-story oliver wang | Photography zach wolfe
over the last 15 years, Diamond D has seen his style of hip-hop come full circle. Along with Diggin’ In the Crates (D.I.T.C.) partners like Showbiz, Lord Finesse, and Buckwild, Diamond built on the beats and breaks approach of older producers like Marley Marl, Jazzy Jay, and 45 King. With his 1992 debut, Stunts, Blunts & Hip-Hop, Diamond sent thousands of aspiring sample-hunters deep into basements everywhere, trying to find the next elusive loop or break to flip. Today, it’s beatmakers like Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Alchemist who have followed in those footsteps.
In that time, Diamond mostly worked for other artists, dropping beats for everyone from the Fugees to Sadat X to Mos Def. Besides his slept-on sophomore album from 1997, Hatred, Passions and Infidelity, Diamond’s own rhyming career went incognito until the past two years where he’s resurfaced to independently release 2004’s Grown Man Talk and 2005’s Diamond Mind. Scratch caught up with Diamond at his new pad down in Atlanta to see what his dusty fingers have been twisting up. Check one, two.
scratch: You’ve put out two albums in the last two years. What’s been behind this burst in output?
diamond d: Just being on the road doing shows. I wanted to have new songs to do. [In the ’90s], I was making most of my money just making beats. I was on some real Babyface shit, wanted to stay in the studio, not really do no shows. It might’ve hurt me, but when you getting money, you ain’t worrying about shit like that.
How have you seen your production style change over the last few years, especially now that you’re working more on your own material?
More use of live instruments, as opposed to filtering, playing your basslines over, making them sound bigger. Using different sound modules. I’m still 70 percent samples, whether they noticeable or they chopped up, but definitely, whenever I lay the foundation I try to add on to it with different sounds.
You first started learning how to flip samples back in the ’80s, training under local Bronx legend Jazzy Jay. What did he teach you?
Jay taught me how to program my drums, how to pick different samples. An example is the song he produced for Busy Bee called “Suicide.” That little guitar note actually came from [James Brown’s] “The Funky Drummer” but how he flipped that opened up a whole other world to me as far as making beats.
Your early productions, like “Best Kept Secret,” were deceptively simple one-bar loops, but you got a lot of power out of that one bar.
Yeah, definitely. I was trying to take the best part, the rawest part of the record where I’d be able to build on top. Didn’t matter what genre of music, whether it was rock, funk, soul, jazz, I just tried to take whatever I felt. On Stunts... I use rock, funk, it’s all on there—from Billy Cobham, George Duke, to Buddy Miles, to George Benson, to the Flaming Embers.