Be like DJ Shadow: The secret to producing amazing work
This article is for anyone who wants to do great things and get noticed, but doesn’t know where to start. To those people I say: Follow DJ Shadow’s lead.
In 1996, DJ Shadow released Endtroducing….., a genre-defining album that set the stage for future producers of instrumental hip-hop. Entroducing….. is an amazing album in its own right, but what really set it apart was that it was produced almost entirely using sampled audio.
On the surface, this article is about how DJ Shadow turned his mastery of an unconventional instrument — the Akai MPC60 sampler — into a mind-blowing piece of creative work. But really, it’s about how anyone can find and master their own instrument. And once you’ve mastered your own instrument, you’ll also have the ability to produce amazing works.
Mastery lies at the heart of creation. It provides the foundation for building up phenomenal structures, because it frees us from the need to think about what we’re doing and focus on what we’re making.
To attain mastery is to attain the freedom to focus on the expression of something that will change people’s perceptions and viewpoints, rather than on the mechanics of creating it.
The true benefit of finding and mastering your own instrument is that it sets you up to make a big, conspicuous dent in the world that everyone is going to notice as you’re driving this planet forward.
How, you ask? Read on!
Find your instrument
The first step to being like DJ Shadow is to find your instrument, the vehicle of production that you have the ability and passion to master.
For DJ Shadow, this was the Akai MPC60 sampler, which he described as “the instrument I took seriously in terms of becoming the best at it, or one of the best.” [1]
The genius of DJ Shadow’s choice of instrument is that it was atypical and distinct. It was, to be sure, an instrument for making music, but unlike the guitar, it wasn’t being learned by 50 million other people. This made achieving best-in-the-world mastery both interesting (because who knows what you can produce once you master a sampler?) and achievable.
Like DJ Shadow, you need to start your journey by finding the instrument you want to master.
This doesn’t need to be a musical instrument. It could be a piece of animation software, a 3D printer, an orbital sander, a programming language, an obscure branch of European history. Anything.
What’s important is that:
- It’s something you’re passionate about;
- Not a lot of people are actively mastering it; and
- You can produce something (an object, song, book, etc.) with it.
Want some examples of incredible things created through mastery of an uncommon instrument? Check out Salavat Fidai’s pencil carvings, or Chelsea Miller’s chef knives, or this rendition of the Super Mario Bros. theme being played on a shēng.
Finding your instrument is the first and most important step towards mastery. And, in many ways, it’s the hardest, because you’ll need to find passion both through and for your instrument. Without that passion, you won’t keep at it, and you certainly won’t achieve mastery.
So to start, identify an instrument that kindles a spark inside you, that you can lose yourself to for hours on end.
Do your homework
Once you’ve found your instrument, the next step is to know your instrument. You need to know your instrument deeply. You need to know both how it works and the medium in which it exists.
When it comes to mastering a sampler, the medium is vinyl. With a collection of over 60,000 records, DJ Shadow certainly knows vinyl.
While working on Endtroducing….., he spent day after day searching for new records to sample. What happens when you spend that much time studying an aspect of your craft? This happens:
“[…]you start to develop a sense of [which ones will have] something fruitful within the grooves. You start looking for certain labels; you start looking for certain producers. One of the first things I realized is that anything prior to 1966 probably wasn’t going to have what I was looking for.”
Knowing the exact year, 30 years in the past, before which which records become poor sources of sampling material? That’s mastery of a medium.
Knowing your instrument (including its history and relation to other elements) also allows you to contextualize it more easily. So when faced with novel situations, you’re better able to come up with creative solutions.
This is the Iron Chef law of creative mastery. Given an ingredient, you should immediately be able to create several unique, beautiful, delicious things with it.
Practice, practice, and more practice
The name Endtroducing….. starts with END for a reason. Although this was DJ Shadow’s debut album, it was also the culmination of five years worth of intensively practicing his craft, producing a string of singles along the way.
If you want to become a master of anything, there are no shortcuts. You’re going to have to put in the time.
Why all this practice? To improve your technique, sure, but not because Malcolm Gladwell said you need to spend 10,000 hours. There’s a more concrete reason: You need to develop a familiarity with your instrument that allows you to stop thinking about it.
Whatever it is you want to express will be limited by your inability to focus on the product. If you’re still thinking about the instrument, you’re not going to be able to master the output.
This scene from the movie Shine does a better job of illustrating the concept than I can:
“Your hands must form the unbreakable habit of playing the notes so you can forget all about them and let it come from here, the heart. That’s where it comes from.” — Shine
This is where your passion comes in. To reach that level of familiarity, you have to have a passion for the activity that will push you to keep engaging and improving with whatever it is you’re working to perfect.
Apply what you’ve mastered
Once you’ve found your instrument, done your homework, and achieved mastery, it’s time to put it all together and produce your opus. Create something that will open eyes and turn heads.
Design and build that reusable rocket ripped from the pages of a pie-in-the-sky 1950’s sci-fi novel. As if that could happen in our lifetime. And then land it on a barge, because why not?
Or, in DJ Shadow’s case, release a mind-bending album that hasn’t gotten the least bit stale 20 years later:
This is what you work for.
Finding something you’re passionate about makes the journey enjoyable, finding something that you can share with others gives that work a deeper purpose.
There may not be any shortcuts to producing amazing work, but there is a blueprint. All thanks to “your favorite DJ savior!”, DJ Shadow.
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