What are your favourite sample sources?

AfternoonWalk

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Hello everyone! This is my first time trying to start a conversation in Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, and I'm interested to know what kind of music do you like to work with while doing sample based material.

Me personally, I mostly like to sample Japanese music in general (mostly J-Pop). Sometimes I pick songs from anime related projects or even go through an artist involved's discography to find interesting material. My EP "Forever In My Heart" is a good example of my experimentation with these kinds of music. I'll leave it here if you feel curious:

https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/forever-in-my-heart

There have been times where I just go through my computer looking for music that sounds good enough to start working with, and lately, I've been thinking about songs from my childhood to download to add that nostalgic value to my future works.

What about you? What do you like to sample, and what's the process do you go through while choosing or searching for samples?

Have a nice day!
 

Eis-T

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Yes! Samples are such an integral part to vaporwave and I think we should have a conversation about them. There are two answers I'd like to give you, a personal and a cultural.
First the personal, I was born in 88 and I come to Vaporwave from a nonstalgic perspective. There are these hazy memories of growing up in the 90's I just can't shake. audio back then had such a distinctively digital /DX7 sound to it. I don't find new samples, I rediscover what I might have heard back then. Ideas for where to look often come to me when I'm not making music (on the bike, when I wake up, in the shower, etc). Another source I use heavily is a CD collection I've built up over the years by visiting flea markets and record shop clearance sales.
Secondly the cultural: among many, many things Vaporwave is a plunderphonic music genre (you'll not gonna get a definition of Vaporwave out of me, I don't believe it is possible to pin down the art movement that is vaporwave into a single definition). This means that samples are at the heart of the genre. Or put more bluntly: Vaporwave is built upon a pile of stolen shit. Conceptually this makes perfect sense as the whole concept of property didn't really apply to music in the era Vaporwave is alluding to. Vaporwave continues in the mindset of napster, bootleg cassette's and those twilight CD-ROMs with pirated software your cousin lended to you. When I hear Lisafrank420, I not only hear Diana Ross, I hear Vektroid re-appropriating her own culture in the most post-modern way. What is music other than ideas translated to a bunch of soundwaves? No wonder most vaporwave artists use a pay-as-you-feel model on bandcamp. Music should be available for all as you are entitled to it just as much as anyone else does.
This brings me to the future of vaporwave: as an art movement with distinctive marxist and anti-modernist messages (often expressed as satirical through the over-glorification of late capitalism) we often become what we try to critique. The whole collectors culture of limited cassette runs and special vinyl releases has become a serious business instead of an overly (and openly) ironic one. I think it is in this context we need to discuss the fact that our man with an impeccable taste in samples, 猫 シ Corp. has decided to stop using samples in his productions from now on. I am very conflicted on this. On one hand he is the great innovator of the genre and has successfully explored the many directions in which vaporwave can be taken, but on the other I fear this is taking away something essential without artistic justification. I don't believe that not using samples makes you more of a "Real Artist" or that giving in to the cultural fencing of the copyright lobby is the responsible thing to do as a leader in the vaporwave community.
 
