Without Missing a Beat

Mass Appeal’s web series “Rhythm Roulette” plays like a game show for hip hop producers. The premise is that an accomplished producer wanders their favorite record shop blindfolded and, sight unseen, picks three records. They then take those records home and look for samples, chop them up, and make a beat. There have been wildly successful producers on the show (e.g., Black Milk, Just Blaze, El-P), a producer who only samples from video games, and even the masked MF Doom. As a huge fan of sample-based music, I love this show. And one of my favorite episodes features 9th Wonder who has worked with Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child, Talib Kweli, J. Cole, and many others.

This episode, like almost all episodes of “Rhythm Roulette”, very neatly compresses the time it takes to make a beat. Producers sit in the studio for hours dropping the needle on record after record looking for the perfect sample. Even after a producer finds that sample, they play it fast, then slow, then backwards to find exactly how to sample it. Kelsey Smith, who edited this episode and a number of others, does a great job of using only what is necessary to show the process of making a beat. She uses matched cuts to make the session move smoothly. Her blatant use of jump cuts, however, reminds us that it takes time to make a beat.

At 5:01, for example, she shows 9th Wonder listening to the Jermaine Jackson record. Jackson sings, “Have I told you that I’ll love you forever?” Wonder finds something he likes in the sample and, without showing the process of recording and slicing the sample, Smith jump cuts to Wonder tapping his sampler with the word “forever” playing over and over again. She then jump cuts to him quickly tapping a single note. This is followed by yet another jump cut to Wonder bouncing his head up and down to a breakbeat. It looks at first like he’s tapping the drums on his sampler just out of frame. But Smith is actually showing him warming up to tap the Jackson samples over the drums that he has already made. The jump cut goes almost entirely unnoticed but still shows how much time it takes to put a simple loop together.

While the jump cuts show that some time has passed between the different stages of making a beat, they also give us a glimpse into the thought process of a producer. At 8:51, Wonder drops the needle on a track, speeds the record all the way up, and then Smith cuts to him listening to the track. She jump cuts to him playing bass notes on his sampler and then both the sample and the notes are audible. Hip hop beats are often made in pieces with random cutaways and noises woven throughout the final product. By showing this disjunctive process, Smith is staying true to the art of beatmaking while allowing us to see it happen quickly.