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,...
I felt a real craving for beat-making today. After practicing some bluegrass rolls on banjo and fingerpicking on acoustic guitar (because some of the existing/new song ideas will need it), and after playing the latest Westside Gunn (Supreme Clientele, 2018) and Evidence (Weather Or Not, 2018) albums—both receiving best hip-hop albums of the year nods by various rap tastemakers—I guess I felt somewhat (too?) drawn into the experiences of the...
Listening to the two tunes produced two days ago (6/8 Brass Hit and 6/8 Psychedelic—all working titles) following the Americana excursion, I’m noticing again something I have been meaning to note down (I’ll use the latter track as the case in point here...) There is a discernible ‘edge’ or impact I am perceiving (to the sample-based aesthetic), when programmed and live drums are audible as parallel, synchronised streams. A bit like...
The complexity of those studio decisions when committing to a stylistic idea resembles chaos theory: unaccountable layering variables like what Albin Zak describes as ‘resonance’. This (piano overdub just recorded) is another moment of—in his words—a ‘phonographic ephemeron’. I came to this piano layer, the part, the miking decision as a response to the previous layers, decisions, auralities. Why is this worth mentioning? Producers...
Christmas Day today which meant I had a whole day for recording. I thought it was a good time to express some of my Americana ideas which have been festering throughout my last semester of musical osmosis (during this PhD, I have been spending an average of about six months obsessing over a particular style, listening to it almost exclusively and learning or focusing on relevant instruments to perform it—the last few months have been...
