I’ve exported and cleaned up all the drum breaks, and individual hits and created an ordered folder for them. I did some mastering and light compression and EQ for each break/hit to bring them up to a normalised sound level.

See the photos attached.

It started off with listening and picking the best bits, chopping them up and processing.

This eventually led me to something like this.

I then exported each sound and put it into folders

Each subfolder contained many variations of each drum sound.

Now I can use them in songs etc. This was influenced by the small, what is a sampler book I read last term.

I read this journal on Dadadism as I was interested in what I had lightly read, the ideas of anti-art and freeform process. As well as the Fluxus movement being inspired by it. Here are some quotes.

The shift from the idea of art as a selection of attractive visual objects to art as a vehicle for ideas forced artists and aestheticians to reexamine and modify their thinking about the very concept of art, as well as its practice.

What I take from this into the audio realm, is the idea of art being something, either an object, an album or something. But Dadaism was more an idea that art was a vehicle for ideas and processes. Art was not something to own but something to do and experience.

the main Dadaists were the artists Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia,

Good to know, perhaps further research into these artists can occur.

Both Ball and Huelsenbeck were inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois life and aesthetics. Their belief that reason is the enemy of new and vital forms of experience echoed Henri Bergson’s views in Creative Evolution

I think this idea that thinking and reason are the enemies of creativity is something I am on the fence about, perhaps I think that reason pushes art form, but Dadaism is all about overthinking.

From the Futurists, they inherited the manifesto as a means of expression, bruitisme or noise music, and the practice of altered typesetting in the design of their publications. The use of art as social protest was shared with the Expressionists in Germany, and the radical break with the past found in Cubist art was carried further in Dada art. In Munich, Ball had studied with Kandinsky, who experimented with sound poems lacking semantic elements. Such practices were adapted by Ball and others in the Dada performances at Cabaret Voltaire.

All of these practices helped influence the Dada movement and what they inspired to do with their manifesto. The idea of using art as social protest is something I’m interested in, something such as sampling and releasing it regardless is an act of it. The bourgeoisie owns major labels and copyrights of music. I think it’s important to reclaim these works.

Dada represented for Ball, Janco, and their colleagues a way to express their profound sense of rage and grief over the suffering and humiliation of humankind as exemplified in the evolving world war

I think despite the war not happening currently, I do see sampling in a similar light. As something that humiliates these larger musical labels.

They attacked art based on the aesthetics of beauty and art for art’s sake, as well as Futurism, Expressionism, and Cubism, representing modern art. Despite their assault on art, some of the Dadaists (Ball, Janco, Arp, and Schwitters) believed passionately in art as a meaningful instrument of life, and viewed their efforts as a means of social criticism and as a positive search for meaning and substance. Huelsenbeck placed a lesser value on art, as being only one expression of human creativity.

so the battle between art and beauty and importance. The idea of art as something meaningful in life, whereas Huelsenback thought it was not.

Dada embraces both anti-art and art. Anti-art, when applied to Dada, refers to the revolutionary art intended to debunk existing concepts and practices of making art. It represents a reaction to these concepts and practices, although it may incorporate them to achieve a different end. By its nature it entails an element of protest

I see this duality to be important, embracing both art and anti-art. It is a reaction to both things, to both anti-art and art. Or in doing so it becomes anti-art by embracing and entailing an element of the past.

The principal target of this anti-art was the “noble” and “beautiful” art derived from an aesthetic of “art for art’s sake” that was being used in bourgeois society to mask social ills. While aspects of the Dada performances and exhibitions in Cabaret Voltaire and elsewhere were considered anti-art, as were Duchamp’s shovel and urinal, they were at the same time experiments in advancing the future of art forms such as conceptual and abstract art.

When targeting art, and being anti-art. The anti was towards the “noble” or “beautiful” art that existed, and only appreciated for the aesthetic of the art, rather than what it does or can do. Something that was against Dada. Duchamp’s urinal and shovel were advancing the ideas of the conceptual and abstract art form.

