Sound travelling through air
So, why do we favour the use of live, natural (acoustic and electromechanical) sources as samples? As Schloss (2014) has described, (sample-based) Hip Hop is both live and non-live. You hear the featured musicians as well as the decisions of the beat-maker interacting with them. Importantly, I’d add, you are hearing the interaction between current and previously committed phonographic processes (recording, mixing, mastering), in turn giving way to ‘sonic worlds’ held-together by varying degrees and different manifestations of sonic ‘glue’.
One reason for this preference may be the aesthetic conditioning we have inherited by way of sample-based Hip Hop’s very evolution and historical dependence on typically live-performed Funk and Soul (e.g. live acoustic drums, percussion, horns, vocals, electric bass, guitars, keyboards). But, as sources have started to encompass a wider range stylistically (as early as De La Soul sampling Steely Dan, all the way to Eminem using EDM sources—No Love featuring Haddaway’s What Is Love springs to mind), it’s important to consider the sonic variables behind the choice (and effectiveness) of the sampled content (beyond just workflow habits or aesthetic conditioning).
As I hastily brought out the cajon to record it on a couple of productions that did not feature live drums (I talk about the usefulness of live drums as a layer under the beat in a previous post), I was positively impressed by the effect this had both on the sample production, but also on the layered beat. Looking at my mic setup, I was using a D112 (a kick drum mic) to capture the cajon’s bass frequencies at the back and a C414 (the one I had been using as mono overhead for the drum recordings) to capture the front/snare sound. Although the source is very different to a full drum kit, the analogous mic choice made me consider a direct comparison in terms of function (in fact, I did also consider deploying an SM57 at the front for the ’snare’ sound and keeping the C414 as a room mic, which would have mirrored my three-mic drum setup). What the mics are capturing is not just the source, but also the space around it. My drum-replacement solution for these two tracks did not replace the drums themselves of course, but it gave the beat a percussive layer held together by a natural, real space: the room being recorded in tandem. The similar mic-setup as common denominator made me think of what else is common and what is a variable; in this case, the variable was the source, albeit performing a comparable percussive function. As I discussed in a recent post, the live, layered drum recording under the beat, provides an essential element of spatial and timbral ‘glue’.
Extending this notion to another supporting perspective, it made me think of a Talvin Singh interview I read in the early 2000s (most likely on Future Music magazine), in which he was making a point about how he does not believe in DI’d (direct) sound. He even records synthesisers through amps using mics, because he believes in sound travelling through air. As metaphysical as that may sound, I think there is a very physical dimension to why this is effective. DI’d recordings can sound two-dimensional. Capturing their sound in space (even if close-miked) adds a third dimension. Not only do the sound objects become three-dimensional (surrounded by a layer of space), but the captured—and shared—ambience can have positive (glue) implications for the coherency of the mix. I remember following Talvin’s advice when I was producing an album as part of my Masters thesis (The Diary of Keim Thomas, which enjoyed a minor release in 2003/4 and had some tracks feature in a film soundtrack). To this day that record has a striking sonic effect to my ears—a glue and a coherency. I recorded all the synths and keyboards through guitar and bass amps, all played live (no MIDI programming) over drum loops. It’s funny that this was the last time I made a record as part of an academic objective. This current album, tied to the PhD timeline, has brought me full circle back to chasing sounds travelling in space.
