to give any reasons
Cut Chemist as much for the way he uses drums and for the sound he gets
D'angelo i wish i could program slow drums like that!
Shawn J Period cant believe has hasnt been mentioned
Dj Shadow i know alot of people love to hate him, and i am not crazy about his new stuff but he had his moments early on
Chief Xcel even just for the drums at the end of Fully Charged On Planet X very nice subtle changes
Evidence Predictable but i still love it
Large Pro
Beatnuts crunchy
i will leave the list there but it doesnt mean there arent more i am feeling
least favourites
J. Rawls i like his music but his drums just dont cut it for me
madlib as above i like a fair bit of his music but his drums are just so so for the most part
dj revolution just cant feel his drums
oh no so hit and miss
the concept was dope i will give him that but it was a write off musically, the pete rock version on the other hand matched songs and beats very well
You aren't faux_rillz. And yes I am serious, and I generally hate concept/mashup/indie hipster clusterfucks like that. But credit where it's due, I've never heard anything like what he did with the Grey Album.
While we're on that blazing downtempo, I really dig the Rehash releases and I think they've got great drums. Gratuitous theft in the rain especially, has some killer drums.
A Neptunes track I thought of just now - Slim Thugs Problem. Those drums are amazing, really original. Did that come out? Was it on the US version of the album, or just on some kind of preleak internet version?
Interesting.
This rumour been doing the rounds for a while or a new one? Not heard this before.
I know this guy gets a fair amount of hate on SS, but some of his drum programming (around the time of the Soul Position LP) was nuts.
Yeah I know he???s loop based but there are some things going on in his work that are clearly programmed.