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AfternoonWalk

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Eis-T said:
Yes! Samples are such an integral part to vaporwave and I think we should have a conversation about them. There are two answers I'd like to give you, a personal and a cultural.
First the personal, I was born in 88 and I come to Vaporwave from a nonstalgic perspective. There are these hazy memories of growing up in the 90's I just can't shake. audio back then had such a distinctively digital /DX7 sound to it. I don't find new samples, I rediscover what I might have heard back then. Ideas for where to look often come to me when I'm not making music (on the bike, when I wake up, in the shower, etc). Another source I use heavily is a CD collection I've built up over the years by visiting flea markets and record shop clearance sales.
Secondly the cultural: among many, many things Vaporwave is a plunderphonic music genre (you'll not gonna get a definition of Vaporwave out of me, I don't believe it is possible to pin down the art movement that is vaporwave into a single definition). This means that samples are at the heart of the genre. Or put more bluntly: Vaporwave is built upon a pile of stolen shit. Conceptually this makes perfect sense as the whole concept of property didn't really apply to music in the era Vaporwave is alluding to. Vaporwave continues in the mindset of napster, bootleg cassette's and those twilight CD-ROMs with pirated software your cousin lended to you. When I hear Lisafrank420, I not only hear Diana Ross, I hear Vektroid re-appropriating her own culture in the most post-modern way. What is music other than ideas translated to a bunch of soundwaves? No wonder most vaporwave artists use a pay-as-you-feel model on bandcamp. Music should be available for all as you are entitled to it just as much as anyone else does.
This brings me to the future of vaporwave: as an art movement with distinctive marxist and anti-modernist messages (often expressed as satirical through the over-glorification of late capitalism) we often become what we try to critique. The whole collectors culture of limited cassette runs and special vinyl releases has become a serious business instead of an overly (and openly) ironic one. I think it is in this context we need to discuss the fact that our man with an impeccable taste in samples, 猫 シ Corp. has decided to stop using samples in his productions from now on. I am very conflicted on this. On one hand he is the great innovator of the genre and has successfully explored the many directions in which vaporwave can be taken, but on the other I fear this is taking away something essential without artistic justification. I don't believe that not using samples makes you more of a "Real Artist" or that giving in to the cultural fencing of the copyright lobby is the responsible thing to do as a leader in the vaporwave community.

I do also have a big collection of CDs that I check out sometimes to see if there's anything interesting to play with.

Also, I agree that the movement is becoming something different to what it used to be. I personally think that it is because of the desire of doing the music that you love while you can still get it safely and effectively out there, which leads to the use of more respectful techniques towards copyrights and also preferring not to go under an anonymous persona (which it is a different subject, but I thought it was a relevant thing to point out).

This was a very interesting response, so thank you so much for stopping by!
 
During the period of time I used the moniker of Pi_ROL I had a tendency of using old advertisements and whenever possible tried to recreate the vibe of a Telereceptor going off in the background. I planned to continue using this medium more but due to poor archiving and lack of available material I had to abandon the style in favour of using video game music samples. Everything I have made since the summer of 2017 has had some relevance of video-game tie-in, most of the samples are from games between 1995-2002 because of how poppy and pumped the music is as it borrows from the best the time had to offer [as well as the nostalgia I identify the most because arcades were ((and still are)) my shit].
 
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I'm a late 90s kid so most of my childhood was a mix of 90s and early 2000s and I'd really like to bring this period alive through my music by sampling 2000s pop music and cartoon network tv shows. I recently sampled some arabic dubbed anime in my latest album. It's in the new december 2018 thread i just started on this board!
Currently I'm trying to go through the classical vaporwave route of using travel commercials and lounge music to capture the lulling sound of middle eastern hypercomsumerism
 
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Eis-T

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just found this piece of gold. I'm sure I've heard it before in a vaporwave track but it could just be that the sounds (esp. the drums and those fake trumpets) are very similar to many vaporwave songs:

[youtube]https://youtu.be/z-ONWCzutOw[/youtube]
 
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aight boys lemmie just blow my horn for a second

my main sample source is thrift-stores. I don't have a record-shop in my town, i live in cumquat nowhere, so if i want the warmth of a vinyl i have to go to places like Goodwill or some ma & pop shop who probably voted for Trump if i want anything actually interesting. My latest purchase is Hiroshima's "Go", which i'll record into audacity than mess around with in whatever audio software i choose to use and bing-bang-boom
 
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Eis-T

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@shifty, can you maybe tell us how you use youtube? I often rely on the recommendation algorithm which sometimes gives great results but often takes a lot of time to reach the place I needed to be.

