"I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all."
Was looking for this quote. It’s popular on a couple of music production subreddits, with good reason: there are no new ideas out there. Chasing after authenticity is a silly waste of time.
IMO as long as the music is greater than the sum of its parts, its yours. taking and stacking loops is fine if thats your process. I personally like using loops, but I find that i need to tweak them in some meaningful way in order to be comfortable with it. maybe its slicing/chopping, maybe its adding in FX and/or detuning, etc. or maybe its just combining multiple loops from different places genres. All seems valid to me
You did not compose all the parts, but you certainly produced the entire record. Now as far as releasing it, I think it depends on the creative standard you want to set for yourself. Some producers compose every line, some producers slap drums on a loop.
imo if you stack 7 loops together and tweak them to suit your taste and the result is something no one has ever heard before, then it belongs to you. tons of old school guys sampled chords because they couldn't play them themselves and they faced the same criticisms. i kinda feel like the distinction between a single chord hit and a 1 bar progression is totally arbitrary. at the end of the day you're assembling things that suit your taste.
it's worth noting that Michael Jackson was not an instrumentalist but he was able to arrange songs in his mind and tell the studio players exactly what to play. That was his process and no one can claim that he wasn't a creative genius. Do you man!
You really asked all the pertinent questions. I always have the habit of thinking creativity needs to be a big challenge but I'm working to convince myself on how wrong i am! A few seconds into your song demo I stopped comparing it to Splice creations and just enjoyed the vibe. There's clearly just as much thought and creativity that went into making those samples work for you, even if you don't get the satisfaction of saying, "yep, this was from an old jazz record my dad used to play. And this part i sampled from the seagulls at the boat docks...and this was..." 🤣
I think this okay to release as your own work, hey you know "solo" pop stars often haven dozens, or even hundreds of talented musicians working on their music. But does it fit with your brand and sonic signature?
Excellent timing, I have been thinking about this the last couple of days as FL Studio just released FL Cloud. I will probably not subscribe, but the possibility made me start to think. I sometime use loops in my music, normally tweaking them quite a bit. My thinking goes very much in the same direction as you have in the video, if you do enough creative changes or combinations, then there shouldn't be a problem. However, it IS difficult to draw the line, how much is enough. I have come to the conclusion that if you get to a result that is distinctly unique, then you are not "stealing" anyone's artistic expression.
Thanks! The Digi could definitely achieve this, although the samples would be in mono so you’d have to do a bit of panning to get the same type of spaciousness. But tbh, it would likely result in a bit of a “cleaner” mix than the OT!
I mean isnt that the whole idea of sampling ? You take parts of a song and use it in your own way. I dont see any diffrence from how they sampled from a LP then using splice samples.Just faster and more convenient workflow.
I typically use a lot of one-shot samples for structuring beats, and then use my own guitar/synth samples. If I’m using longer form samples from Splice (which I frequently do), I usually mangle/chop them quite a bit until they’re basically not recognizable as their source content. So this particular example is quite a bit different from my usual sampling workflow!