Drum glue and isolated elements within a phonographic context
So, back to today’s beat-making cravings… After surfing through the—overwhelmingly by now—many multitracks of sample productions, I found a recent guitar-and-bass idea, itself a development of an older drums-and-bass recording, which fit my mood, felt musically and sonically inspiring, and seemed fertile to further development. After loading a bunch of individual drum hit samples on the MPC (not my usual libraries, being conscious of wanting to push the beat production M.O. further), I played around with different drum sounds jamming patterns that seemed to work with the looping bass and guitar idea. The hook/essence of the tune was in the bassline (in fact I had rerecorded it tighter more recently, copying the looser old bassline, both on the Jazz-with-flats and Pbass-with-roundwounds (strings) to provide me with some options). Pretty soon I was (now consciously and knowingly) missing a live drum layer; thankfully, I had a long multitrack of drums performed and recorded on the original session (with multiple mics), which I unmuted and scavenged for good loops. Once I found a one-bar phrase that was sitting well under a programmed beat I was testing out and eventually committed (inspired by the live drums), I looped it around with all mics active (kick, snare, toms, two mono overheads and a stereo overhead pair), and started mixing it. Auditioning it with and without the parallel beat, I checked for phase and tried to decide which pair of overheads I should use (during recording I was consciously providing options, so that I could take the drum aesthetic to different ‘eras’/signatures). The two pairs of overheads actually sounded effective together, although I knew this was atypical. I wanted to keep the drums quite natural, and they had been recorded through my choice of hardware preamps with some compression/EQ on key elements (overhead through the LA610 and kick through the Focusrite pre). So, I merely balanced the levels, kept the reverb send on the snare, and run a parallel send of the whole drum mix heavily into a pumping VCA (dbx) compressor, followed by a Pultec EQ (pushing the lows and highs, but cutting out some low-mid mud). The New-York-style parallel compression technique brought out that record-like quality, energy and ‘air’ out of the live drums, enhancing the programmed beat. The highlighted recorded ambience, exaggerated air and tonal glue brought about by the parallel layer gave the drums a ‘phonographic’ quality that was quite complimentary to the programmed drum hits, gluing them together and achieving that live/non-live fusion that felt stylistically relevant. Taking the programmed beat out momentarily, I found that the live drum mix was also working rather authentically (for the envisioned era) with the funk guitar (a Telecaster performed through a Crybaby wah-wah pedal as well as the rest of my now established pedal signal flow); and either of the new (P/J) bass recordings. The guitar had been committed with a lot of space courtesy of a spring reverb (again, a conscious decision that is both era-referential and in pursuit of ‘staged’ tracking). As I experimented with the acoustic drum mix, I was surprised by how few of the drum mics I actually needed to have on for the supportive drum-layering effect to work. I ended up with only the stereo overheads and a little kick support. The parallel compression was bringing up so much energy, that the stereo overheads felt more exaggerated when the compressor was having to deal with fewer elements.
The overall mix-bus was going through a mastering (Massive Passive) EQ, Neve compressor and (Ampex) tape emulation (as set up in a previous production session). I had been reviewing and working on the drum mix with the benefit of phonographic hindsight—hearing it in this more finalised (end-format) fashion. Strangely, I had previously set up the bass send to the same reverb bus used for some of the drums—as everything else was so ‘staged’ the DI’d bass was missing a degree of ‘three-dimensionality’. I considered re-amping it in the room through my bass amp (something that had worked well for other tracks). But given the late hour, I settled for the reverb enhancement, and went on to record some DI’d Rhodes via a selection of stomp boxes from the guitar pedal-chain, ending up on the hardware LA610+dbx combo for some pre-amp, EQ and compression shaping.
Again, this resulted in a very ‘wet’ and staged footprint for the Rhodes, which was complimentary to the guitar recording and sat well within the sonic ‘world’ of the rest of the mix. Thinking about the ‘song conundrum’ (how far do I take the sample productions before sampling), I questioned whether a mix has to be completed and committed (recorded I guess, as the tape/vinyl media are simply emulations here) before I can move on to the beat-making phase; that would be the more ‘authentic’ approach, or at least the one that would mirror the limitations of a traditional crate-digging workflow (sampling from fully committed and previously released phonographic records). But one realisation that became clear today is that the ‘phonographic’ (essence) lies in the layering choices made as part of the record-making (recording?) process, as well as in the ‘glue’ decisions infused upon elements as part of the mix process (shared reverbs, parallel and mix-bus processing, etc.) For example, the reason I shaped the Rhodes in that particular tonal and spatial way, was in response to the guitar, bass and drums. The different bass tones/sources chosen and the corresponding signal flow were—equally—options relating to the guitar sonic.
I wondered if sampling isolated elements (drums, bass, guitar) through the mix processing would feel realistic/phonographic. Would it feel like a segment from a record, and less like an (individual) recording? Well, what makes an isolated element on a record phonographic, and thus attractive to a samplist? The phonographic context still ‘surrounds’ it. It is evident in the contextual decisions carried out to shape its tonal, dynamic and spatial (and performative) footprint in relation to the other elements of the arrangement/multitrack; even if they drop out momentarily. It is audible in the mix-bus and master-format colourations of the overall record—a funk break recorded in a particular space in Ohio, recorded and mixed on a particular studio console, committed to tape, mastered and recorded off a particular format (vinyl). In the same way, isolated elements that have been developed as part of a song, mix and record feel phonographic, unlike isolated recordings/samples. The practical workflow benefit, of course, is that you don’t always have to commit to a full ‘pretend’ structure—complete with breakdowns and climaxes—to furnish yourself with effective instrumental samples (although these dynamic extrapolations are clearly beneficial in terms of contributing to variations and happy accidents; what Zak (2001) describes as “phonographic ephemera”).
