Good point. When I referrred initaially to sampling, I meant using a hardware sampler - like an Akai or Emu.

Digital recording does involve sampling in the discrete-time sense, but that's a different matter. I would not have a grudge against digital recording technology since I use it myself.

"Sampling" ie. using a sampler, I am not too sure of. Would it be reasonable to take the best vocal take for a chorus and re-use this for each chorus throughout a song on the basis that it would be better than recording a whole song in its entirety?

Going back to the original comment I made in this post - vocals in a song on Nevermind were edited and over-dubbed using a hardware sampler because Kurt Cobain did not perform the part exactly in time. Do you think that was the right approach for the producer / engineer to take or should it have been left as it was?

I don't see a difference between using a 'sampler' for vocal takes and comping takes or dropping in and out of takes when using tape, apart from the clear analogue vs digital debate and the fact that tape splicing is rather more demanding than using a 'sampler'.

Do you think that it's acceptable to drop-in to replace a screwy chord or note in a guitar part, or shoudl the whole part be recorded again? Or should the part be left with the mistake?

Yeah, I think drop-ins are fine if they are necessary. But, repeating a single sample throughout a song is a different matter - its taking it one stage further. Is there any point at which it becomes unacceptable even if the end listener can not notice? For instance, would it be reasonable like I said before to record one good verse vocal take for a song and one good chorus vocal take, and then compose these into an entire song?

Rodabod wrote:Yeah, I think drop-ins are fine if they are necessary. But, repeating a single sample throughout a song is a different matter - its taking it one stage further. Is there any point at which it becomes unacceptable even if the end listener can not notice? For instance, would it be reasonable like I said before to record one good verse vocal take for a song and one good chorus vocal take, and then compose these into an entire song?

Chorus takes are done like that all the time.

Acceptable?

I don't care how something was made if it's good, so long as nobody was abused or exploited in the making.

Noah wrote:If an engineer knows what he is doing, he should be able to make an instrument sound good without using samples. Read the last sentence over until it makes sense.

Noah -

I've been reading this over and over and it still doesn't make sense.

Some music sounds fine like you say. But I, for one, love "Onset of Putrefecation" by the Necrophagist. The way I understand it, the whole thing was recorded by a Belgian teen, patching everything direct into his computer and doing a massive Pro Tools fuck up for every single song. If you haven't heard this record (and this is for everyone), go get it. It is clearly a labor of insane metal love. The ridiculous complexity of the thousands of nitro-riffs, the wild panning all over the thing and about six other things that I can think of prove a point. This record is a studio invention, but it's creative as hell.

Contrast this, if you will, with a song that I heard in the grocery store - Bowling for Soup's 1985. This song is probably just as heavily processed at "Mutilate the Stillborn" (my favorite song off the record mentioned above). But the heavy processing on this song is all about making it sound similar in its "artificiality" to a common popular commercial sound. I don't begrudge this for the reason that you do, Noah. I just think it's terribly uncreative.

Look, as mentioned above, producer/engineers make creative choices all of the time. Microphone choice and placement fall into this category, even if the signal is fed right to 2 track tape. If the intent is to make those choices subtle and sit in the background, then the measure of success will be how un-noticable the creative choices are. Usually, this will come down to a technical evaluation (relative mixing levels of instruments, absence of phase distortion and stuff like that).

If the intent is to have these creative decisions play a more active role in the final product, what's successful to me is how appropriate those decisions strike the listener. When those decisions take the road of "we'd better do this because everyone else is doing this", I find it distracting or worse. But I've got lots of records I like where the creative, non-acoustic choices of the artist/engineer play an important role in the final record. That doesn't make them less legitimate than more subtle records.

= Justin

Rodabod wrote:Yeah, I think drop-ins are fine if they are necessary. But, repeating a single sample throughout a song is a different matter - its taking it one stage further. Is there any point at which it becomes unacceptable even if the end listener can not notice? For instance, would it be reasonable like I said before to record one good verse vocal take for a song and one good chorus vocal take, and then compose these into an entire song?

What about tape loops?