Up-and-coming Vancouver musician Ajay Bhattacharyya’s motto is, fittingly, “Fake it till you make it.”

First exposed to manipulating noises through a sound-design course at Vancouver Film School, the young artist began his career by editing dialogue and the crunch of footsteps. After deciding that he would rather pursue music than spend a life perfecting sound effects, however, Bhattacharyya soon switched paths. Paying the bills by ghostwriting for EDM DJs, the producer released tracks across a number of styles, including big-room trance and dubstep, simply by studying and emulating the sounds of each genre.

Now writing under the name Stint, Bhattacharyya has used that technique to secure a Grammy nomination after delving into R&B for the first time with smooth vocalist Gallant. The musician’s ability to appropriate new genres has landed him a nod for best urban-contemporary album—up against Beyoncé and Rihanna.

“It’s important to keep things eclectic,” Bhattacharyya tells the Straight on the line from Los Angeles. “Understanding lots of different types of music is what brings innovation. If you only listen to one style, and you only write in that style too, it’s probably going to sound like everyone else.

“If you take the intro to our record Ology, for example, there’s a pulsing sound. That’s because I was really into this DJ called Jon Hopkins, who writes these atmospheric techno bass songs. I would never have brought that to an R&B record if I hadn’t been listening to techno at the same time.”

Meeting Gallant was a lucky break for the producer. In L.A. to expand his contacts, Bhattacharyya hired a publicist who found herself at a party with Gallant’s new manager. After hitting it off, the pair suggested that their artists should connect—and, despite much bigger names being in the running for the sessions, Bhattacharyya and the rising vocalist found their complement in each other.

“I hadn’t actually run into too much R&B, coming from Vancouver,” the musician admits. “Not by virtue of not liking it or anything—there’s just not too much R&B going on. Gallant taught me a lot in terms of chords and tropes. It’s funny—when I grew up in high school, there was this boom of Destiny’s Child. All those references were in my lexicon because of the stuff I’d heard as a kid, but I’d never paid attention to them on a technical level. Gallant really drew my ears to that.

“Being nominated for a Grammy, especially because this is my first time writing R&B, feels really humbling,” he continues. “For me, the most important thing is having something that I can tell my parents. They don’t really understand what I do. When I tell them I made a song, they ask where my name is, and why it doesn’t sound like my voice.

“And then they ask whether I played any of the instruments, and I have to tell them that I just programmed them into the computer. But, luckily, they do know what a Grammy is.”

The Grammys take place on Sunday (February 12).