Timbaland reveals that Aaliyah’s “Try Again” was a result of a ‘mistake’ he made on his keyboard

Timb says one of his biggest hits was a mistake
It’s true that many of the songs that end up becoming hits weren’t intended to blow up. Timbaland can attest to that. During a recent discussion on I Am HipHop Podcast, Timb revealed that he made a mistake while playing with his keyboard when his engineer captured and it ended up being a hit, that is, Aaliyah’s “Try Again.”

“I was playing with this keyboard and it was a mistake, and my engineer Jimmy Douglass caught it. I said, ‘Jimmy did you catch that lil rhythm?, [and] he said, ‘I sure did,” Timb recalled.

“So [after] he caught it and played it back, I put the beat on it. I said, ‘Ooo, chop it right there,’ and he chopped it right there.”

He continued that Jay-Z was the one who convinced him that the record was a hit. “When JAY-Z came in the studio, he was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and that’s when I was like, ‘Yeah, we got one,” he said.