A Timbaland beat can make you feel everything all at once. Call it the mosaic approach: The longtime producer picks a sample; blends it with odd, custom tones he crafted himself; throws in some polyrhythm; and then spits out a futuristic production that sounds like it was beamed directly from Mars. In fact, Tim is so good at this that the phrase “beats Timbaland made thirty years ago sound like they were made today” has turned into a well-worn cliché. But how did he get there in the first place? What accounts for a production approach many have tried but none have replicated? For Switched on Pop’s latest installment of their Modern Classics miniseries, host Nate Sloan and guest host Megan Lubin run down the story of the Timbaland sound — how it started, where it landed, and how we think of it today. You can read a preview of their discussion below and can hear the full episode here.
Megan: In the early ’90s, songwriting partners Missy Elliott and Timbaland left their home state of Virginia and went to New Jersey to work with the R&B group Jodeci. But they were feeling pretty desperate to break out of this silo. They wanted to get their beats and songwriting in the hands of other artists. So one day, Timbaland was in the studio with another producer, Static Major. And, as Tim tells it, Static laid down a beat and played with it a bit until they got something that they were pretty happy with. But they knew it needed something else. One thing that Timbaland does is collect sounds. So Tim sifted through his catalogue and heard something that he liked. He described it as a futuristic robot saying “yeah” over and over in different tones. He then took that sound, truncated it, stretched it like dough to make it sound like it had been dragged through a warping machine, threw a little slide whistle on it, and that’s how we got …
Nate: … “Pony,” by Ginuwine?
Megan: “Pony,” by Ginuwine.
Nate: The song that would become the soundtrack for male strippers around the world. This one sounds as fresh as it did when it first dropped.
Megan: This song is a good example of what I’m calling Timbaland’s mosaic production approach. The conventional sampling method in 1995, when Tim was making this beat, was to build a new song on a recognizable piece of an old song. But Timbaland was almost never trying to do that. He wasn’t aiming for nostalgia in his beats. His approach to sampling was much more collage-like. He would hear these individual bleeps and bloops, and he’d arrange and manipulate them to separate them from whatever the source material was. He’d use them to make a wholly new sound, a sonic mosaic unlinked to the source. Some elements might have felt familiar, but the sum always felt really fresh.
Nate: So yes, the iconic sound that kicks off “Pony” is a Timbaland and Static studio invention. That’s their alchemy. And it puts this stamp on the song in this way because you’ve never heard it before. So now this new sound will be forever identified with that particular track. That’s a really powerful statement as an artist and producer to create this signature that will be indelibly connected to your song because, simply, it doesn’t exist anywhere else. It sounds like the future.
Megan: Exactly. We talk about songs or sounds that sound futuristic or otherworldly. These are words that often get attached to the Timbaland production approach, but it’s hard to describe. To say what the future sounds like we talk about crunchy computer sounds or, like, zips and zaps. But I wonder if the sounds that we think of as sounding futuristic are just on some level sounds that we can’t place in the past. Like, they’re just songs that we can’t connect back to something we’ve heard before, which is basically the experience of listening to many Timbaland songs.
Nate: Yeah, part of the pleasure of his craft is how dislocated it is from what is familiar and expected.