Do samples kill the *real* electronic music?

[djshire]

So back on topic:

What kills electronic music, is basically time. In fact, time kills everything. However, even when humanity eventually kills itself, at least it will leave the following to the aliens:



God help us.

I watched 15 minutes of that, then used the video preview bar for the rest of it.

Here's what I saw:
1) His set was probably pre-planned, as he only a few times put on headphones. However, he still had to cue and play the tracks (and EQ), so at least he was doing something (most festival DJs just mime along, even though they really have nothing to do but hit play).
2) He was playing a mixture of bass music (future bass, trap, dubstep), and it was done in a way that was well mixed (for the genres and sub-genres) and kept the energy up.
3) He stayed at his booth...no crowd surfing or anything like that.
4) He was very engaged with the crowd, and that is something that many festival and/or club DJs aren't

Is it the same as "ye olden days" of DJing? No, but DJing and producing electronic music has always been about pushing technological boundaries, and as long as long as the DJ does their job right, it doesn't matter the format or playstyle, as long as its still DJing and not just being a juke box (and I don't mean like for mobile DJs that do weddings and birthdays, I mean the "just push play and that's it" DJs).

So your post is

[egbert101]

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[DSmolken]

Looking at this from a more positive side: if you wanted to kill real electronic music, or some other style of music, what would be an effective way of accomplishing that goal? What has "killed" styles of music in the past, and which of those methods would be more likely to be effective when applied to real electronic music?

Home taping didn't kill music, and neither did Venom. Much like destroying the Earth, killing even a single genre of music might prove harder than we've been led to believe, though hair metal or big room house are genres I remember "dying" in the sense of losing the vast majority of their commercial viability. That will happen to every genre in time, but what can a single person posting on this forum realistically do to accelerate the process? What could a single person with a large budget and a single-minded obsession do?

[Tj Shredder]

BTW a interesting challenge would be to create an entire composition made exclusively with copyright samples ...cheating would be using a single custom-made sample ?

I did this several years back for one of the KVR competitions, with the additional condition I added for myself that every single copyrighted sample used was an identifiable fragment from a famous song where there had been a successful music copyright lawsuit against it (eg Bittersweet Symphony)

It really wasnt that great, but I didnt get sued myself. Though that sort of disappointed me in a way.

You can't beat Johannes Kreidler regarding exclusively using 70200 copyrighted samples...

[egbert101]

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[elxsound]

Looking at this from a more positive side: if you wanted to kill real electronic music, or some other style of music, what would be an effective way of accomplishing that goal? What has "killed" styles of music in the past, and which of those methods would be more likely to be effective when applied to real electronic music?

Home taping didn't kill music, and neither did Venom. Much like destroying the Earth, killing even a single genre of music might prove harder than we've been led to believe, though hair metal or big room house are genres I remember "dying" in the sense of losing the vast majority of their commercial viability. That will happen to every genre in time, but what can a single person posting on this forum realistically do to accelerate the process? What could a single person with a large budget and a single-minded obsession do?

Well said.

These topics or even the BS article are just outlets for people to vent about one thing or another.

[BHK Samples]

"...It's not as easy as it seems and any seasoned listener, A&R person or producer will hear a sample pack jam pretty quickly."

Only if seasoned listeners, A&R persons or producer do jam with the same sample packs.

[donkey tugger]

Home taping didn't kill music, and neither did Venom.

I beg to differ;

[BONES]

Real Electronic music was always about sampling, taking a mix of different sources and recombining them in new and interesting ways.

Really? I don't recall hearing any samples on any of Kraftwerk's seminal albums, on any of Gary Numan's most successful work or that of any of the great pioneers of electronic music, from The Who to John Foxx and Ultravox. Sampling came a long, long time after that and bred a few very different styles of electronic music, from Howard Jones to Skinny Puppy and, eventually, to EDM.

I like to participate in music and the more I do so, the more boring it becomes to listen passively. I still do that and I value the work of others but the music I like the most is stuff that inspires me to do my own music.

Really? No matter what I do with my own music, nothing has ever dimmed my love of music in general. If anything, I am a more voracious seeker/consumer of music today than I have been since I first discovered music that I truly loved (all the way back in 1979). I don't think I've ever been inspired by music I've heard to go and make my own, it was more a logical extension of my overall love of music that I started making my own, which is probably why the music I listen to bears little or no resemblance to the music I/we make.

It's kind of an interesting situation, in that I'd rather make music than listen to music from our genre, which means I never listen to any EBM/Industrial stuff any more. These days 99% of what I listen to is Post-Punk but I'd never even think of trying to make any of that stuff myself. I wouldn't even be interested in being the keyboard player in a PP band.

