Ableton Forum

But in this day and age you have to respect those who sample well

I tried for years to be as natural as possible then someone who I respect as a producer was like just use your own samples

I've got a pretty healthy record collection of techno, house, some breaks, old school funk, cheesy disco and bad 90's hip-hop so my sample sources run deep

When my boy broke down how he did a monster track that came out on Subliminal a year ago I was like - DOH!

Not one real intrument used except for the SE-1 for the bass

guy even owns a 909 but never uses the thing - the classic 909 hi hat for house and techno - jacked from another record

In a lot of ways I respect both the samplers and purist - I just want to make and put out pumping loopy techno beats...and whether you want to admit it or not but most is sampled

Plus it's fun to look for hot beats and get creative with your engineering skills - FYI I don't consider my self a song writer but more of a engineer - fyi

no need to compress kick drum really but if you wanting effect then yes to do it but dont use live compressor it making sounds tiny. maybe its the idea for youtry so send bassline and kik to same audio channel and then compress both but remember to change levels of kik and bass when you compress because that is how you get it to sound good. The best thing is to sidechaing the kik to the bassline but cannot do this in live yet. I hope for this with live six because sidechain is special cool effect and for many thinks.

djadonis206 wrote:But in this day and age you have to respect those who sample well

I tried for years to be as natural as possible then someone who I respect as a producer was like just use your own samples

I've got a pretty healthy record collection of techno, house, some breaks, old school funk, cheesy disco and bad 90's hip-hop so my sample sources run deep

When my boy broke down how he did a monster track that came out on Subliminal a year ago I was like - DOH!

Not one real intrument used except for the SE-1 for the bass

guy even owns a 909 but never uses the thing - the classic 909 hi hat for house and techno - jacked from another record

In a lot of ways I respect both the samplers and purist - I just want to make and put out pumping loopy techno beats...and whether you want to admit it or not but most is sampled

Plus it's fun to look for hot beats and get creative with your engineering skills - FYI I don't consider my self a song writer but more of a engineer - fyi

Sampling leaves you without a the fundamental knowledge of music and audio manipualtion - which will come a bite you one the ass sooner or later.

And I do know most beats are sampled. Most are also shit. That's why HMV, Virgin, Juno etc are all flooded with POS 12" that aren't worth the plastic they are printed on.

Personally, I dispise this 4/4 thoughtless, cheap techno /house /trance stuff. It's all about image and aesthetics rather than substance or thought. A phat kick gains more ground than a beautifully thought out and played instrument? What kind of world is that?

There is some good stuff out there, but from the quatities produced it's few and far between.

I'm not trying to trash anyone's opinion, I understand that everyone has different tastes and I am nobody to tell you what and what not to like.

A good producer should know how to use samples and use real instruments (soft synths etc) both...

When I drop the needle I can tell what's real and what's sampled - right now Cirez D is hot - I think he uses both and he's blowing up

You know the music you make and the direction you want to go go hand in hand - I think

If you want to dj the world along side Marco Bailey, Christian Varela and Chris Liebing you're going to make beats in that style - try your best to use their techniques etc

If you want to perform along side artist like Trentmoller, monolake and Traum you're probably going to try and do what they do

I don't know anything about Trentmoller or monolake but I know they're not playing longside Chris Liebing or Adam Beyer - but there's nothing wrong with that...monolake has something to do with Ableton I know that.

it's really up to you and the direction you want to go - no hatin'

you say tomatoe I say tamato

Funkstar De Luxe wrote:[
Sampling leaves you without a the fundamental knowledge of music and audio manipualtion - which will come a bite you one the ass sooner or later.

And I do know most beats are sampled. Most are also shit. That's why HMV, Virgin, Juno etc are all flooded with POS 12" that aren't worth the plastic they are printed on.

Personally, I dispise this 4/4 thoughtless, cheap techno /house /trance stuff. It's all about image and aesthetics rather than substance or thought. A phat kick gains more ground than a beautifully thought out and played instrument? What kind of world is that?

There is some good stuff out there, but from the quatities produced it's few and far between.

I'm not trying to trash anyone's opinion, I understand that everyone has different tastes and I am nobody to tell you what and what not to like.

yes thanks for your opinions but I must say you have little imagination. Smapling creats so mauch music for twenty years and more and is an artfrom not to underestimatings. Peopels who only use sapmle library is boring and also lack imaginations becasue the secret to sampling is fidning a sound and sample it to create something new. Aphex twin resapmple his own music for many years and if you listen to someone like djKrush or shadow you will hear gretness from sampling.

