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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

Most of his stuff these days is probably ghost produced. Also, it seems like his tracks are extremely simple (though, they still somehow are fairly good). He had a beat on a Lil Wayne album a couple years ago that sounded like nothing was done other than sampling 2 or 3 loops from an old song and repeating them.

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If you're talking about "Dr. Carter," that's probably my favorite hip-hop beat in modern history, but I've listened to the song it samples and you're right, he did almost nothing to it. It's still awesome though. Sometimes what you don't do to a song is just as important as what you do to it. ;-)

I agree about Dr. Carter. It's by far the best song on that album. It's got such a great feel to it.

Hard to go wrong sampling David Axelrod...

> He had a beat on a Lil Wayne album a couple years ago that sounded like nothing was done other than sampling 2 or 3 loops from an old song and repeating them.

That same sentiment describes tons of great hip hop beats. The tricky part is picking the correct samples. Here's an example of a simple sample of one song being used to create a classic beat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY8EIoMelFc

For reference, I was talking about the Dr. Carter song as some people below mentioned.

I get sampling, and there is no doubt that Swizz (or the people he works with) has a great ear for samples. I still think there is a big difference between the effort put in the Dr. Carter beat and the Dead Presidents beat--he didn't even layer drums on top, just chopped the original song. The Dr. Carter beat works perfectly, so I'm not hating!

> Also, it seems like his tracks are extremely simple (though, they still somehow are fairly good).

This is very difficult. It's just as difficult as making a powerful API that's still extremely simple.

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