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Recycling of sounds in production


Anu Katariina

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Is it right to use someone else's sounds, even the "signature" sound of a track and to what extent and what should be the level of announcing it/giving credits to the original artwork.

 

If the producer is recycling, is he talented and is he a wanted one in the eyes of the scene?

 

The values of creativity and respect of others' work are eonian, but when reality meets resources, recycling happens. Should the producer give the whole thing a second thought, let it rest a bit and see if there's another way, or should e.g. dead lines be blindly followed?

 

I gathered the threads this has been freshly brought up and those who are interested in discussing the topic pick it up from the links.

 

https://www.psynews.org/forums/topic/60002-the-official-psynews-welcomed-topic/page-7?do=findComment&comment=1052694

 

https://www.psynews.org/forums/topic/65428-etnica-live-in-athens-1996/page-2?do=findComment&comment=1052699

 

https://www.psynews.org/forums/topic/70460-lectro-spektral-daze-voyage-in-your-mind-timewarp-rec/

 

 

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If the producer is recycling, is he talented and is he a wanted one in the eyes of the scene?

 

 

If,

Creativity = Talent?

Recycling = Talent?

Then,

Creativity = Recycling. :o

 

Mr.Rotwang. Help me out with the math over here please :D

 

@Anu- I see where you are going with that.

 

*Talent doesn't just mean being exclusively Creative and producing fresh tracks with completely unique sound. Moreover if any one can do that in a good way then he/she is for sure talented. And also if they use a sample which they them self like doesn't take away their talent.

 

*Uniqueness doesn't necessatily mean creativity which also doesn't necessarily mean Talent.

 

*It would be like saying all the very talented people who gave us so many good remixes (recycling the original!) are talentless. In fact those who gave us shitty remixes are the talentless.

 

*Turning crap to gold is the biggest talent. IMO. I mean adding more value to the existing things. So that its identity itself is morphed to something new , something better is for sure a TALENT.

 

*Lot of artists use the sounds of their favourite artists out of sheer love and respect. Using it and making a track is a way of showing respect to the original artists.

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Yeah..this topic is now taking the path I wanted to. You really gave it a lot of thought today, Starkraver, and I appreciate this and your previous comments in another thread. First of all: let's make the terminology clear so that we talk about the same things and don't get lost in a verbal jungle. By recycling I do not mean remixing. I was thinking when I started the topic that somebody is gonna bring it up and it came right away.

 

In remixing I can tolerate, even appreciate, recycling far better than in making an original track from scratch. Even crappy rmix never ruins the original..it stays safe. And yeah, brilliant rmix adds to the common good for sure. But I always demand written credits if someone's previous work is used the way that's RECOGNIZABLE AND TRACEABLE. In remixing the both producers agree in terms and conditions but the third party= owner of the sound being recycled i.e. added in the original track in the production process of a remix should always get asked/informed/credited.

 

Well, because examples of real life tell the story best, I was speechless after hearing in another thread linked above that my idol of 16 fuckin' years of my life became popular and a big name and rich just because he took a signature sound of a track and made it a signature sound of his. A carpet has just been wrenched under my feet. If I had known the year 2003 when the CD with the track released 1999 came out I would have never bought it, neither some other albums afterwards. There's no creativity, no orginality, no heroism. He is talented. Going crooked is a talent, too. And I have rejoiced all these years that he is Finland's musical export product, too, that he sure is, but all the fame came along sucking that sound.

 

From a producer's perpective: I have no idea how I'd react (how even worse I'd react) if someone took my sound, RECOGNIZEABLE and TRACEABLE back to me without asking permission. Sometimes these questions discussed here are a matter of lawsuit and copyright, too.

