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Interesting shadow article on sampling


MadAbbott

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"Sampling isn't just about dusty old 45's anymore"

 

It never was.

 

"Once,all you needed to do to create a new sound was to dig out some old vinyl"

 

You can still create totally new sounding music and new genres of music too using these methods.

 

Whenever I hear this dude speak and I've heard him speak a lot

I always feel for some reason that he's telling me what to do.

 

I remember interviews where hip hop kids I knew hung on to his every word like it was some kind of gospel when he said things like adding any additional instrumentation to sampled sounds was 'cheating' (then went on to credit Geoff Barrow from Portishead who do that on every record in the 'more masters' section in the liner notes of Endtroducing six months later)

 

Err o.k. then..cheating's fine..thanks for letting us just make music Josh.

 

Shadow needs to shut the fuck up and stop acting like he invented sampling which is how he has come across more and more over the years whenever he decides to grace us with his specially gifted hidden inner 'knowledge of the game'..

 

Stop being so precious man because you sound like you're old and more to the point like you're old and in the way .

 

Sampling as an art form will always be 'novel' to anyone who has the good fortune to discover it because it does things to sound that conventional instruments cannot even think of achieving...my youngest kid who's 11 years old messes around with my sampler all the time and is enthralled with what it does sonically..I bought him a guitar a couple of years ago and he's picked it up no more than twice in comparison.

 

My best mates wife who's a classicly trained flautist and has played with symphony orchestras wants an Sp-404 !

(she came round a few weeks ago and got on the red wine and wouldn't get off the 404 cause she loved it that much until we bribed her with a family sized takeaway pizza)

 

All instruments are novel if you place them into the right hands.

 

It's always a suprise to me that some people don't know how powerfull a violin can be for example..they will do when you ram one up their left nostril though.

 

DJ Shadow makes records these days that sound like bad adverts for Ableton live and has fallen off major style and he doesn't like it one bit.

 

But that's his own fault for falling into the music industry trap of trying to stay relevant instead of just being true to himself in my opinion.

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But that's his own fault for falling into the music industry trap of trying to stay relevant instead of just being true to himself in my opinion.

That's exactly what happened to PE post Apocalypse '91. Really wish they'd return to their native sound and convictions.

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DJ Shadow makes records these days that sound like bad adverts for Ableton live and has fallen off major style and he doesn't like it one bit.

 

I played out & listened to music from his first two albums A LOT, but very little interested me after that, bar "I gotta Rokk" which I liked.

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I still like his new stuff but it lacks the texture of his Mo Wax days. His early 12"s and Entroducing were just so damn good that it's hard to touch. And yeah, I hate how they try to make it out like he created sample or something. Now, he did make it his own. I'll give him that for sure.

 

I was listening to a Premier interview the other day and he summed it up pretty good for. There's still an audience out there for sampled, boom bap hip hop and certain people are going to keep making and listening to it regardless. Fuck people who don't like it.

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was endtroducing really the first all sampled album though? it's a credit that gets used a lot, and the album IS fucking amazing, i'm jsut wondering if theres not another album before that used all samples but just never made a big deal out of it.....

 

like melle mell? or BDP? or some weird arty experimental stuff like marks & lebzelter?

 

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was endtroducing really the first all sampled album though? it's a credit that gets used a lot, and the album IS fucking amazing, i'm jsut wondering if theres not another album before that used all samples but just never made a big deal out of it.....

 

like melle mell? or BDP? or some weird arty experimental stuff like marks & lebzelter?

 

 

 

I would be surprised if that's the case but I guess if you throw out anything that has vocals or drum machines on it then maybe. Hip hop isn't all that centralized around "albums" anyway. A lot of the best stuff came out on 12" or EP only. People had definitely been making tracks entirely out of samples for some time. So, even if he was technically the first person to have every single sound come from samples I'm not sure it's all that much of a talking point. I had never even heard that claim until reading this article. I even have the 33&1/3 book on Entroducing and I don't remember that being in there. I always just thought Entroducing was the shit because it's so musically vivid and cohesive. The way he put the parts of Midnight In a Perfect World together is genius. It all just melds so beautifully.