An emphasis on the connections between art and life required that art function in relation to other value-related societal practices, including social criticism.

so art was not aesthetic but that art should relate to other things that society practices, such as social criticism or showing a lens to issues or critiquing.

Contemporary Fluxus performances such as Cage’s silent “performance” at the piano and the videocello performances of Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman would have been quite at home in the era of Dada.

So cage and Fluxus were inspired by the Dada movement and you can tell why, cage and his ideas were coming from this mindset of changing and reflecting on the notions of art and art aesthetic.

Looking at art in its cultural context and linking art practices to political and economic issues, disregarding stringent boundaries among art media, and displacing the artist from the center of attention are common themes in Dada and postmodern art.

Something I feel and fit in, taking the artist away from the centre of attention. More art should be the focus, forgetting the boundaries of law and copyright. Postmodern hip-hop is the exact metaphor for this practice.

I keep seeing the word Fluxus come up in texts and other books I’m reading, I’m interested to read up and so this blog post will reflect what I have learnt from it. It was the graphic score from Christian Marclay that caught my attention about the Fluxus movement.

George Maciunas is considered the founder and leader of the Fluxus movement, which occurred in New York during the 1960s. Considered to be against the idea of education of arts and the art museums owning the ownership of what is good and bad within art. The group often promoted the idea of process over result, and that everyone should have access to art and create whenever they want to and as much as they want to.

Fluxus was seen as Anti-Art to get rid of the bourgeoisie.

“Fluxus artists were most heavily influenced by the ideas of John Cage, who believed that one should embark on a piece without having a conception of the eventual end. It was the process of creating that was important, not the finished product.”

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/fluxus/

This was a powerful quote, something I consider within myself as well. In the modern capitalistic music business, the whole idea is about what the end goal will be. To invest and make money. I just want to create for the sake of it, very much in line with the Fluxus movement.

Fluxus experience [electronic resource] / Hannah Higgins.

Higgins, Hannah, 1964- Reflection

I then found this book in the online UAL library, called the Fluxus experience.

I booked out pirate studios and decided to finally drum to the graphic score I made. I took one of my condenser microphones and placed it in an overhead position as read in my recording for the small studio book.

After this, I recorded individual hits with the dynamic mic on the snare and repositioned the large diaphragm condenser over the ride and High hat.

Next, I will listen back to the improvisation and make a drum kit from the samples.

Contemporary DJing provides a salient site to explore the interplay between traditional physical and emerging digital forms of music and so inform future music technologies

Interesting to understand that current and past practices all inform future music technologies and the interplay between traditional physical and digital forms as a balance.

For many DJs, purchasing music is not only about finding new releases; it also involves unearthing old ones. ‘Crate digging’, or seeking out old recordings, is a key part of the sampling culture that originated within the hip-hop and electronic dance music scenes of the late 1970s and early ‘80s. This is very much an exploratory practice, as the value of a record can lie in anything from a particular vocal sample or a small section of a melody, to a specific drum break or sound.

Seeking out old records and finding them is an exploratory practice. The value of the record is something small like the drum hit or large like the loop.

It is also a practice that is strongly associated with the vinyl rather than the digital format, as many old and obscure records are simply not available to download. The DJs in our study routinely ‘dug around’ car boot sales, charity stores and bargain basements. As it is usually not possible to listen to these records before purchasing, visual information and metadata provide especially important filters for ‘digging’ through record collections and separating the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’. As with buying new releases, DJs rely on some distinctive metadata here: “If you find anything that has certain drummers on it, there’s gonna be good breaks on it. If there’s anything on certain labels from a certain era there’s gonna be good things on it. Anything that has a picture of someone in a spaceship on it is probably gonna be good, unless it’s from the ‘80s … ”

metadata and knowledge through digging is a key factor learnt from the craft and actions of doing. Through digging and finding one can locate what is and who they are within the record, and what to look for.

Hip hop, belonging to the same lineage, performs something of a transcendental form of call-and-response in beats that are produced by sampling from existing records and through the ‘flip’ – an ‘answer’ track to the ‘leader’ of the original recording

To see the ‘flip’ as a response to the original track is super interesting, something I’d never considered before either. I do find I only flip something I really like listening to. And that my piece of work is a reflection or inspired by this record I’m listening to. This call and response are super interesting.