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it depends

simon posford sampled a lot when he composed the shpongle albums but at the same time he is very talented and creative in my opinion

but i agree it gets annoying when you hear the same sample in many different tracks

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Well they´re sure no psytrance, but one of my favs - The Prodigy sampled everything that could be sampled. They sampled it to death. Whole tracks basically, really. I was astonished how well they implemented it to their sound and made it sound that much different than used originals you wouldn´t recognize them at all, maybe well trained ear. So, that i consider talent, and they took only bits of those used tracks so i find it ok. Another story connected to them is whole album (The Castbreeder)that was hiddeous rippof of Junkie XL and Lunatic Calm´s tracks.

 

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Prodigy-The-Castbreeder/release/778895

 

Well, I hated it - but I liked the album. And also, like Anu - Saša and I found this fact years and years after crazing about this album. Also, connection can be made with today´s artists using loops in production (we use it too sometimes in our LD tracks, mostly percussive or ambient fx and let´s not pretend we´re not). Someone gave his talent to make the other one´s life easier for something that he can make but consumes its time and he decides to go by with a loop, for example.

 

Also, let´s take Girl´s Talk project for example if you heard of it. If not, you should see documentary named Remix Manifesto - it´s talking about sampling and making music out of it in a very intelligent and creative way that no real artist would try to forbid, and industries policy about royalties, legal rights etc. This guy is doing awesome work with only sampling other ones music, and he is doing it damn good.

 

Whole movie is on youtube, i would recommend it.

You can find it here too:

http://ripremix.com/

 

Thing is, when you take really obviously whole theme like I did when creating Into The Morana´s Cold Kingdom track - you HAVE to ask for rights and credit it properly. And I did, and guys at Bethesda Softworks didn´t wanna talk about it, they´ve thrown dozens of disclaimers on me so I reworked it completely and show them my middle finger. We took Jasmina to studio, and made it even better. Creativity gone wild after they ripped my only

standing nerve off. :)

 

(track was originaly made vastly inspired with computer game named Morrowind that I loved to play very much, and i wanted to show the world my vision of the track, but properly credited)

 

My 2 cents...

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Thing is, when you take really obviously whole theme like I did when creating Into The Morana´s Cold Kingdom track - you HAVE to ask for rights and credit it properly. And I did, and guys at Bethesda Softworks didn´t wanna talk about it, they´ve thrown dozens of disclaimers on me so I reworked it completely and show them my middle finger. We took Jasmina to studio, and made it even better. Creativity gone wild after they ripped my only

standing nerve off. :)

 

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Haha. At least you asked ;) Is the nerve back in function? And thanks for all the stuff you wrote in above post.

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No problem, i wanted to clear some stuff - even to myself - with this post ahahahah... Yes, I´ve asked because i made whole melody pretty much same (I played it with my bare hands though!!! :P ) Nerve is in function, ocassionaly. ;)

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Essentially all sounds are sampled. I think very few producers create their own sound from scratch (I only know of Richard Devine who is a "sound designer"). A friend at the university I went to created his music in MatLab of all things.

 

Even playing an acoustic instrument is copying because you haven't built it, you haven't tuned it. You are playing on something that someone else created.

 

I see someone mentioned prodigy and I couldn't help but remember a video...

 

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I see someone mentioned prodigy and I couldn't help but remember a video...

I´ve mentioned them (fan from childhood hehehe) - but there is one much more funny, i´ll repost it here when i find it :)

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Shall we discuss hip hop...especially the early era when the whole point was to spin existing drum breaks while rapping on them. In the 80s the scene wasn't that concerned about crediting or clearing its samples. For example, I have one amusing compilation of tracks sampled for Eric B & Rakim's classic album Paid in Full (1987). It's a triple CD with a total of 44 tracks. Not bad, compressing all that to one ten-track, 45 min album.

 

(It's a neat triple CD, by the way, going through loads of classic funk, soul, disco and whatnot. Some serious crate digging was involved in that album's production.)

 

Then suddenly in 1991 there was a court case where it was ruled that "sampling without permission can qualify as copyright infringement". Bummer. It's often said that pretty much none of the classic albums could have been written under current legislation, considering the shoestring budgets those 80s guys had. (See the same article.) Nowadays you can get in trouble for sampling just one second of copyrighted material (which, in turn, can cover almost all recoded music in existence).