Also, I re-read my post and I've changed my opinion 180 degrees on "collector culture". I just didn't get the joke, at all. these are the reasons I love it now:
- I think it is a great way to show support for fellow artists.
- The overhyped tone (ONLY 10 COPIES!!1!) is totally hysterical. literally. It is like the re-incarnation of bluelight specials at K-mart. A parody on scarcity under late capitalism.
- Connected to that: the second hand market is bonkers and shouldn't realistically be considered a place to buy and sell vaporwave. The sky is the limit. I think it is more about the glorification of value (I express how much I love the music by putting my copy for sale for 999,-) instead of seriously trying to flip it for that price. It is a callback to the millionaire worship of the era, just like the esteemed Porter Vong does. The second hand market seems to be saying: Buy low, sell high. Anyone Can Get Rich With Vaporwave!! Let The Rising Tide Of Vapor Lift Your Boat! These are empty promises, we all know that (i hope....) . but pretending it works like that IS part of the joke. If you are actually interested in getting something on the second hand market you are almost always better off trading one (or some) of your records for the records you want. There are some things money can't buy, and exchanging with fellow collectors (and bonding with them!) is one of those.
- obscure formats (minidisc, floppy, zune, VHS, card-ridges etc) add to the already obscure nature of the music. It is more FUN to use a cassette player than a bandcamp page.
- My favorite reason: It is a way to leave a legacy. People in the future will find this shit in yard sales, second hand stores and their grandpa's attic. Imagine the wonder and confusion these artifacts will evoke! We sometimes forget how rebellious vaporwave is in the age of spotify. I'm telling ya, some of these cassette's and 12" will end up in museums long after vaporwave as a community is gone. We're currently first in line to become the 21st century dada, and just putting our shit out there (this includes all merch) will help solidify that position
 
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shiftycomfort

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Eis-T said:
@shifty, can you maybe tell us how you use youtube? I often rely on the recommendation algorithm which sometimes gives great results but often takes a lot of time to reach the place I needed to be.

mostly i use it as a sampling library, i have made great use of firefox addons that allow you to download the music from videos, i also will record directly from the computer speakers to my phone if i want specific clips. i have also found that using the hotkeys, like shift+> for speed up and shift +< for slow down, the number pad as a make shift "hot cue" function, 0 being the start and each subsequent number when pressed will skip to the next part of the video, you can mix up a song, crudely, while recording it to something then edit it. i just like playing around with it when im bored, and sometimes i come up with a song solely created with youtube fuckery. i also rely on the algorithm, which is golden in my opinion, for finding new songs to play with. hope this helped!
 
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Ocean County Mall

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I use "YouTube to mp3" and sample old commercials and footage from the 80s 90's.
.... But I am one of those "fake" vaporwave artists that make their own beats.... As I have all the old gear digitally in fl studio, arturia analog and the PulseCode Vst drummacjine
 
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sandbryc

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I'm really new to sampling and creating vaporwave in general, although I've loved this music for years now.

I've had a lot of fun and success sampling from TV Shows and Movies I liked as a kid in addition to music I love.

I just put out an EP where I sampled Bear in the Big Blue House and The Dark Crystal for a couple tracks, it was a lot of fun to work with those sources and re-contextualize them.
 

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Archive.org is a good place to find really weird, unexpected stuff. 70s/80s/90s/00s industrial, educational, e-news, and infomercial videos are a good place to find good library music as well as good vocal samples. The downside to archive.org is there is a lot of random stuff to sift through but there is some great stuff in there.
 
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LostintheCycle

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Just wanted to share the Soni Musicae soundfonts, which are hands-down some of the best I have heard, particularly for the harpischord and accordian soundfonts. Often soundfonts that depict those instruments are synthesized and do not take many parts of the sound in account, they ultimately sound nothing like the real thing. But these ones are very good, the only caveat is that they are all in the sfArk format which requires a bit of fiddling to decompress, but the effort is more than worth it.
 
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tfwamirite

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Hello everyone! This is my first time trying to start a conversation in Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, and I'm interested to know what kind of music do you like to work with while doing sample based material.

Me personally, I mostly like to sample Japanese music in general (mostly J-Pop). Sometimes I pick songs from anime related projects or even go through an artist involved's discography to find interesting material. My EP "Forever In My Heart" is a good example of my experimentation with these kinds of music. I'll leave it here if you feel curious:


View: https://eternalvibes.bandcamp.com/album/forever-in-my-heart


There have been times where I just go through my computer looking for music that sounds good enough to start working with, and lately, I've been thinking about songs from my childhood to download to add that nostalgic value to my future works.

What about you? What do you like to sample, and what's the process do you go through while choosing or searching for samples?

Have a nice day!

i use eurodance, europop type stuff usually. its super good at turning into mashcore/dancecore.
 

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