Oliver argues that in sample-based beat-making (assuming the sampled material is mined from vinyl records), a fragment of a sound goes from analogue to digital as it is recorded in the sampling device’s computer memory, and then returns to analogue as it is projected into the air and thrown into a relationship with a recording MC; this process allows the sampling beatmaker to establish a collaboration with a musician on the original recording, albeit a virtual one due to the sampled musician’s physical absence and unwitting role.

Assuming it’s a vinyl record, this analogue to digital and back-to-analogue transformation is very powerful, and sampling usage is a form of collaboration with the musician, although it is a physical absence.

The technique of chopping, involving the isolation of small pieces of recorded phrases to be played in new rhythmic and textural arrangements,98 is demonstrated in the film Secondhand Sureshots featuring the beatmakers and DJs Nobody, Ras G, J.Rocc, and Daedalus who are tasked with spending $5 on five records in Californian thrift stores, then making one track each using nothing but samples (subjected to cuts and effects) from these records.

I have actually watched this video in the past, shot by stone’s throw, with all five artists creating a whole project from $5 records and then flipping it into 5 individual tracks, super interesting and it was really inspiring to do it. And then in the end they press 5 records of the material and release those back to the location they made it. I forgot this existed! I need to do the same.

the producers, relishing a sort of ‘thrill of the hunt’, search for records containing suitable sounds. Ras G picks out Machine Head by Deep Purple for his belief that it would be likely to contain isolated kick and snare sounds, Nobody buys Touch by John Klemmer as he notes that Klemmer’s records have been coveted by beatmakers for their ‘open’ passages of saxophone and organ. 100 Daedalus is eager to stress that he would not want to sample and chop something if it already sounds ‘done’, but only if he believes he can repurpose it in line with his own musical style: ‘The game isn’t to make it unrecognisable, the game is to make it your own

The thrill of the hunt being part of the practice, we want to try and find the heat. And that with sampling the aim is to make it your own, not to make it unrecognisable. It’s remix culture.

because otherwise all of my heroes become criminalised […] from DJ Premier to Large Professor to Pete Rock to Marley Marl […] it was a different era, and I don’t think you can apply the hyper-greed, hyper-capitalist kind of mentality that we’re living in now to three decades ago, or for that matter two decades ago’

Hyper greed, the Hyper capitalist kind of mentality that we exist in, is super true.

DJ Shadow, a producer who claims to have had to discard some of his tracks because of sample clearance problems, reflects: ‘We’re living in this strange dichotomy where music has technically never been worth less, and yet, where samples are concerned, people have never wanted more

Sampling really is a reflection of greed and wanting more and more due to its popularity.

Danny Brown’s production team used this approach when making beats for the album Old after Brown was sued for an uncleared sample on his previous release XXX; 111 while replayed phrases might originally be deployed as replacements for the sounds they are imitating, they are unlikely to match the originals exactly, and they might even produce results that sound better to the artist, as Brown explains: [For] this album [Old] they was extra cautious and made sure we got everything cleared or we had to replay it. And we had to replay a lot of them, but they ended up coming out better than the actual sampled ones, to be honest.112 Thus, replaying is a very useful option to Brown as it allows him to rhyme on beats that he feels he works best on, without blunting his ‘creative edge’.1

it’s a good workaround, to re-record anything you cant clear or pay for. Something I’ll do with my own work as well.

I decided to look into journals and found this one on digital crates, interesting as I first discovered digging in the digital domain before the analogue, youtube has been a huge archive for me to discover music to flip and sample.

“Digging the crates” generally refers to a practice where hip hop and electronic dance music DJs and record collectors search through bins of vinyl and compact disc recordings for rare music often obscured by time and limited availability

This is a great description

the practice of crate digging is appropriated as a metaphor for sifting through extensive quantities of information artifacts of expressive culture capturing the experiences of diverse cultures and communities

I think crate digging as a metaphor for sifting through extensive information is really interesting. I agree completely, digging through cultures, communities and artefacts, discovering how I will use them or just listening.

