I listen quite much to D'angelo, (probably 24/7) but actually first today I've realised there is a "funny feel" to the "Smooth" drumming. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV229J1zSJE



If you listen at the drumming which starts at about 0:21 and continues through, it sounds like a loop which has been cutted and pasted quite badly :)


But, I suppose there are live drums (wikipedia says Drums by Gene Lake)
How is this sound generated? staccato feel and loose timing? :D

PS: I've never noticed before, but I rarely listen to his music through headphones. As I did today.

D'angelo grooves are always pretty cool. My son has got a few albums and all the grooves are very good, a bit strange in parts I agree.

The drumming is live but they have used parts of the groove and cut and pasted like you say. I can hear the tiny silence bits in between audio clips too and I think those gaps are very deliberate and small but they have quite an important effect. They are contributing I think to the staccato feel I am sure of it.

Ah, he is only hitting the rim of the snare drum and the hi-hat cymbal. Nothing difficult about that because that is the way that it sounds. And of course he is not hitting it loudly but softly.

I play the drums and this is a fairly simple (yet funky)off beat. Has a few ghost notes in there on the snare but this is not something that is hard to play. Sounds like at the end of each count (where it seems to stop) he is hitting the hat (closed) twice at double the speed of his normal hat tempo. Though I am listening on a laptop right now, but unless I am missing something here that is my bet.

Back in the early 90's when I used to dabble in sample-based music (as in: everything sampled and chopped up from CD's) a common technique in breakbeat and drum & bass music was to take a sampled drumbeat of 4 or 8 bars, then chop it into 8 (or sometimes 16) samples. You could then shuffle them around in creative ways to create entirely new beats and weird rhythms. 

Devoid of anything approaching a professional sample editor, we would quite literally take the number of bytes in the original sample and divide it by 8, then split the sample manually by taking the start and end of each segment in bytes. We didn't think about zero crossing or anything like that. The result was that sometimes the mixed up segments would join together perfectly, and other times they wouldn't. Of course this also depended on your accuracy in setting the loop point of the original sample to begin with...

The outcome was that some of the resultant beats would sound a little clumsy and rough around the edges. I think that was the sound they were going for here. It very much reminds me of some of the underground beats that were around at that time. 

I still think that is not what is going on here though (as per Sharke) I agree that is an interesting thing to do though for sure. 

If you listen very hard especially right at the start before the vocals come in the groove is quite normal except they have not completely joined up the looped sections. Not only that if you listen hard you can even hear tiny clicks where the audio clips begin and end. They have done all this on purpose. 

Also each section of the loop may may been altered in speed (faster) so it falls just short. And because the tiny gap appears it not only drops into silence for a fraction of a second it holds up the feel and the next groove clip starts just later than you would expect creating a slightly un nerving groove etc.. Studio One can do this by instructing every actual groove clip to play a tiny bit faster hence it ends slightly early. (Studio One not only allows the whole track to play slower or faster but every audio clip on a given track can have its own time stretch applied ie slower or faster. It is a very cool feature. The individual settings obviously either add to or subtract from the overall track settings) 

ChuckC


I play the drums and this is a fairly simple (yet funky)off beat. Has a few ghost notes in there on the snare but this is not something that is hard to play. Sounds like at the end of each count (where it seems to stop) he is hitting the hat (closed) twice at double the speed of his normal hat tempo. Though I am listening on a laptop right now, but unless I am missing something here that is my bet.

Probably simple, but yet so funky :D

The guy is playing a real live drum set mostly rim but some snare light hits in it, with percussion instruments say like a tamborine and I think maracas perhaps from back-up singers. There is no gap that is the way that it sounds, that is the way that a rim on a snare drum sounds and a drum set tuned that way and the way that the drum set and mix from the percussive instruments are recorded in the day of microphones and recordings (I think back in 1995 or so if I got that info correct).