Do you think they imagine the end result at the beginning of the process or do they just play semi-randomly until they find something that has potential, and then refine it?
The way it works is a producer will grab dozens of samples, then they'll loop things. Some stuff will sound good, some wont. Most of it will require a little polish (EQing etc) to tidy up. While a producer will have an ear for it to begin with (which can be a learned skill) you have to bare in mind that you only hear the samples that did sound good and none of the dozens of samples that were rejected afterwards.
Source: I used to write a few dance tracks in a past life
I produce sample-based music[0] - and - like a lot of sample-based producers, also listen to a lot of vinyl.
Listening to records, I will instantly know when I hear a ‘sample’. I’ll put the needle back and play it a few times - importantly (hence turntables) - play with the speed and pitch in a lossless way - and eventually record, trim, loop it, and load it into my AKAI sampler or my DAW.
If you have a synth that can sample you can load a sample and then play with filters and other features to see if it will work or not.
Very rarely do artists just know that something will work out, but the more they do it the better their skills get at recognizing samples that will work or can be turned into interpolations that work.
Not everyone gets to be DJ Shadow (king of sampling).
Most of the time, sampling like this is just fumbling around and happy little accidents. There may be a goal they have in mind, but rarely would you know in advance what the end result should sound like exactly.
That's not exactly true. While there are plenty of happy accidents there's also plenty of times I've taken a sample and looped it knowing full well what it would sound like before I started.
Well, I said "most of the time", not "always". And that's talking from experience (both mine and that of fellow hobby musicians). It's true that sometimes you might come across a snippet and instantly know what you will be doing with it.
I'm talking from experience too. And from experience I found the opposite was true. Most of the time I found a snippet and knew what I was doing with it. Admittedly sometimes it sounded lousier than I'd expected and I thus scraped it but that's not really the same as having a sample and accidentally discovering it sounded good. Usually I'd pick a simple because I thought I could sound good (otherwise I wouldn't have bothered sampling it to begin with). So I think the term "happy accidents" is disingenuous because a lot of the time it wasn't an accident.
>So I think the term "happy accidents" is disingenuous.
I think, actually, that both of you are right. Everyone hears music differently, and some people may be better at putting together happy accidents, while others are better at hearing things beforehand. Ya know, just like the two of you. :)
Maybe now, but when Kid A was recorded hardware was a little more limited. So you'd spend a lot more time hunting for what sounded like good samples than you would ingest everything and see what sounded good.
These days it's pretty trivial to do the digital equivalent of "jamming with your band mates" when it comes to sampling but in the 90s you had to develop an ear for it because the process of capturing a sample through to cuing it in your tracker was longer and a lot more painful than what we take for granted now. And you often had to create all of your own samples, there weren't web sites you could download these things from like there are today. Even percussion needed to be sampled if you weren't lucky enough to own a drum machine.
One of the reasons I got into circuit bending in the latter end of my exploration in music was because I craved that instantaneousness with electronic music that I had when jamming with my guitar.
As for Kanye, I don't pretend to be an authority on his music but the few tracks of his I have heard haven't exactly been imaginative when it comes to sampling. He has taken tracks that were already good, taken the main riff from them and looped that. So I'd argue the creativity in his music is the lyrical content rather than his use of samples. Whereas you compare him to Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim or Prodigy and you can see that lyrical content is less important but the sampling is really creative, to the extent that the samples they've used are often unrecognisable from their original source.
edit: There's a YouTube video of Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) talking about sampling using his Atari ST and how he'd hunt records for good sounding samples.
I wonder is it an enourmous talent and sound engineering skills, or simply drugs? Or being popular peformer people queue with ideas and it's enough to pick the interesting ones?
songs come together in pieces. mostly. the jre with billy corgan is a great place to hear some real knowledge dropped on this subject. i’ve always appreciated billy corgans approach to songwriting and his willingness to talk about it.
Being amazing at negotiating is a salary multiplier regardless of whether the job has meaning or is part-time... For example, as an absolutely amazing negotiator, you might get yourself a $1m full-time meaningless job or $100k part-time meaningful job. $100k is not a small amount, but you're still leaving $900k on the table.
