jpeg Mafia has fast become the face of Hip Hop's Innovation and as a producer he breaks many rules on his latest album I lay down my life for you there are so many unique ideas on this album that every producer should pay attention to So today we're going to uncover exactly what he's doing differently by analyzing his Beats on this album and breaking down three ideas that he uses in his production that you can use to improve your own beats too my name is Navid D I've been producing for over a dozen plus years and
have analyzed a lot of amazing producers to learn their techniques and that's exactly what we're going to do today now I think the best way to do this is to compare what most producers do versus what jpeg Mafia does on this album so you can see just how unusual his production approaches are so start with the first idea when it comes to beat switch UPS jpeg mafia's approach is different than most producers for example let's compare this song off of Travis Scott's last album Utopia which also has some phenomenal production on it [Music] now if
we were to analyze this Travis Scott beat take a look at how it's structured and exactly how this beat switch up happens this entire section here is beat number one within Travis Scott's song and this section here is beat number [Music] two and this entire middle portion here is the transition as we go from one beat to another and you can see it's almost a minute long and this is the approach that most producers use if they want to create a beat switch all right all right they create this slow fluid change over time now
let's compare this to what jpeg Mafia does if we take a look at the track It's Dark and Hell is [Music] Hot so here is the first beat within the song [Music] and here is the second beat and take a look at how quickly jpeg Mafia jumps from one beat to another this transition period is so much shorter and yet it still works so how is he able to create transitions that work so well like this ones that don't require minutes of time like how it might for most other produc ERS while connecting textures and
selectively introducing sounds is what helps him do this let me show you what I mean here is the sample that is used for the [Music] song Now what you'll notice is that the strange vocals within the sample appear all throughout the entire song in both beats here I have broken down this transition and you can see in the sample layer here the same sample continues playing as we go from one beat to the next [Music] and by doing this moving from one beat idea to another becomes easier because there's this connective sound within both beats
so not everything is different between these two ideas and what you'll also notice is that he doesn't introduce every single new sound in beat number two all at once for instance this new bass texture doesn't come in immediately but a bit later instead so now it doesn't feel as though too much in this beat is changing all at once so this beat switch up doesn't feel jarring because of that this is a smart idea that you can think about using in your Beats now let's talk about another idea when it comes to sound pairing jpeg
mafia's approach is different again compared to what other producers do for example let's take this W song here here we have a beat that is uniform in its texture meaning we have this electronic modular synth as the main sound in the beat and we have electronic drums being used alongside the [Music] synth let's take another example this is the beat for dip a Skywalker beat for Danny Brown let me Z you don't let me my Z don't let me my again uniform textures electronic modular synth as the main sound and electronic drums now let's compare
this to what jpeg Mafia does in New Black [Music] History here we have this electronic modular synth similar to the other beats that we just played but the drums are not electronic in this beat he instead pairs this with live acoustic drums and the reason why you don't see this done often is because it's actually pretty hard to do the reason why is because you'll notice with a lot of electronic drums is that the individual sounds are much shorter and the advantage of using shorter drums like this is it allows you for more room to
add these large colorful synths just like in the original Beats that I showed you but when we compare these drums to acoustic drums which are much larger and more colorful these are just going to leave you with less room so this idea of pairing colorful synthetic sounds with acoustic drums becomes difficult but the way that jpeg Mafia is able to balance this is by using synthetic textures a bit differently unlike the the beats that I showed you from other producers take a listen to The Loop that jpeg Mafia [Music] uses the texture of this synth
isn't bright or full like the other beats were most of these notes that jpeg Mafia uses sit in a lower frequency and only a couple of these notes are arpeggiating up into that brighter area I'll play this again [Music] this allows for more freedom and more space to use these bigger more colorful drums but still have room for rapping but we still have this really cool unique match of synthetic and acoustic again just a really smart idea here in his production that allows him to do this personally I can't recall too many examples of other
producers doing this idea this well one that does jump to mind is Jay Dilla when he did this all over rough draft which is one my favorite [Music] albums days j2k and that might be why new black history is probably my favorite beat off of this new jpeg Mafia album moving on let's talk about the final idea for this video what might be the strangest part about this album to me is how vocal samples are used now vocal samples are nothing new in Hip Hop producers have been using them to make beats forever a great
example of this is Devil in a New Dress again a Kanye West song produced by [ __ ] put your hands to the constellations the way you look should be you my sens this beat is a great example of how most producers commonly approach using vocal samples for one they will select vocal samples that introduce a sense of musicality into the [Music] beat furthermore they will reinforce this melodic idea of the vocal sample using other instruments and build musical patterns around the [Music] vocals but this is yet again where jpeg Mafia does something different on
this album this is best displayed on the beat for don't rely on other men so first off take a look at the actual vocal sample that is used is it a melodic beautiful piece of sing from an old soul record like most producers use no it's some random sentence that's said by a character on succession a TV show I hear you went down did you go down oh yeah I did so the fact that he decided to use a weird sample like this is already strange enough it's a melodic and it sounds like you're just
hearing a series of words being said but even with that there's still an opportunity to introduce some melodic ideas in this beat using outside instrumentation well jpeg Mafia doesn't do that take a look at what he does build around around the [Music] sample it's pretty much aoic as [Music] well here I'm using a secret analysis tool that I cannot reveal just yet this is showing you the notes that are being played within the song and as you can see it's pretty much just one long note that has a little switch up in the middle of
it all of these ideas are just so different than what most producers choose to do when they make beats so let's go ahead and try using some of these ideas to make a beat of our own starting off I'm going to find a sample of a modular synth to build my beat around here is what I'll use I'll use parts of this syn sample that aren't quite as bright for my first layer that will allow me more room for what I want to add on later [Music] and for my drums I'm going to choose a
live acoustic drum [Music] [Applause] [Music] set for the base I'll create this rolling pattern I think that would work well with this [Music] idea and I think this Loop just needs a little bit more so I'm going to go find yet a another layer within the same sample to add on [Music] [Music] top next let's see if we can create a switch up just like jpeg Mafia again I want this to occur in just a matter of seconds instead of minutes so to do this I'm going to carry over some of the sounds for beat
number two to create that connec so let's take this sample and have it continue to play as we move into beat number two and then for beat number two I will keep using the same texture within it but I'm going to change a lot of the other sounds in this beat so let's take a listen to what we have [Music] [Music] cool if you like this video hit like And subscribe if you're a fan of jpeg Mafia I do have an older video where I analyzed his last album before this click that right next to
me if you're interested otherwise I will see you next time bye-bye