I have been a "real" musician for about 20 years.
Started in Jr. High on trumpet, got a guitar whan I was 12(been playing for 25 yrs), messed around with a keyboard @around 14(still love it), and now I'm a full time bassist @ Cornerston Church (Southaven, MS)

For years I bad-mouthed electronic music due to my perception that it required no musical talent. I have now matured some and I see the error of my ways.

You should absolutely practice and be diligent honing your skills on any instrument/ device that you can, BUT nothing is original in music.

Thousands of years, millions of people,

12 NOTES!!!!!!!!!!!!

God alone "creates", man "crafts" from that which is created.

To each his own.

mezzmerized wrote:You should absolutely practice and be diligent honing your skills on any instrument/ device that you can, BUT nothing is original in music.

Thousands of years, millions of people,

12 NOTES!!!!!!!!!!!!

God alone "creates", man "crafts" from that which is created.

To each his own.

If that were indeed true, I'd have no interest in music at all.

There's only three primary colours (i think ) but we still have original art.

I love electronic music. I just sickens me that we have all this wonderful technology and it is only used to push out the same tired / cliche 44 bullshit.

Sampling your own work is fine, if you ask me. After all it's your creation. Sampling creatively is also pretty cool, in a novilty type of fashion.

The sampling I am agains is loops, single instruments, mentalities like "Hey. nice kick drum - I'll take it." Daft Punk style sampling makes me cry, becuase the majority of Discovery is other people work. Sample CDs are a collection of the most disgusting sounds on the planet, and the Mona Lisa is not a collection of other peoples pictures pasted together.

We must strive for originality in what we create. If you find yourself making a track and the first thing you do is steal someones drum and plonk it down in 4/4, it doesn't look good for the rest of the track.

Anyway, back on topic. I can't recommend compression enough for a kick drum. Just make sure you get a nice quick release on her.

The thread has been jacked!

We can all agree that whatever floats your boat and makes the party move is OK

I guess it would be fitting now to make some music and post it in the MUSIC LINK section (now that we have one)

and listen to the sampled and unsampled

Sampling a fat kick is one option, sampling a good kick from say a funk break then making it fatter is a better one, then you'll have your own kick that no-one would have processed the same, sampling is fine as long as youre creative with it. one idea would be have your kick natural then create an new audio track with the same kick but compressed. So you have the dynamics of the natural kick with the fatness of the compressed one. Need to experiment with the mix of the two until you get the sound your after. Having a song with the type of kick your after running in your arrange window can help. By A-Bing against the pro song you can get pretty close to what they are doing. This can apply to snares and pretty much anything to get a full fat sound without losing dynamics

Gtrance wrote: How do I use compression on a kick drum effectively??

I think this is a good question.
Many records has that nice pumping thing going on in the kick and bass region, and how to make this one self?

On some records it is the same feeling like someone is using a plastic ball and dropping it on asphalt or something..

- here's some thoughts on compression and kicks:
If you use a kick from a drum-machine or from a real drum, you need to compress it a lot to make it sound like a kick on a record.
But - instead of going for a fixed idea of thresholds, attack and ratio, listen for your self to the sound and with the compressor you are using.
The compressor will definately change the sound of your kick, and you will have to ask yourself; do I like it this way, - and - does it sound like the sound on records I like?
If you don't after going through lots of settings, then try with another kick or try to combine different kicks together to one kick, or change to another compressor - not two sounds alike - or maybe both.


And also, remember that most kicks on records go through lots of compression stages:

Compression on it's own.
Often compression together with the bass part - you send both the kick and the bass to a group and then compress them together.
Compression on the whole mix.
Mastering, often with several bands.

In the 90's - lots and lots of mastering studios used one spesific box for making that bouncing sound, in my view it kind of defined the sound of the 90's in many ways because you could hear it working on so many many records.

That box is the TC-Electronics M-5000 with the MD2 tape-simulator/3-band compression algorithm - there's still nothing like it for that particular sound, but it is a kind of expensive box, and anyways - it's not really the sound of today, I think.

So: when you go for compression on your kick - you will probably know more about how much to do, and how, and with wich compressor, after you have gone through the whole prosess some times - from the indiviual compression to finished mix and mastering.