Plus, let's face it, most devs are fungible commodities and don't have much bargaining power on top of the prevailing market rate. For devs, most bargaining power comes from domain expertise, but d.e. severely limits the scope of the job search - i.e. you may be limited to only a handful of companies worldwide which would be interesting in paying extra for that expertise. Chances that any of them do "meaningful work" AND allow part-time are close to zero.
No. I've been doing part time work in tech for almost 20 years, and have done part time work for many "meaningful" jobs: working for scientists, contracting for non-profits, building better ed tech systems, working for hospital fundraising foundations, school boards, etc. There's a lot more to negotiation than money. In all of those I've been able to charge decent market rates, and work part time.
I'd say helping the forest service for environment canada collect forest fire data is meaningful, as is helping track underwater noise to reduce marine mammal damage.
It is absolutely a seller's market for developers right now. If you can't find part-time work in a meaningful field, it means you don't know how to look for work and ask for what you want, full stop.
> At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work.
Many people in the US could easily have 10h work week, if they could just reign in their creeping lifestyle inflation and live like people did at the end of 19th century.
Instead, most people opt to work more in exchange for significantly more comfort and pleasure. It's an unconscious choice for most - they can't even fathom living beyond a certain standard, so they in essence HAVE TO work fulltime. But the option to work less is there, they just don't realize it is.
> Many people in the US could easily have 10h work week, if they could just reign in their creeping lifestyle inflation and live like people did at the end of 19th century.
This is a dangerous lie that makes it sound like most people's money are going to luxuries. They don't.
You might think people are spending money on TVs and iPhones and cars but most people buy a TV or iPhone every month - to their landlord, and once in a while buy a new car to their hospital.
>> Over 30 % of average household spending in the US goes to rent or other housing, with insurance and healthcare being next 20 % and transportation next 15 %
Well housing is a great example of creeping lifestyle inflation. At the end of the 19th century, the average new house size was around 1,000 square feet and the average household size was close to 5 people. So 200 square feet per person. Today the average new house size is around 2,500 square feet and the average household size is 2.5 people. So 1,000 square feet per person. That's lifestyle inflation. If you're OK with 1,000 square feet shared with 4 other people, you can live more cheaply.
Health insurance wasn't common then and health care was close to non-existent. Penicillin hadn't even been invented yet. If you cut yourself and it got infected, you might die. If you're OK with living the way your great grandparents lived, you can live more cheaply. If you get sick, pray.
The average new car price is $40,000. That's another great example of creeping lifestyle inflation. I think I might have spent $40,000 in total on the 7 cars I have owned in my life. If you're OK with people at work making fun of the car you drive, you can live more cheaply.
What's the median of the actually-inhabited dwelling? You're talking about new houses. Most people can't afford new or a house, and live in crappy old apartment buildings. Also, most constructions are due to speculation: there's already plenty of empty dwellings. There is no housing crisis, the crisis is created by the rich to profit off the poor;
> The average new car price is $40,000. That's another great example of creeping lifestyle inflation.
Yes and no. People don't really have a choice because the incentives are skewed. It's hard to find old parts because there is no regulation forcing the industry to provide them and/or make inteoperable parts. Once again, capitalism is ruining everything, otherwise we could very well drive old cars and they would be well-maintained, and it would be illegal for a manufacturer to make a product that's incompatible with others (except for very compelling technical reasons).
> Instead, most people opt to work more in exchange for significantly more comfort and pleasure.
That's definitely not how it works.
First, because people in the global north spend most of their resources on basic survival (unless you're from the upper classes) imposed on them by capitalist system based on private property where imaginary pieces of paper (property titles) means you need to pay ransom to reside somewhere.
Second, because the material comfort in the global north is not ensured by the workforce from the global north (i mean, partially yes, but mostly not) but by the quasi-slave labor from the global south, be it in mines or factories or sweatshops.