Milo sent me an email discussing this J Stor article he found discussing the ethics of sampling from an engineer’s point of view. I decided to read it and see what I could find within it. Here are a few quotes.

Another common use of the sampler is to extract a fragment of sound from one context and place it in a new one, with no appreciable loss of sound quality over each generation of extraction and repositioning.

this is interesting as I definitely disagree, sampling and re-recording always have a level of sound loss and quality reduction. But the idea of samplers being able to take fragments is true and interesting that it’s considered fragments, it can also be huge chunks.

These three capabilities of the sampler – the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative and the extractive – are crucial to understanding both the sampler’s popularity and it’s potential to disrupt the production process in the music industry.  

so the fact does three things, the mimetic/reproductive, being that it can reproduce and copy works, then the extractive, meaning we can take parts that we like and then reappropriate these sounds. then the manipulative, which is directly editing the recording we take through other means.

Their cost has fallen dramatically over the years (making them relatively more available to a greater number of musicians and engineers)

I agree completely, something that has also happened with music and home studios is access to technology. How does that affect the usage of equipment? As well the industry, the music industry is benefiting from artists and the monopolisation that they own. How can underground artists break free from this chain?

Sampling has forced the music industry and the legal profession to ask who – if anyone – owns a sound, and as a logical extension of that question, is it possible to a sound? 

These questions are important to ask, since the development of copyright law and ownership. We can really try to think about who owns what? What sound is owned by who, and why do they own that? Who says so?

The musicians position has been documented elsewhere, in both trade public and popular magazines, yet the engineers’ voices are strangely missing from the press. ‘Strangely’ because it is the engineers whose fingers are on the trigger, so to speak, pushing the buttons which create, manipulate, and re-place samples.

So the engineers sit in the middle, they are paid for services and typically receive no royalties for the work. How come we have ignored the engineers? This will focus on their opinion as they are the ones that hit the fire button.

If the sampler has the potential to rupture the discursive practices of the industry – as rap suggests it does

So the power of the sampler, to rupture practices of the industry is powerful, I like this aspect of it.

First, all the engineers do feel that there are certain uses of sampling which are undeniably unethical, and that sampling should not be a technological free-for-all. 

It’s interesting because who can decide and draw the line in the sand between what is okay and what is not?

The engineers represented here were not in agreement as to when sampling begins to violate the ‘rights’ of the musician. 

So they cannot agree, which further shows that sampling and its ideas are subjective.

Central to this discourse is not only the nature of sampling and copyright law, but a deeper issue of the creative role of the engineer in the process which begins with composition and ends with the published sound-recording.

I guess for me this is not that important, but I am also an engineer for myself.

If there is one point of agreement among engineers in the debate about the ethics of sampling, it is that sampling from pre-recorded materials is at the least unethical and, at worst, is outright theft. According to the engineers I spoke with, the type of lifting common in rap records, in which an entire phrase (usually verbal) is extracted from a pre-existing recording and repositioned in a new context, falls into outright theft category. 

Theft? It’s interesting that they consider this theft, but making money from artists is not theft? Taking royalties is not theft? Interesting that they consider rap’s usage of sampling as theft, I am interested in the types of engineers they have contacted, is this because rap only needs engineers for their mixing, mastering, and vocal recording?

Creativity is embodied not only by composition, but by transposition of meaning and thus semantic – shifts.

So creativity is not just making but also moving things around, shifting this and putting that over here. Sampling is the re juggle of making music and taking parts into a new sound.

The engineers I spoke to did not agree with that view. The prevailing attitude was that such recontextualisation amounts to little more than theft: 

Again this idea of theft from engineers is interesting as it poses a question of who is right and wrong? Perhaps it’s society again that is to decide for us, I fall into the other side, and see it as being creative and not theft.

