In the year or so between this post and the last, I have focused on what I can do with the samples more, which led me to improve my ability to sequence drum patterns. I discovered that freeing up my other hand allows me to be more creative and spontaneous, and I have been so happy with the results that I am in the process of making drum sequences for all of my projects, new and old. There are two samples in this piece, both from different sections of the piano masterpiece ‘Clair de Lune’ composed by Claude Debussy, I do not know who the pianist in the recording is. I use two drum sequences and two banks, and the live session was edited later with Audacity.

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This is another video from spring 2009. While the sample is from a flamenco style orchestral piece, the style of the composition is still a beat that someone might want to rhyme over. The portion sampled is actually a ‘break’, when the fury of the flamenco is paused briefly for light, deliberate instrumentation at a faster tempo, lasting for only about ten measures before returning to the flamenco at full pace.

This is a video from spring 2009. While most of the music I have been sampling has been either from classical or soul music, I have discovered a fair amount of interesting modern orchestrations on some of the public and college stations. This sample is from a contemporary string piece in the same vein as Philip Glass or Steve Reich, though I’m sorry to say that I don’t know who the real composer is. I called it ‘current’ because it has been produced recently, and because it makes me think of a constant flow.

In February 2009, my friend Eddy texted me about a beat battle on louisden.com, the challenge was to sample a song from a boy band. I chose Menudo from the ’80s (the members are continually replaced). and proceeded to find the song “Without You Here” on youtube, it’s from the 1984 album “Reaching Out”. While most of the submissions to the contest were sequenced, I am sure, I felt much more comfortable recording an improv session, which I edited heavily with Audacity. It’s a composition of segments from an improvisation, just like the previous work I made for my sister’s friend. I did not win the contest, in fact I am not 100% sure if the track was submitted or not, the last I heard about it is when I asked Eddy to format the file to mp3 before turning it in.

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In January 2009, my sister from RI asked me to help out a friend of hers, Brenden, who needed an original beat for a school project. I only had a couple of days, so I used a project that I had already set up for improvisation. My intent was to shoot a video so that I would have something to update this site with, but I had trouble getting to two minutes without trainwrecking. So I used select portions of the audio from my improvisations and spliced them together with Audacity, a freeware audio editor. I was happy with the results, and I still use this technique for more concrete compositions.

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In late fall of 2008, I got an unexpected text message from my friend Eddy from East New York announcing the sample of the week: The World is a Ghetto by George Benson. I proceeded to find the song on youtube and recorded it from my phone directly into my mpc. Needless to say the sound quality was subpar, but it still sounded decent when I raised the tempo to a manageable 85 bpm. I’m playing two banks, though I only play the second bank in the last couple of minutes. There was only one sample of the week, unfortunately, but Eddy and I continue to collaborate on beats when we get the chance.

Shot in spring 2008, this is one of the earliest examples of my technique nearly perfected, and the reason I started shooting video of my sessions. The sample is from a lute piece by J.S. Bach, originally in 3/4 time. I switch between banks several times, and I have two rows of drums at the top. I had originally taught myself to play the drums with one hand in the summer of 2005, when I was playing a former roommate’s Radio Shack electronic piano, which had drum buttons right above the piano keys in the order: kick, snare, hi hat, crash. I spent all summer teaching myself to play simple piano lines with one hand and a drum beat with the other, and after about a month I could switch hands mid-performance. When my roommate moved out in the fall, I bought the keyboard from him for $50 and a TV with built-in VCR. I gave the piano to a friend a couple years later, but I kept the technique going with a laptop, Reason (a program I used for sampling) and a USB drum pad. It is with this set-up that I moved from simple keylines to sampling, and where I developed the technique expressed in the video. Because I hated the laptop interface, it was only a matter of months before I graduated to the superior MPC platform.

I had just gotten my MPC 500 and I was still learning the basics when I visited my friend Emerson, who is a laptop DJ known as ‘White Animal Sound System’, in Cape Cod in the summer of 2007. While he was working, I went to the library to go through their CD’s on my laptop, looking for samples. I got the sample used here from a Yo Yo Ma album, I think it’s called “The Silk Road”. When the library closed, I hung out at Emerson’s work and cut up the samples with my laptop. That night, it took me about half an hour to load the samples onto my MPC and to assign them to the drum pads. The drum sounds used are from a CD that came with a compact flash storage card that I got off ebay. I played the samples and drums live, while Emerson did his thing on Ableton Live with the same Yo Yo Ma samples, and I recorded the session with my laptop. Soon after, I decided to sample only from the radio, and to cut up samples only with my MPC, since I did not want to rely so much on my laptop.

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I made this with my Sony Playstation Portable in 2006, using a homebrew application called PSP Rhythm, which is primarily a sequencer, but also has some sampling capabilities. This piece was an entry for a song contest held on the program developer’s website. The rules were to use one sample of my choice and the drum sounds that they provided. For my sample, I recorded myself playing a kalimba. I stopped using this application when I got my MPC 500, but I would still recommend it to anyone looking to make music with their PSP (the PSP must have a custom firmware on it). I also made a custom skin for PSP Rhythm 7 called Minimal Style, which may still be available on the developer’s website. Oh yeah, my user name on that site was ‘peru’, and I did not win the contest.

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I used the same method as brubecksong to make this soon after, using a sample from “I’ve got dreams” sung by Otis Redding. I made several other songs using this method, but ultimately abandoned the process because I felt it was too much about the delay, and that my projects were beginning to sound the same. While these two works were not created portably, they are the starting point for my love of creating with existing recorded music. It would be another year and a half before I got my first laptop.

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