Third, because we have a global abundance of resources and so much of it is wasted. Estimates vary but i believe ~30% of food is wasted globally, yet people go hungry in most countries. There's millions of empty apartments in US/France, yet hundreds of thousands of people living in the streets. We live in a monstrous system where we have the means to make every one well-off but consciously decide some people must suffer.
Fourth, because even not accounting for obvious waste, planned obsolescence means stuff that is produced goes to replace shit-broken stuff instead of going to people who could get access to it for the first time. I believe planned obsolescence is a crime against humanity (and other species pollution and climate change are threatening).
If you take these points into consideration, i believe sharing work and resources more fairly could lead to everyone having decent material comfort for very little weekly work.
I'm sorry, but living in a detached house with 500+ sqft per person, frequently eating out, changing cars every 5-10 years, having a closet full of clothes, eating food from all around the world etc. etc. is way above "basic survival".
Watch a documentary about rural parts of third world countries, they're much closer to "basic survival" than pampered middle-class members in the West. For reference, in China, not that long ago people were subsiding primarily on rice - that the majority they ate every day throught all of their lives. Not to mention, they went hungry quite often (but not often enough to starve to death). That's "basic survival".
Here in the West, we can cut out so much fat out of our lives without really losing out anything truly substantial. For example, check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/. He's living in Chicago on $700 a month, around half of which goes to health insurance and real estate taxes. But, people think it's "hard" or "miserable", and they prefer to chain themselves to their full-time jobs for decades so that they can fly on vacations, get new shiny cars and go to McDonalds every other day. That's the choice I wrote in my OP.
> A "country" doesn't "decide" to make an asset class appreciate or depreciate. It's always been driven by supply and demand.
But it does. The supply is partially driven by speculators who bet on the prices continuing to grow. Currently, a lot of people are buying more expensive houses than they need
because "house is a good investment". This (the speculators) can be easily stopped with a policy - e.g. tax heavily all profits from real estate sales, incl. primary residences. If taxes make it next to impossible to profit on increase of house value (the profit goes to treasury and not to seller), then the market would significantly cool down.
The fact that we (for example) tax heavily income from work, but not from real estate speculation, is a CHOICE.
If you did that, who would want to build houses?
Buying an asset because it will increase in demand is not "speculation", it's investing. Banning investment means no one will invest to make more houses.
Buying an asset that you anticipate increasing in demand is the definition of speculation (and you are correct if you point out that is what most people are doing on the stock market and crypto).
Investing is lending your money or other assets to an entity with an expectation that it will use those assets to generate more value.
One is increasing value in the world, and the other is riding coattails.
Also, I'm sure parent poster was suggesting taxing of real estate capital gains, not every dollar of every sale, and particularly not the initial sale by builder.
The taxation would be on resales only, not initial sales by developers.
Also, if you increased the value of house (e.g. via renovation), the value increase would be tax-free upon resale, so that you can fully recoup the money you've put into the renovation.
This is already true up to $250k. Look, I certainly don't think it's a good thing to build an economy on people or corporations flipping real estate. But active measures that would make it less attractive for people to buy a house, will drive that money elsewhere. As of 2020, 82.8 million residences in the US are owner-occupied. People have put their nest egg into a place to live, and that's good. It's a good thing that real estate is a safe place for people to put their savings to keep pace or outpace inflation. Imagine that money going into the stock market chasing gains. It would be a catastrophe. There is a true market for real estate driven by demand. A large number of houses in this country are owned by people who live in them, who are not speculators, but would only make the decision to own if it made financial sense.
It’s easy to treat taxation of primary and secondary residences different from rentals.
Houses in this country are being purchased by large investors at rates never seen before. It only started happening in the last decade. SFR wasn’t previously an institutional asset class. That has increased demand for housing that used to make sense to buy on a lower income and reduced supply. They literally will buy every house they can that fits their buy box. Suddenly that $150k starter home is a forever rental.
Frankly, I think tax policy may be the only way to fix it. That or prohibit ownership by large entities.