[BONES]

It's not a very insightful article. For a start, it assumes that all electronic music is EDM, which annoys the bejeezus out of me, as does the ridiculous assumption that anyone making electronic music is a "producer".

It also seems to focus on one aspect and ignores another that would actually make the point much better - presets. These days, you can't sell a decent VSTi unless you have 1000 presets to go with it and people actually measure the worth of a particular instrument solely by the number of presets you can get for it. Surely this, more than the popularity of samples, is indicative of the laziness and/or ineptitude of the market?

That said, I've heard presets being used by some very successful, very creative artists over the years. e.g. Yello once used a DX9 preset without any attempt to hide the fact (no effects or EQ to disguise it) and New Order used sampled percussion sounds from a Korg DDM220 completely raw, too.

For myself, I'll use whatever tool is going to do the best job. I have real analogue hardware synths, fully digital hardware synths and all manner of softsynths and samplers and I really don't care which I use, as long as they do a better job than all the others, with minimal effort or complication of my processes. e.g. I would love to own a hardware Korg ARP Odyssey but without a preset memory it over-complicates things too much, so I use the VSTi instead.

I also find it interesting that anyone into EDM would worry about this when entire genres are defined by the use of a particular thing, like acid-303 basslines or the Funky Drummer loop. For me, EDM has always been boring and repetitive, so I'd have thought that everyone using the same sounds in the same way was de rigeur for the whole scene.

[Grizzellda]

Sampling is simply a technique that has been made available with computer technology...

REJOICE!

But surely there is something to behold in terms of "old skool" electronic stuff, from the 1970's, just synth sounds, for sure!

[justin3am]

I like to participate in music and the more I do so, the more boring it becomes to listen passively. I still do that and I value the work of others but the music I like the most is stuff that inspires me to do my own music.

Really? No matter what I do with my own music, nothing has ever dimmed my love of music in general. If anything, I am a more voracious seeker/consumer of music today than I have been since I first discovered music that I truly loved (all the way back in 1979). I don't think I've ever been inspired by music I've heard to go and make my own, it was more a logical extension of my overall love of music that I started making my own, which is probably why the music I listen to bears little or no resemblance to the music I/we make.

It's kind of an interesting situation, in that I'd rather make music than listen to music from our genre, which means I never listen to any EBM/Industrial stuff any more. These days 99% of what I listen to is Post-Punk but I'd never even think of trying to make any of that stuff myself. I wouldn't even be interested in being the keyboard player in a PP band.

I didn't mean to imply that I've grown tired of listening to music. I'm constantly inspired by stuff I hear. I've worked with lots of different artists over the years and no matter the genre they work in, I always try to find something that interests me. I take those ideas and I try to apply them to my own music. As a result, my style has changed dramatically along the way. I still do some psychedelic rock, beat oriented electronic music and even some hip hop. All styles which have influenced me through the years, so the flavors of those style all start mixing together. Even when I do really abstract stuff, I think you can hear some of those influences.

What I was trying to say was, that I like to interact with the things I hear. I work with MIDI controllers all day, so I will often play along (poorly) with a song that I'm listening to in the background. At home I do the same kind of thing but I'll run the TV or the radio through a bunch of signal processors as well. It's just become difficult to sit still when I'm listening to music. You don't wanna see me at the doctor's office or in an elevator.

[sfd]

It's to much of LEGO in a lot of modern music. Not only "electronic" music.

You have a set of samples and pre-programmed stuff that you put together just like LEGO.

If musical LEGO is a good or bad thing depends what you're going after.

If you want something cool soudning muscial LEGO is of course a great tool Nothing wrong in that.

But if you want to express something and stand by your own musical concept and integrity you may not want LEGO to be the foundation for your creativity.

Another aspect is of course that there's a proud in hand-crafting all your stuff all by your self.

However that is not an answer on the thread's question.

Here's a track I've done using zero samples, zero loops and zero pre-made stuff.

https://spiritualmachinery.bandcamp.com ... y-of-night

[BONES]

But that's equally true of most music. With guitars you have chords that you use to construct an arrangement - intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, break, chorus, chorus, outro - and that form the basis of your lead and rhythm parts. Same with piano and most other things, really.

It's always the case that some people will use Lego to recreate something familiar, like the Empire State Building or an X-Wing Fighter, while others will use Lego to make entirely new things that spring from their own imagination. What's sad about that, of course, is often people prefer the reconstructed project rather than the imaginative, new one. But that's just the way people are.

[sfd]

Well, yes. I guess some element of performance adds something to it as well.