Instead of creating music note by note (micro level), we can now create music phrase by phrase (macro level). This is mostly because technology has changed the way we do art in the last century, leading to increasingly obvious appropriation of past work, as collage has done with painting. Below is an overview of this very strong trend, including several video examples and a discussion of this opportunity for non musicians to get an exciting opportunity to create music.
At the beginning, there was the tape
In music, appropriation started with the invention of the sampler, a special kind of synthesizer that can record then playback any sound very easily and with lots of control. The first sampler was actually the Mellotron, using tape as the playback medium. However even before samplers or the Mellotron, Musique Concrète composers such as Pierre Schaeffer used straight magnetic tape recorders to playback sounds, along with manipulations to modify the sounds. A new aesthetic was born, with a focus on the sounds being arranged together rather than on the notes being written on the score.
Nowadays in the popular music industry, the emphasis on sounds rather than notes has become the norm, with extremely high production standards from the « top notch » producers: making a hit has more to do with the way it sounds than with the pure melody /harmony /rhythm aspects that are typical of classical music.
Back to the 80′s technologies
If early samplers were expensive (the Fairlight), cheaper alternatives appeared with personal computers such as the Amiga that had a built-in audio chip; together with a piece of software capable of managing bits of audio (a soundtracker), you could create a song built from real, good-soundings sounds, easily!
In 1985, musicians were really happy to use Notator or Pro24 (that later became Cubase) on their Atari ST to manage a MIDI home-studio made of synthesizers. With this approach you deal with MIDI, in other word you deal with notes, as on a score, not audio.
As a kid, I could only afford one little synth together with the Atari of my parents, and despite my efforts the music I was creating did not have a good sound at all (now I know why, the quality was equivalent to the default General MIDI setup on most PC…), and I was upset that a friend using a simple soundtracker on Amiga could -with little effort- produce very nice-sounding results. It was unfair!
Here is some examples of using a Soundtracker on Amiga: (by today standards this is not so good-sounding, but it sure was impressive compared to a Roland MT32…)
Of course, with some musical education, I believed, just like many other people in the trade, that this was not really music, just cheating: you did not have to care with any music theory, it could not be correct…
Then the hit from MARRS: « Pump up the volume » came and after some debate everybody had to agree sampling other people audio (not just music, but also TV speech, radio commercials etc.) was there for long, and it was music. Hip-hop, initially based around playing records to get the beat, quickly adopted samplers as its core instrument, sampling past records extensively.
Loopism
In clubs or within a hip-hop group, Dj’s had developed special skills to manipulate records playing on their turntables, and this set of techniques (including the famous scratching, and many other tricks) was named turntablism.
By analogy to turntablism, someone has coined the term loopism to describe this new way of making music by combining loops in realtime. Here is an example below, with a loop played live from the pads of an Akai MPC and recorded « on the fly » in a looper pedal. Once the loop is playing on and on, the Dj performs good old scratches on the turntables on top of it:
Going software
Nowadays software gear that enable to manipulate audio are so common and affordable that just everyone has access to this new way of making music by combining loops in realtime.
For experts musicians or artists on the edge, the software application MaxMSP (or PureData) can playback audio loops, as used by the breakbeat artist Preshish Moment:
Preshish Moments: a combination of a custom MIDI controller and custom MaxMSP patches creates a custom overall instrument based on loops, with enough control to fully compose and remix live, with no interruption, for hours.
Most software digital audio workstations (DAW) support loop-based music creation. In particular they provide tools to stretch or shorten a piece of audio (usually a loop) with respect to the desired tempo of the tune: given a loop at 110BPM the DAW can time-stretch it to fit a tune at 130BPM.
However there are DAW that are very much loop-oriented from the beginning, such as Ableton Live, Propellerhead Reason, and to some extent Apple Garage Band. They all provide a complete library of loops that you can combine together very easily, even if you know nothing in music theory.
This indeed represents a breakthrough in music history, where anyone can creatively mix and match audio bits together and appreciate a rather good-sounding result! Of course the work has been partially done by the loop makers, and the music is already half-baked. But this remains a major opportunity for more people to quit a passive listener posture to become a bit more active and creative.
Within this trend of loop-based music making, many initiatives have appeared, including aspects of human-machine interface to control the loops and how they must be played, distorted, filtered etc. Below the famous Wii Loop Machine by The Amazing Rolo from Scotland:
A live, and wiimote-controlled loop machine: Wii Loop Machine by The Amazing Rolo.
As we have seen, a DAW such as Ableton Live or Reason can be seen at the same time as a studio in a box or as a new kind of musical instrument. The old saying of « playing the studio » (producers meant by that that the studio must be easy and intuitive enough so that one can create in a spontaneous fashion in it) has become litteraly true.
At the same time, the need for ready-made loops has created a huge new market. Loopmasters, PrimeLoops, Modernbeats and many other have jumped to that market. With every kid now willing to be the next Dre or Timberland, it is a good business for sure…
Not only for beginners
If anyone can create convincing music using the built-in loops of a DAW, professional producers can as well, and they do it! Logic Audio (Garage Band bigger brother) built-in loops have been used to create the biggest part of the massive hip-hop hit Love in this Club, by Usher.
The tutorial website mjtutoriels explains (in french, but this is easy to follow without understanding the words) how to do a remake of the instrumental track:
All original material of whatever nature created by Cyrille Martraire and included in this weblog and any related page, including the weblog's archive, is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