I'm totally with you on this. I think the sharing economy for housing is catastrophic. And I'm someone who rented most of my life - sometimes finding places on AirBnB and going long term on them - then bought a house, and I hope in a few years I will rent this house out (long term) and buy another. But I've watched areas around me turn into transient AirBnB wastelands, including the house next door. While other people can't afford rent, and the rents have gone up 30% in the last five years. Short term rentals are a blight. I don't blame people for taking the money - the family who owns the house next door put their house up on AirBnB, pays a company 10% to do housekeeping and fucks off to Thailand .. they come back once a year for a few days. I can't say they're wrong. But it's even worse if it's a faceless corporation buying up all the housing stock. Then we're all just living in a hotel.
I do think this should be addressed, either with tax policy or city ordinances against the practice, but I think the first step is to differentiate between short and long-term rentals. Long term renters have rights, for one thing. And they add to the neighborhood, they don't hollow it out. Every AirBnB is basically a dead property that takes away from the community and gives nothing back.
I agree except I’d say most people prefer neighbors that own and are invested over renters that may have historically stuck around for just as long as owners but now have to move every few years because corporate landlords up the rents 5% every year. That’s an entirely new phenomenon.
Corporate landlords have turn ratios near 40%. Small landlords are closer to 20%. The turnover is akin to Airbnb.
Taxation is one angle to consider, but it isn't it an inadequate band-aid for the wounds caused by easy money, artificially low interest rates and the political incentives of the US's central banking system?
The root cause is long-term low interest rates but now that SFR is an asset class, the interest rate cycle won’t bring back the $150k home without a major crash that harms everyone.
Tax policy that punishes large investors can help things land without a crash.
I'm not sure about that. Norway or Sweden are infinitely more progressive than the US and yet people there are neither in poverty nor in Gulags. Are you saying it's only a matter of time until they end up there? What's your estimated timeframe for that?
In what sense is Sweden infinitely more progressive? Is it the privatized retirement accounts, for-profit privatized schooling, privatized police forces, privatized public transit, privatized welfare, or having the most billionaires per capita?
Sweden is a social democracy that has generous welfare benefits, which are funded primarily via sales taxes (VAT) of 25%[2] and "high, but flat" income taxes[3] that are much less progressive than in the U.S., and much lower corporate tax rates than in the U.S.
It is also a country that respects private property and has a mania for privatizing everything under the sun. It's the home of enormous global corporate empires like Ikea, Volvo (trucks, the cars were sold off), H&M, Atlas Copco, Ericcson, Spotify, etc.
Sweden is the only country I know where private for profit schools compete for public school dollars, and for profit private companies are allowed to run welfare programs. Sweden has famously been called a "capitalist welfare state".[1]
Isn't IKEA a sham charity or something and not a corporation?
In the US many states still have a medicaid gap: no medical coverage for a subset of the poor (those without dependents). 5-10% of the population depending on state.
Many/most teams don't have heroes at all, they only have noobs :) I.e. most people stay on a team for a year or three and change jobs afterwards - there's no chance of accumulating knowledge. Nobody is sure how things work and why they are the way they are.
I believe many managers are fine with this, because the team is producing something (i.e. "velocity" is higher than zero), but are oblivious to the fact that team could be way more productive if the knowledge was actually retained in people's heads and not just lousy attempts at documentation.
I don't know if they are oblivious to it - but it might not be possible to pay people enough to get them to stay due to pay bands set by HR etc.
OP mentions that he is in Germany - there it might be more possible as SWE doesn't pay as well as it does in the USA and there are fewer companies so it might be feasible to pay a lot more than the competition, whereas in the USA that's unlikely to be viable outside of companies like Netflix etc.
I can't really see politicians allowing the inflated housing market to deflate. So many people will lose years/decades worth of saving this way - that would mean a lot of angry voters, not to mention another potential banking crash, as mortgages would no longer be backed by houses of enough value. I think high housing prices in developed world are going to stay with us for a long time.
> big oil? Their products kill people literally every day.
Does oil kill more people than lack of oil though? How many people would starve without synthetic fertilizers (made from oil) and without oil-powered farming equipment?
