Just got word that Steal Like an Artist is in its 30th printing.
Back in the day, I’d get these “REPRINT NOTICE” postcards in the mail:
That stopped after the 10th printing or so. (LOL)
Four Tet on making music
Four Tet’s Three is one of my favorite albums of the year, so I was delighted to come across an interview with Kieran Hebden on the Tape Notes podcast discussing its making. He rarely gives interviews, so before listening, I really knew nothing about him or how he works. It was a delight to hear about the making of a record I’ve spent so much time with.
Four Tet’s music is extra special to me because my 11-year-old composer and I both love it — I put “Loved” on my February mixtape and Owen put “Lush” on the mixtape we collaborated on this month. It was wild to me to hear Hebden describe how he works in Ableton, drawing the notes on the piano roll instead of playing them on the keyboard. (Something I see Owen do a ton when he’s composing.)
I really loved Hebden’s attitude towards making music after many decades. He says that if he can stay excited about listening to music and enjoy the making of it while also avoiding the trappings of success and the bog of the industry, that it actually makes the work more successful. Just a wonderful listen.
When he was asked about his most important piece of equipment, he said his hi-fi system because it’s what helps him listen to music in a level of detail that helps him really explore and hear sounds. (Check out the gigantic ongoing Spotify playlist of what he’s listening to.)
This emphasis on listening came up over and over again in the interview, and I wanted to copy down his advice to other musicians: Listen to more music.
“Listening to a lot of music and really exploring it and doing that level of investigation of really understanding where things have come from.”
He then describes swimming upstream:
If you listen to a current record now that samples an old nineties record, and then you check out the old nineties record, find out that sample’s like an old soul record for the drum break or whatever.
And then you go listen to the old soul record and then you find out who the drummer was who played that drum break. And it’s like, oh, it’s Bernard Purdy or whatever.
And then you look on Wikipedia and check out all the other records he made. And then you’re like, oh, he worked with this producer a lot and you check out what that producer did.
To listen to music in that way and explore it and study it, I think is hugely valuable in terms of learning how to be a good arranger, a good producer, a good musician. The more you take in of understanding the sort of like great music that’s out there and the things that came before, it’s so powerful.
Everything’s there, all the information’s there. And then if you take everything you learn from that and then combine it with your own ideas and your own emotions and stuff, then you sort of set up to sort of push things forward. I think that’s much more useful than spending all your time being like, I’m just gonna be learning what every single thing in Ableton does now for the next few months…
You’ve got to love records so much, he says, that you want to make something that can sit on a shelf alongside the records you love.
It’s a lesson that is true for all creative people: Your output depends on your input.
If you want to be a great musician, you need to listen to more great music. If you want to write great books, you need to read more great books. If you want to make great films…
Books are made out of books
In the back of Show Your Work! and Keep Going, I took out the “recommended reading” heading I used in Steal and quoted Cormac McCarthy from a 1992 NYTimes profile:
The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.
It was also used for the title of a book on his literary influences.
RIP.
On plagiarism: What kind of person are you going to be?
YouTube has a plagiarism problem.
We spoke with @austinkleon to try and fix it
Watch ? https://t.co/rdZFPtCRAb pic.twitter.com/RdMNAfaAZp
— Colin and Samir ???? (@ColinandSamir) April 3, 2023
YouTubers Colin and Samir asked me if I would talk to them about plagiarism on YouTube. The resulting conversation was kind of a 20-minute summation of a lot of my thoughts about creative work.
You can watch the whole thing here:
Spoiler alert: My “solution” is not really a solution. LOL.
https://twitter.com/theJayAlto/status/1642940987327627294
The vibration is the way in (presets and intros)
In a recent interview, Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz) showed Zane Lowe where the hit song “Clint Eastwood” came from — the “Rock 1” preset on his Suzuki Omnichord.
I loved this clip and it got me thinking it would be fun to make an entire playlist of hit songs that were based on synthesizer presets or pre-programmed drum machine patterns.
At the top of the list would have to be Wayne Smith’s “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” which came out of Jamaica in 1985 and “kick-started a new genre and changed the island’s culture almost overnight.” The beat came from the “rock’n’roll” present on a Casiotone MT40 keyboard, which was programmed by a Japanese woman named Okuda Hiroko, who was straight out of music college and working for Casio.
The Guardian has a whole list of “the greatest preset sounds in pop music,” including:
- The GarageBand “vintage funk kit 03” loop that powers Rihanna’s 2007 single “Umbrella”
- Presets (or slight variations of them) from the Roland CompuRhythm CR-78 were used for Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That” (which Michael Jackson stole for “Beat It” ), Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Enola Gay,” Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” and Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”
- The Casio VL-Tone’s rock-1 preset can be heard on the hit “Da Da Da”
And so on and so forth. Once you go looking, the list is endless.
Thinking about presets coincided with my discovery of the Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Sonic Boom (Peter Member) collaboration from last year, Reset.
The album is sample-based, with a little twist that all the samples come from really obvious and identifiable bits from vintage tracks which are worked up into something different:
At first, Kember began re-familiarising himself with his long-lost collection of ’50s and ’60s American doo-wop and rock-and-roll LPs. Crafting song-length loops from classic intros to tracks by Eddie Cochrane, The Troggs and The Drifters, Lennox then added his own vocal observations to create fully-formed songs.
I discovered the album when I got excited that KUTX was playing The Drifters’ “Save The Last Dance For Me” and suddenly Panda Bear started singing. (The song was “Livin’ in the After.”)
Sonic Boom explains the thinking behind the sampling:
[It] struck me that a lot of these tracks had intros that juiced the whole thing even though they were independent from how the rest of the song sounded. I just felt they had a vibe that we could grow something from.
When I listen to the album, I ask myself why these “obvious” samples feel rich to me while other obvious samples sound cheap.
For example, I was at my kids’ swim lesson the other day and a song that turned out to be Coldplay’s “Talk” came on. I’d never heard it all the way through, but the song takes a riff from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” and plays it throughout. It felt really cheap somehow to me in a way that “Planet Rock” — which samples the Kraftwerk songs “Trans Europe Express” and “Numbers” — doesn’t.
Coldplay even cleared permission with Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter to use the song. But maybe that’s why it feels cheap to me?
For me, great sampling is about transformation. It usually comes from two places:
1) the sample is from something obscure or humble (like a preset)
2) the sample is from something huge and classic and is re-contextualized — usually by someone in a more humble position (like with early hip-hop, the kind of Robin Hood theft of taking from your parents’ records and twisting it into your own thing)
A great sample works on the original in a sense, it changes it a bit, makes you hear it in a different or more interesting way.
The sampling in the Coldplay song feels like neither to me: A wildly popular band borrows a line from a masterwork to make a completely mediocre song that you’d hear on the mix at your kids’ swim school.
It reminds me of something Nick Cave wrote on the subject of creative theft:
Theft is the engine of progress, and should be encouraged, even celebrated, provided the stolen idea has been advanced in some way. To advance an idea is to steal something from someone and make it so cool and covetable that someone then steals it from you. In this way, modern music progresses, collecting ideas, and mutating and transforming as it goes.
But a word of caution, if you steal an idea and demean or diminish it, you are committing a dire crime for which you will pay a terrible price — whatever talents you may have will, in time, abandon you. If you steal, you must honour the action, further the idea, or be damned.
And speaking of Cave, I need to wrap this post up, so let’s bring it back to the beginning with a tweet by his bandmate and collaborator, Warren Ellis, on using presets to get started:
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