Hepha Luemp

Funkstar De Luxe wrote:Daft Punk style sampling makes me cry, becuase the majority of Discovery is other people work.

just wanted to clear this up:

Discovery includes only four outside samples — not much for a contemporary dance record. “Around this, we play all the instruments, which are mainly vintage keyboards and guitars, so it's a mixture of a few samples and us playing around it."

- Mix magazine 10/01

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_daft_punk/index.html

I tend not to ever compress my kicks .. I tend to compress everything else off of the kick. Not so much side-chaining, but just slapping a bus compressor over the mix with the threshold set so the kick clamps down a bit on the mix when it comes in.

I went through a phase of side-chaining everything off the kick then all my tracks started to sound the same.

Sampling kicks is a good idea ... but I'd avoid bringing in too many samples which have the shit limited out of them, it ends up ruining the track's dynamics. (Actually you're hard pushed to find nice dynamic tracks in techno these days, but that's another story ......)

rachmanoff wrote:

Funkstar De Luxe wrote:Daft Punk style sampling makes me cry, becuase the majority of Discovery is other people work.

just wanted to clear this up:

Discovery includes only four outside samples — not much for a contemporary dance record. “Around this, we play all the instruments, which are mainly vintage keyboards and guitars, so it's a mixture of a few samples and us playing around it."

- Mix magazine 10/01

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_daft_punk/index.html

Yes, but those 4 sample are almost unaltered and make up nearly all of the notable tracks.

Funkstar De Luxe wrote:If you spend three weeks making a kick, you can then reel off what ever style of kick YOU WANT rather than just what you can find. Making is specific to what you are doing, but stealing is a comprimise.

I HATE sampling. It's breading a generation of 'musicians' who can't tell a C from a D#.



Only poking fun, but you know what I am trying to say

You say that coming from Scotland??? hello, BOC play all their own instruments and sample and mangle them to create some really interesting textures and sounds. Plus, its a stretch to call someone who just samples other people's records a "musician"--maybe DJ, or producer, but not musicians. There are pleny of great instrument-playing musicians in this generation that can rock it on their instruments. Sure there's a flock of crappy djs and "producers" that put out crappy tracks because of the availiblity of computers, software, and the internet, but there's still a lot of great instrument players, and some of the most interesting music I've heard these days involves sampling instruments that you play and then mangling the sounds, ala BOC and Four Tet.

As for compressing the kick, it is not inherently wrong. If you record a real kick drum, or trigger a sampled kick using a velocity sensitive controller like a drumkat, trigger finger, or even a keyboard, then a compressor can help smooth out the dynamics. The "don't compress kick" comments are more aimed at programmed kick tracks that don't have velocity variation. For these a compressor could help, but isn't exactly necessary to smooth out dynamics--there are none. As others have said, if you are using samples and don't like your kick sound, try using another, layering mulitple kicks, or try some eq'ing. Another trick is to route the kick (and snare) signal to a send, and put a compressor on the send and compress the hell out of it. Anyhow, my 2 cents...

fwiw, my I compress the kick on all of my tracks, and for using drum samples played with velocity my settings are:

threshold: -6.35 dB
ratio: 7.84
attack: 44.2 ms
release: 251 ms
output gain: 5.82 dB

This is a decent place to start, adjust to taste from there...

Funkstar De Luxe wrote:

djadonis206 wrote:But in this day and age you have to respect those who sample well

I tried for years to be as natural as possible then someone who I respect as a producer was like just use your own samples

I've got a pretty healthy record collection of techno, house, some breaks, old school funk, cheesy disco and bad 90's hip-hop so my sample sources run deep

When my boy broke down how he did a monster track that came out on Subliminal a year ago I was like - DOH!

Not one real intrument used except for the SE-1 for the bass

guy even owns a 909 but never uses the thing - the classic 909 hi hat for house and techno - jacked from another record

In a lot of ways I respect both the samplers and purist - I just want to make and put out pumping loopy techno beats...and whether you want to admit it or not but most is sampled

Plus it's fun to look for hot beats and get creative with your engineering skills - FYI I don't consider my self a song writer but more of a engineer - fyi

Sampling leaves you without a the fundamental knowledge of music and audio manipualtion -

You're way off base here. Not every use of sampling is jacking whole loops as is (as you implied with your lack of "audio manipulation" comment).

Ever heard of DJ Premier? Ever hear him freak a sample? Pete Rock? DJ Shadow? Just Blaze?

all expert audio manipulators, particularly when they are working in 100% sample-based mode.

If anything, your comment is a generalization that *can* be true, but I wouldn't even say *mostly* true.

STRATEGY