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#RJD2 on Building Symmetry, Finding the Spark, and Why “Let There Be Horns” Didn’t Need a Rapper

You don’t just watch an RJD2 show—you try to figure out how the hell he’s pulling it off. “Four turntables, two samplers, side-by-side rigs,” he explains like a man diagramming a small spacecraft. “It’s symmetrical, mostly. I’ll have three turntables running a routine and the fourth cueing up the next one.” He’s not bragging. He’s just casually outlining a level of multitasking that would make most DJs break into a stress rash.

It started out of necessity. “I couldn’t exactly take 20 dudes with samplers on the road,” he says. So instead, he built a system that could mimic that depth of sound with a solo stage setup—and ended up inventing something that felt both completely organic and totally impossible.

That logic extends to his recording process, where sampling isn’t a technique—it’s a philosophy. “I don’t pay attention to genre at all,” he shrugs. “I care about the year it was made, the instrumentation, how many players are on it, the label it came out on.” He’s not looking for hits. He’s looking for sparks.

His “Sharpie on a Post-it” method—literally jotting notes on records as he listens—might sound chaotic, but it’s a crucial part of how he reverse-engineers ideas. “You hear a song with a great first two chords, then it goes somewhere dumb,” he laughs. “So I imagine how I would’ve written it, and that becomes the A-section of a new song.”

Sometimes those sparks turn into full songs. Sometimes they just smolder. And occasionally, they get passed over—like “Let There Be Horns,” one of his most intricately crafted tracks. “Rappers passed on it for years,” he says. “Which makes sense—it’s not sparse. You have to fight for your space on it.”

To most producers, that might be a flaw. To RJD2, it’s a feature. “That tension between a captivating track and a captivating rapper has always fascinated me,” he says, name-dropping Public Enemy and M.O.P. as masters of sonic chaos. “I always wanted my tracks to have that fullness.”

When asked how long it takes to make a record, he shrugs again. “Anywhere from three weeks to three months,” he says. “But I never sit down like, ‘Okay, I’m starting a new album Tuesday.’ It just sort of sneaks up on me. I screw around in the studio, and then suddenly I’ve got six songs, and it’s like, oh—I guess this is a record.”

That approach gave us The Colossus, a towering work that blends gritty grooves, baroque orchestration, and no small amount of emotional resonance. “I’m not good at making urgent beats,” he says. “Like the stuff DJ Premier was doing in ’99—I couldn’t do that. So I made up for it with arrangement.”

And that’s the secret weapon. Not a loop, not a riff, but arrangement. “Intros, outros, foreshadowing—it’s storytelling without lyrics,” he says. “There are guys who can do magic with an 808. I had to develop my own thing. This is it.”

So whether he’s dissecting a record with a Sharpie or juggling four turntables mid-show, RJD2 remains a technician of vibe—equal parts architect and alchemist. And if that means making instrumentals too massive for MCs to touch, well, maybe that’s the point.