In the previous section, we saw engineers falling into line with the legal precedents, but in the case of a sound being sampled live, no legal precedents exist, and the question of whether a sound can be a privately owned entity, or at what point a sound reaches a distinctiveness which makes it the unique property of its performer, is perhaps the greater point of contention among the engineers. 

again style is something that is copyrighted not the chords, melody, or live recording. Who owns the style? The engineers in this journal are focused on the style of performance and the vibe of the artists being something they own, more than the music.

I would feel that if a sound could be recreated … in another studio, it would be kind of hard to say that you actually own that sound. That would steer musicians away from a tool that they could use. You know, ‘I’m sorry, but you cannot record this frequency with that texture …’ There will only be certain frequencies available to public domain. You can take it to its end result and see that there’s obviously going to have to be a lot of give and take … 

Again this engineer is correct, imagine where certain frequencies were available to the public domain? We cant use that guitar as that is some other artists style.

The final product doesn’t end when you’ve got the sample. You play around with it lots. And even after you alter it, you’ve still got to work with it in the recording… It’s one thing to have a killer violin sample. It’s another thing to play it like it’s a violin. So there’s creativity going on right there. (Peirce) 

Pierce is correct, it is creative, although I disagree again, artists such as Alchemist simply find the loop, and the loop finding is the skill within his work. But yes putting together fragments makes everything.

but when it comes down to legalities I think it’s true. If the engineer doesn’t push that button to make the sample, it won’t be done … The executive producer should be held ultimately responsible and get a longer jail term than the engineer who samples it. (Brewer)

Jail time for sampling, it’s interesting that some people are pushing for this sort of punishment. And that the engineer who needs to eat is to blame.

reminds us that the question of the relationship between art as a finished product and the materials which are employed to that end was problematised by members of the Dada movement in the early part of the century 

Art as a finished product and the materials that were used to get to the end is something the Dada movement has been interested in. Something I need to do research on.

In one sense, the ‘revitalisation’ of popular music spoken of by rap producers amounts to little more than a rehashing of the Dadaist prob- lematic. Today it’s called post-modernism, but the question remains. If a text exists in some form in some public venue, as sound exists in air, are individual uses of that text unique creative acts? 

again Dadaist? what is this, I should do further research. But yes it’s true, public ownership is difficult to argue with within sound.

Thus the reasons for likely development of copyright laws are not attributed as much to the theoretical issues of whether a sound is ownable, but to the realities of the music industry.

So again its more to do with the industry of music that is stopping sampling rather than the theoretical ideas of sound ownership and who can control what. it’s all to do with money. Not ideas.

 Complicating this model is the role distinction between the labourer and the producer, between blue-collar and white- collar, between the hourly wage-earner (studio cat) and the professional who is on salary (the producer).

It’s true, the blue-collar vs white-collar, the creative vs the owner. The owner owns it, and the creative makes it. Without either party, it would not work.

I’ve been meaning to buy some drumsticks as the drum graphic score I made I want to perform, and the location I want to go play the drums does not give you sticks.

I purchased sticks, and a small tambourine as well as some shakers of different densities. I found this procedure really interesting as if I should have done this ages ago.

I want to use the shakers, tambourines and Drum sticks for the drumming, of course, make my own samples etc and incorporate this within my composition. I also bought a shock mount for my condenser microphone, as I don’t have one, and a mic stand, a round heavy base. K&M as these are great mic stands.

I chose the normal non-boom arm mic stand as I have an Aston shield which on booms it fails to work with the weight. I guess the next step is to record the drums.

I met with Milo, being two months after our original meeting. I have found that it is helpful to take what I’ve done and ask for advice on what I can do next. Milo saw my work and said that I’m up to scratch but also that I should nail down exactly what my vision is, in the sense of the academic side of this piece of work.

What am I trying to do with it? He said he was not worried about the more practical side and me actually working hard, but rather that I should take some time to analyse exactly what the meaning and decisions of reading I am taking.

Going on and forth I want to read a journal a day to speed up the process, I did find that in my original prototype I had so much free time and space to work that I read so many and it genuinely helped me understand my work process and what I was doing.

Here’s to more work.