I first started the projects sampling some clock tower bells, and seeing what I could make them
sound
like, unfortunately, it wasn't anything good (at least for what I wanted to do). Then I found a really good
background noise café type sound, and I immediately knew I wanted to make it part of an intro, as some
songs will use rain or background noise and then switch it up into a funky or jazzy song, which was what
I was going for. I then paired it with a coin spin sound that I thought would make a good transition into
the song and I was off. Now this time I also found a nice song by Patrick Talbot called Blue, and I wanted
to use a part of it seeing as it was completely free use and the download file split everything apart.
I did not use any part of Blue. It just was not funky enough to justify the intro I had made, so I shifted to
a different drumline. This was the part I was most lost in the project, as I needed to rethink how I
wanted the piece to sound. Then I found a brass tacks beat that I really liked and thought I could try a
more city feel. I messed with a lot of brass and saxophone, but midi and even sampled sax have a hard
time capturing the magic of a real instrument playing for a piece, and it wasn't meshing well with the
brass tacks, so I scrapped the Idea. By now I knew I needed richer sound for the beat, and I felt pretty
smart when I realized I could use a train for the city vibes as well as a really easy to work with
background sound.
At this point I knew what I had to do, and with a little bit of mastering the audio (because trains are
loud) I went to the final phase of the project. With the trains added on, it started to sound like a hip-hop
beat, and because it wasn't complex, I thought I would add an imagined rap over it. I say imagened,
because the flow came to me very easily, and I wasn't about to look for a sample of someone rapping
with the same flow, so I used a kick I found on reddit r/EDMmusic of all places to make fake syllables
and a steady flow. Is it as good as actual rapping? No. But that wasn't really the point, by now I had
made the grove I had set out to make. In the midst of seeing what instruments could make the flow, I
also found a funny vine sound effect within the same reddit sound pack I downloaded, and it ended up
being incorporated as extra noise in the beat.
On the topic of sampling and legality. Sampling is legal as long as it is transformative, and/or you have
explicit permission to use the audio. If “transformative” sounds vague, that’s because it is, and many
artists and record labels have fought about fair use and intellectual property through decades, and
possibly even centuries. The whole problem stems from the fact that people want to get paid, but art is
often subjective, leading to legal disputes being muddled and many opinions being formed. What is
written in law however is that you can use someone’s work so long as it is for an educational setting
(non-profit), criticism (in chopped up clips), or in a way that makes it unrecognizable from its original
material, and therefore a new product (often this will still require permission from the original creator
but not always).
