This isn’t the same at all, musically speaking. “Any group of guys” may or may not be as skilled on their instruments (and voices) as the Beatles were. However, “any group of guys” can indeed have access to the same samples and piece them together…
Sorry I wasn’t clear: I know you weren’t talking about rapping, I was simply saying the last time I made this challenge to someone, it was over rapping. Audacity is an audio editing program.
I paid $9 for Kanye’s CD and I had empirical evidence that such a purchase would be worthwhile, I have nothing from you to prove I should do that. So, I’m certainly not paying you, friend.
But if it really is that easy, surely you could whip something up in a few minutes, no?
A few minutes - no. I must admit, I don’t have extensive sample libraries in my studio - obviously, it’s not really my bag. But with a week or so to find some samples and a day or 2 to put them together, sure, no prob. Maybe you could rap over the top of it!! A true collab, just like Kanye. I bet we make millions!
I’m an on-again, off-again musician (recorded, toured, and one of our songs even topped the college radio charts in Germany), and my background is piano and keyboard instruments. Anyone could write a simple rock tune or create a melody. Arguably, it’s easier to sit down in front of a keyboard or guitar and start hammering out music than it is in splicing and dicing things together. But that’s not going to be my point. To make something memorable that grooves is another story.
You can say all music is easy. And it’s true. Pretty much anyone can sit down and create a tune. But to have it groove, to make it memorable and catchy? That’s fucking difficult, no matter whether you’re using four guys with live instruments or sitting in the studio piecing together a song collage. I could make a generic sample groove easily here using the software I have, too. But I just cannot churn out anything I would call convincing. True, it could be a limitation of my talents. My experience is that it’s a hell of a lot harder than it looks. Rap is similarly derided. Everyone thinks they can rap. I say, go to a karaoke night and listen to some amateurs rap.
[QUOTE=pulykamell;13202561
You can say all music is easy. And it’s true. Pretty much anyone can sit down and create a tune. But to have it groove, to make it memorable and catchy? That’s fucking difficult, no matter whether you’re using four guys with live instruments or sitting in the studio piecing together a song collage. I could make a generic sample groove easily here using the software I have, too. But I just cannot churn out anything I would call convincing. True, it could be a limitation of my talents. My experience is that it’s a hell of a lot harder than it looks. Rap is similarly derided. Everyone thinks they can rap. I say, go to a karaoke night and listen to some amateurs rap.[/QUOTE]
I agree. Making a great groove is difficult. But sampling an already great groove and repackaging it is easy…
Missed edit: Even if it were somehow demonstrably “easier” to create, it matters not one iota to me. I don’t care if you’re sitting at a piano plucking at notes with one finger or using a Casio keyboard with an auto-accompaniment or if you have the resources of the entire London Symphony Orchestra in front of you. If you can create a song that engages people, the difficulty of its performance or creation is immaterial.
And if you want to hear something with a bunch of samples that I put together quickly:
http://www.realworldremixed.com/remix.php?remix_id=UquoSnSFSlRryU4.
This was a entry I made years ago in a remix competition based around Peter Gabriels “Shock the Monkey”. I always loved the song and hate competitions so I told myself I wasn’t going to spend more than a day on it using samples that I had available. This is what came out. Nothing outstanding, but definitely a good simple groove, IMO. It’s not hard…
To do it well, though? I disagree.
It’s all a bit like the argument that modern art isn’t really art because “anyone could do it” - in theory, yes, anyone could take the samples Kanye has used and do the same thing with them. But they didn’t. He got those ideas and put those old beats into new environments and made it sound amazing, and that’s why he gets the credit and the acclaim. In theory anyone could recreate any work of art, but in practice it’s not so easy.
The way we’re discussing it you’d think working with the samples is the only thing Kanye does - it is usually just one piece of the puzzle where his songs are concerned, like Diosa said upthread, he took that ‘P.Y.T.’ sample but it wasn’t the focus of the song, he layered it with original stuff so that the sample became unrecognisable, just another one of the instruments, another layer of something more special than just rapping over the riff from a different song.
I think it’s great that you’re musically inclined and expressing yourself, but from what you just linked to:
2.18 out of 5.
Plus, I’d argue that what you’ve done there is nothing like the majority of the sampling Kanye does-- he takes a teeny party of a song (like that little quick blip from PYT I talked about earlier), chops that 5 second clip up, rearranges it, and makes an entirely new song out of it.
Or in the case of power, he literally samples one line of music from a song and adds it between a bunch of original content.
That’s reasonable work. But that’s exactly the kind of stuff I’m talking about when I say “I could make a generic sample groove easily.” I like the layered instrumentation you put on that, but the backbone of the song still sounds very vanilla. It’s missing that bit of “spark” a good backing track has. Like I said, that sounds like something I could come up with. I couldn’t come up with a good Kanye groove if my life depended on it.
You have a point here. Some of the best songs ever were written quickly and easily. It doesn’t mean they were written by musical geniuses. It’s rock and roll, not rocket science.
When somebody is claimed as “a musical genius,” that implies to me that they’re doing something far and beyond what anybody else is doing - ala Hendrix, the Beatles, rap pioneers of the early 80’s, etc. Taking music to places it hasn’t been. Kayne’s not doing that, IMO…
Ok, so I’m not a musical genius. But neither is Kanye…
How about this one:
http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=492111
This was a remix I did, again in a matter of hours, for a Chemical Brothers song with QTip on vocals called “Galvanize”. All samples except for my guitar work. It’s basically just a sample of the main riff of the song with some “original content” mixed in, as you say…
My point is anybody can make a catchy tune if it’s based off of the catchy part of another tune…
And I’m sorry for derailing this thread. I’ll stop now…
And I disagree. Popular music sounds completely different now than it would had there been no Kanye West for the past ten years. His body of work makes that almost self-evident to me.
I also find it curious why the “I could do that, it’s not so hard” crowd is wasting time on a message board when they could be making millions of dollars doing what they claim is so simple.
They don’t have the marketing.
I’m not going to argue whether Kanye is a genius or not. I’m actually not intimate enough with his work to say one way or another. I personally have no opinion on the matter, but I do enjoy what I’ve heard of his work. However, isn’t what you wrote one possible definition of genius? The ability to do something great and making it seem effortless? I will say this: I’m a reasonable musician. I can hold my own. In my life, I’ve met two or three individuals who, to me, seemed like they could pick up a guitar or sit at a piano and just pour out music. The music wasn’t technically difficult or intricate. But they had some sort of intimate connection with their muse and they could just pluck out melodies and rhythms with such ease, that I could not classify it as anything as but a type of genius. Part of genius, to me, is making it all seem effortless.
Yeah, anyone can do it. But that doesn’t make you Beck, Moby, Trent Reznor or the Beastie Boys. When Kanye uses samples (like Daft Punk’s ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’ on ‘Stronger’) he is also mixing it with completely original material to make something new.
Somewhere along the line I saw the perfect response to this idea on these boards - “That’s so simple/easy - I could do that!” “Yeah, but you don’t.”
Sampling is like quilting–it’s taking pre-existing material and recombining it in new and interesting ways. Sometimes a quilt will be based largely in a single fabric and will retail the character of that fabric; other times it will use lots of different fabrics or alter the preexisting ones to the point that it’s something completely different. Both types can be beautiful.
No one ever looks at a really nice quilt and says, “Pfft. The real artist is the person who designed that fabric.”
If this is what we get in a thread about Kanye, I’m glad I never got around to starting a thread about the new Girl Talk.