TW #9 — Samples, Lameness, Preconceptions, and Fluffy Bunnies (Necros)
A reply to Perisoft's piece in #8: why necros, once a "siner-synth" purist, became "a loop junkie".
Key claims#
- He used to use no looped samples at all — "no drum loops, no guitar riffs" — and friends called the result "video game music"; the quest for "real"-sounding tracks ran into instruments that are "DAMN HARD" to sample convincingly: real violins/violas, distorted electric guitars, accordions/harmonicas, trumpets/cornets/trombones.
- A college-radio track built from a scratchy Monk-style jazz-piano riff, re-cut, layered and underlaid with a dub hip-hop loop convinced him: sampled material can be "not even vaguely similar to the original" and still "thoroughly excellent and professional".
- Loops are easy to overuse into plagiarism, "but with a bit of talent and feel" they become original; using samples in new ways is "a very difficult and respected task", not piracy.
- Defends basehead's NAID compo entry, which Perisoft had called "35 % ripped from CD samples": most of the audience could not tell without soloing the samples in ST3, and making riffs work "like Basehead did" is harder than it looks.
Practical takeaways#
- Expect to fail when sampling bowed strings, distorted guitar, reeds and brass; loops and riffs are the scene's workaround (multisampling, sample-looping).
- Transform what you borrow — chop, re-arrange, layer, change the context — and the result is yours in every way that matters to the listener.
Notable quotes#
- "So thus I became a loop junkie."
- "It is far harder than you think to get riffs to work well."
Relevance#
The 1995 opening of the ripping/realism debate that runs through traxweekly (#24–#25, #64–#65, #70–#76): a working musician's position on samples versus synthesis. Also documents Necros's own move away from pure synth timbres.