At what point can I say "no samples have been used in this production"? I pride myself on generating all my own sounds - sourcing many sounds from my own trumpet, cello, drums, and my own synth presets. What would constitute a sound I didn't make?
Drum loops from a sample CD: how much processing / slicing is needed for the beat to be my own? I obviously never played the original drums. But the original drummer never made his own drum kit.
Sequenced beats: I'm using provided samples, although I'm usually processing them so they don't sound the same, and the rhythms are arguably mine. Again, I never made the original sounds. If I synthesise various drum sounds, or sample a coathanger against a filing cabinet and use that as raw material, do I own that? If I made the coathanger and the filing cabinet and the sampler and the sequencer and the... coal..?
Synth presets: what if I use a preset? What if I layer two presets? What if I put a preset through 10 different effects units? My trumpet has two 'presets'. With or without the mute. But it's a lot more organic, and how it sounds depends mostly on how it's played - like a synth with a lot of controllers (if you could get a controller that punishingly responded to your breathing / smoking habits / posture / lip strength / etc...).
What is the danger of using a preset or a sample from a CD? Well, somebody else might use the same sample. The shorter the sample, the less noticable it will be. But does anyone really begrudge, for instance, Tricky and Portishead both using the same string loop (in
Hell Is Around The Corner and
Glory Box)? Then only element, really, to distinguish the tracks, is the vocals. But we're tuned to hearing subtle (in waveform terms) differences in voices. Not so much to trumpet playing styles, kick drums or 'warm pads'. Singers need to develop a vocal style, electronicists need to develop a... programming style?
I think I've been too obsessed with the raw materials of music, and have recently become more relaxed about using a lightly tweaked factory preset here and there or making beats with a preset drum kit. There's a lot to be said for the
choice that a musician makes - the more materials there are to choose from, the more important the choice is.
There are lots of very nice samples bundled with Reason 3.0, but I still feel a bit dirty using, say, their 'glitch' drums. They sound cool - it's easy to make stuff that sounds very complex - like stuff that would usually come from accomplished techn-owizards, but all I'm really doing is banging away with sounds that someone else has put in the effort to create, casually strolling off with a musical style that took other musicians a long time to develop and perfect. Does the process matter? I think it does. I feel it does.
Synthesis, in the sense of creating something new from disparate chunks of stuff that has come before, is a guilty creative method - but it's a contemporary phenomenon - music spreads more rapidly than ever, cultures are being mixed to the point of utter dissolution, information is squirting all over the place all day long. It's interesting to see what sort of things will stick together. I'd need to be superhuman to be both an extreme synthesist and a master of all the raw materials...
Whaddya reckon? Is it worth worrying? Is it productive to cut something off that sounds good just because it seems to conflict with some facet of your intellectual framework, or because you imagine some other musician a thousand miles away saying 'I used that sample! Get off!'? Or because, since you can't see anyone else in your potential niche, you think that nobody will understand, or they will be too quick to dismiss you on the basis of a perfectly accurate judgement (e.g. 'I've heard that sound before'), because they didn't have the patience to keep listening; because they didn't realise that they were looking at a detail - that the style is something far more ambitious, something far bigger, something that seems to require a great deal of explanation... What's the word for it?!
Care to comment?
![[mp3]](/smunk/m.gif "mp3")
