In a sense this feels very much like an old-school Akai MPC production in the way it’s based around a core eight-bar ‘construction kit’ (which you can hear in full at 3:00-3:19) comprising a triggered drum-sample pattern (primarily a combination of distorted kick drum and what sounds like a noisy cymbal-tail) and a handful of heavily processed and edited four-bar sample loops featuring bass, electric guitar, organ, and trumpet sounds – although the last two are so heavily messed with that it’s hard to be 100% sure of their provenance! Now, on the face of it, this approach might seem rather limited in its ability to generate textural variety or arrangement build-up, but this production deftly illustrates how to get masses of mileage out of such comparatively modest means.

For a start, if you look at the maths, there are 63 possible ways you can combine our six construction-kit instruments (kick, cymbal, bass, guitar, organ, and trumpet), and I counted nine different combinations on display in this case. However, what the producers have also done in this case is create two different variants for each of the bass, guitar, and organ loops. So the four-bar bass riff (first played at 0:10) is edited down to a single-note alternate line (eg. the following four-bar section at 0:20); the guitar loop at the start of the song features a rising line, whereas its variant (eg. at 0:10) just repeats a single high note; and the two organ loops appear to be just different collections of retriggered and manipulated snippets. The mixing then builds on this concept by creating further variations with processing, for example the duller filtered version of the bass riff heard at 1:00, 1:40, 2:30, and 3:50, or the more distant ghostly version of the guitar’s high-note variant that accompanies the later appearances of that filtered bass.

Extra arrangement variety also comes from loops that are muted just before the end of a given four-bar section to generate a kind of ‘drop fill’. So, for example, the last four-bar section of Pusha T’s verse (1:20-1:29) drops out the kick, cymbal, bass, and organ, leaving only the trumpet and second-variant guitar loops. I counted at least nine occasions where this technique was employed – there are three just in Malice’s verse (1:40-2:20), for instance. And all that’s before we even consider the five different voices that perform over the track!

Speaking of the voices, even though the lead rappers sound pretty dry in this mix, you can still hear them clearly in the stereo Sides signal, indicating that they’re being stereo-widened in some way. Given that it doesn’t sound like reverb, and that the waveforms of the Middle and Sides components during the vocal fill at 1:07 look pretty much phase-aligned, I’m guessing we’re hearing some kind of EQ-based widening technique, and (based on the tone of the sides signal) probably one that’s only operating above about 200Hz.

But that’s not the only interesting thing about this mix’s Sides signal, because you’ll also notice that the sub-80Hz low end of the kick drum and bass are also present, which is a little unusual because a lot of mixing engineers prefer to keep those frequencies effectively in mono to maximise their power on playback. That said, even though stereo localisation of bass isn’t great down at those frequencies, phase decorrelation can still add more of a sense of ’envelopment’, so there’s a trade-off to be considered here.

And finally, the Sides signal also features plenty of upper-spectrum distortion components from the kick drum, and although they’re triggered by the kick drum, what’s fascinating to me is the way they actually seem to act almost like a layer of upper-register percussion, filling a role that’s otherwise left pretty much vacant by the generally sparse rhythm programming.