Cold Technology, Hot Beats

I produce electronic music, on my own and with my bands like Revival Revival. We use a lot, and I mean a lot, of samples of copyrighted material. If you’re worried about our legal well-being, be at ease. We have yet to make a nickel from any of it, and if we ever eventually do, we’ll be sure to get the proper clearances first. It’s usually easy to get permission to use copyrighted works, you fill out a form online and pony up the (usually reasonable) fee, it takes ten minutes.

This assumes that the copyright holder isn’t an uptight dork like Paul McCartney who doesn’t license samples. Maybe he and the other Beatles copyright holders will run out of money some day and be forced open up the Beatles catalog wide, that would be cool. They could release DJ vinyl of the whole catalog, vocals on one side, instrumentals on the other. Imagine the five years of top forty hip-hop following that release. Can we make this happen somehow?

Anyway, here’s my process for sampling and remixing. The first step is to convert your desired sample into AIFF or WAV format. If you’re using a piece of something you recorded yourself, you just need to go into any audio editor and Save As. The better class of audio editors can also read directly from mp3s.

But what if you want to sample streaming audio from the internet, or something from a movie, or from some other file format that your audio editor can’t read? For these situations, I use Audio Hijack. The free version is totally adequate for my purposes.

Stern public service announcement: you should never, ever use Audio Hijack on anything copyrighted. That would be illegal. Or would it? Depends on many factors. Here’s what statute has to say about the copyright exceptions known as the Fair Use doctrine:

[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Also, anything licensed Creative Commons is fair game as long as you give credit.

Once you have your AIFF or WAV, the next step is to isolate the loop you want. Any audio editor will work for this purpose. A good choice is Audacity, which is free, open-source and remarkably full-featured. You could also use Pro Tools, but that’s too much of a procedure for me. I personally prefer a program called Transcribe, which was designed to help jazz musicians figure out Charlie Parker solos, but which turns out to be a handy sampling tool as well. Transcribe has a particular way of looping playback while you fiddle with the selection region that suits my working style perfectly.

Okay. Now you have your loop. If you want to just use it at its present tempo, you’re done. But very often, you’ll want to be able to change tempos, keys, rhythmic vibe and so on. To do these tricks, you need to insert metadata into your loop, marking off each rhythmic event. I use Recycle for all slicing and dicing purposes. Recycle’s user interface is a little clunky, but it does what it needs to do.

Once you’ve converted the sample to Recycle’s REX2 format, then the fun really begins. I use Reason for sequencing and arranging my samples. As with Recycle, the user interface is awkward, but it’s adequate for my purposes, and it encourages a spirit of playful experimentation. Once you master Reason, just about any combination of samples in whatever key at whatever tempo becomes possible. I’ve spent a lot of happy hours just auditioning one loop against another.

See also a blog post about my color-coding system in the sequencer window.

You need some kind of MIDI controller to do the most musicianly sample-based music. Keyboards are fine, but I prefer a system of my own devising based on a video game controller.

Hear the controller at work, controlling all the textural/swirly synths:

Clap Your Hands, Stomp Your Feet

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Me vs James Brown vs RZA

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Tomorrow Never Knows

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Revival Revival vs the Beatles vs M.I.A.

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Audio files aren’t the only means of memetic inspiration. You can also import MIDI data into Reason for remixing fun. The internet is a bottomless source of public-domain MIDI. Everything written before 1938 is up for grabs: all the classical, all the ragtime, all the folk songs and holiday songs and traditional melodies of every description. Try importing a Scott Joplin rag or Bach keyboard fugue or Chopin etude into the sequencer, add a nice beat, and prepare to be delighted. You can also export any Finale and Sibelius score as MIDI.

The MIDI sequence above is from my adaptation of Four In One by Thelonious Monk. Hear it:

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MIDI sequences don’t have the soul of samples, but if you align them to slightly uneven eighth notes from a James Brown loop or some such, it warms them right up.

For an instrumental track, or one with only sampled vocals, I’m usually done at this point. But if the track is going to get vocals, or live instrumentation, or it just needs some further post-production, then it’s time to bring in Pro Tools. For the robot sound beloved by hip-hop, I use Auto-tune cranked all the way up. Like Wayne Marshall says, Auto-tune is the new reverb. For more subtle, naturalistic pitch correction, I use Melodyne.

To put the finished product online, you probably want to convert it to mp3 or some such compressed file format. You can do your audio conversions with iTunes, though it’s a bit of a hassle. To choose your destination format, click iTunes -> Preferences… -> General. Next to “When You Insert A CD etc” is a button labeled Import Settings. Click it, and open the “Import Using” pulldown to reveal your choices. In addition to mp3, there’s aac, Apple’s proprietary version of mp4, offering marginally smaller files and marginally better sound quality. To convert a song, select it and click Advanced -> Create AAC Version. Then click File -> Show In Finder, and there it is. This is a lot of rigamarole, and if someone knows a better way to do all this, I’m all ears. Rather than dig through all the menus every time I want to make an mp3, I use iTunes-LAME, which is not, in fact, lame, but actually terrific.

The internet is full of interesting pointers, not to mention samples and other people’s tracks. Here are my relevant Delicious tags: sampling, remix, mashups, hip-hop, electronica, audioediting, copyright. Happy slicing and dicing!

Tags: audacity, audio, audio editing, cold tech hot beats, copyright, creative commons, electronica, hip-hop, mashups, memes, mp3, music, opensource, pro tools, reason, remix, sampling

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 11:13 am and is filed under music, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.