 

But the point is that sometimes extensive mixing of existing stuff starts to count as a form of art by itself.

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Then suddenly in 1991 there was a court case where it was ruled that "sampling without permission can qualify as copyright infringement"

Thanks for the historical heads up.

 

Since I started this thread I have been pondering over the topic and well..I guess I have to live with this knowledge now but still I don't want to stumble upon recognizable borrowed or stolen sounds that belong to some other artist especially concerning goa but I am glad it does not happen often. I just lose the feeling if I notice these things. And a good feeling is the most important matter to me when listening to music.

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Essentially all sounds are sampled. I think very few producers create their own sound from scratch (I only know of Richard Devine who is a "sound designer").

I don't think that's true at all. Richard Devine may be the only well-known artist who does sound design as a profession, but loads of artists design their own sounds - that's what modular synthesizers and things like Max/MSP are for (not to mention microphones). Some artists even write their own software.

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Guest The Hypnotic LFO Room

Sampling is when you take a already existing sound, vocal, drum loop etc. and use it or manipulate it. Sound design is when you program your own sound on a synthesizer or vsti.

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Sound design is when you program your own sound on a synthesizer or vsti.

Sound design can also incorporate recorded sounds (like old-fashioned foley techniques in movies).

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Guest The Hypnotic LFO Room

Sound design can also incorporate recorded sounds (like old-fashioned foley techniques in movies).

 

True :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Are we talking about sounds or style here?

 

Shpongle hasn't used any library sounds in the latest productions, Simon claimed.

 

I have built a lot of acoustic instruments, true, but use them way less than I would like.

 

I once wanted to go that way: Build my own modular synth from scratch, build my acoustic istruments, code my own plugins, code what special features I wanted into Psycle that I was using like 10 years ago or so.

 

I also wanted to become a craftsman, travel, grow my own food... You get the picture.

 

So I built a ton of instruments, a few pedals and modules, started looking into plugin programming, etc,m but eventually hit the wall of realities and limitations pretty hard :P

 

There´s only so much one person can do with time.

 

So I for example try to sample as much as possible myself, and build the synth sound with my modular setup (the possibilities of which I have barely scratched). Still, even though now I've been unemployed for 1,5 years, and even lived one year in the countryside in total isolation, I realized it took all the time I had just to finish the last album as it stands. Especially the moment you go out of the box, and start building stuff with analog stuff, do layering, multiple recordings, etc. It´s really a huge difference. I might have to spend the whole day just to get one bass sound right, whereas with software I might have done the same thing in fifteen minutes.

 

So, with people usually having a life too to take care of, you see why music does sound kind of the same, and people using what they easily can get their hands on.

 

You really need to choose what to focus on. You can choose to spend hundreds of hours perfecting original sounds in complex software like Alchemy etc, or you can write music.

 

About style: everybody is copying everybody else anyway. I might be alone with my thought, but I think there´s nothing wrong even in copying the trademark sound of somebody else. I strongly believe that ideas should be free... That might be a bit boring usually, but I don´t see anything wrong with that. Actually I´ve beenb thinking that it might be fun to do a few tracks in the style of some other artists, just for excercise's sake :)

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Guest The Hypnotic LFO Room

So, with people usually having a life too to take care of, you see why music does sound kind of the same, and people using what they easily can get their hands on.

 

I have a full time job next to my music making and I don't think my music sound like anyone else. It's all a matter of wanting to be different and not just to land the next commercial gig. It's not the equipment (plugin vs. Hardware) you use but how you use it!

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 11 months later...

First I was shocked now just entertained of this copying of The Gate. @ 0:08 Pathetic!

 

(posting this here, too, not only Morphic Resonance thread)

 

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An update to the above post. I was right as a listener but wrong as a producer, hehe (I don't make music ;-))

 

Fb discussion went like this: https://www.facebook.com/MorphicResonanceOfficial/posts/1018535271596787?comment_id=10186185349217

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