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Found this

 

 

What was the appeal and challenge of making a record comprised entirely of samples?

There's been so much said through the years how Endtroducing is the first 100 percent sample-based record, and I don't know if that's true to this day. I wasn't trying to do that. I thought it had already been done. That wasn't in my thinking at all. But what I was trying to do was push the art of sampling forward because, as I was starting to make mixes in '89 on a four track and got my MPC in '92, all throughout that time frame, the manipulation of samples was becoming more and more intricate and challenging and people were pushing the boundaries.

Then around '93 and '94, sampling took a turn a little bit to the stylings of what Dr. Dre was doing with adding keyboards over the top and having live instrumentation played over just a couple of samples. By the end of the '90s, most hip-hop artists were barely using samples at all. This was happening as I was developing my discipline of using samples.

By '95, when I was really working on Endtroducing heavily, I was very much trying to make a statement about, "Why are we all abandoning this artform? What everybody else is doing is great, but I feel like there's a lot of work left to be done in this discipline." And I wanted to create a record that pushed that conversation forward. That was then and I've tried to do that through the year at various times still, just sort of be like, "Well this little moment on the record I'm going to try to blow people's minds."

The ironic thing is that those moments are almost never referred to or asked about in interviews. I grew up studying records and how people did this and how they did that and it would be conversations in the car with me and my friends and people that were also trying to make beats. I don't necessarily get the impression that those moments that I've done since have been the fodder of those types of conversations.

I still do it with other people's music. There's new beats all the time where I'm like, "Wow, the syncopation on this one part of the song, or the way the beats are laid out, is totally unexpected and really flips my ear. That's what I like to listen for in music: I like when the music is unpredictable and the beats are unpredictable and you can't predict what's about to happen. That's what I've always liked about hip-hop and then in the many styles of music that have emerged from that.

 

http://www.westword.com/music/dj-shadow-isnt-so-sure-that-endtroducing-was-the-first-100-percent-sample-based-record-5692493

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yeah fair enough - i always suspected it was a term thrown around by journalists rather than shadow's own claim..... it just never made much sense to me that it took until 1996 to make a all sampled album :)

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was endtroducing really the first all sampled album though? it's a credit that gets used a lot, and the album IS fucking amazing, i'm jsut wondering if theres not another album before that used all samples but just never made a big deal out of it.....

 

like melle mell? or BDP? or some weird arty experimental stuff like marks & lebzelter?

 

 

 

 

Critical Beatdown was all sampled way before Shadow

 

his latest album i heard on a plane trip last week and found only one dope song on it.. the rest sounded like some kid just starting out making beats very simplistic minimal

 

hes good at scratching though thats it.. dont expect any classic material again

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dont expect any classic material again

 

We've been waiting for this to happen since 2002..he's only had 15 years to try and make something decent sounding again.

 

I wish Shadow would go back to crate digging for making his music again..as everyone knows his personal record collection is immense ..there must be literally thousands of interesting dope samples he could use from them.

 

Apart from the collaboration with Run The Jewels I don't think he's made a good record since The Private Press...The Outsider was a load of bollocks, The Less You Know The Better was underwhelming to say the least and the stuff he's now doing with Ableton stinks,quite frankly.

 

I've said before that I don't think he should just be rehashing Endtroducing or The Private Press because as an artist you should have the right to free reign but if I was Shadow I'd be totally focused on bettering those albums and I for one believe he could probably do it and not for some Hip Hop nostalgia trip either but because of the fact the dude is crazy talented when it comes to using the sampler and he developed such a brilliant signature sound there was no mistaking that it was him when you heard his music, just listen to In-Flux or The Changeling for starters,that shiz is fucking majestic and amongst the best things ive ever heard in the genre of sampled music...its just a shame that he's wandered down so many musical blind alleys since those days that he's totally lost where he was supposed to be going IMO .

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