We rip all the vinyls to digital and compose the music in Cubase. However we don’t manipulate our samples very much. We do some equalizing, reverb and a little distortion and other effects once in a while, but we don’t pitch the key of the original samples. It’s a goal for us to match things across time and space, but to keep the original expression of the material—to keep some transparency in the material.
A lot of musicians sample, and a lot do it in a way, where they manipulate the samples as much as possible to create a new sound. Nothing wrong with that. But we try to make sample-based music that sounds like it wasn’t sampled. Music that crosses time and space, bringing together completely different styles, genres, cultures and colors in a way that sounds like it was intended to be so. Full of references to music that is out there, but still with its very own character—a bit like tuning into a radio station from a parallel multicultural musical planet, where genre is nonexistent.
However, matching the samples without pitching and heavy manipulation takes a lot of time. We have built an enormous archive over the years, which is divided into categories like instrument type, tempo but also key. But within the E minor chord, you can have so many different pitches. So the challenge is to find stuff that really play together, rhythmically, sonically and key-wise. A gamelan player from Bali didn't tune his instrument to the same E minor chord as a synth player from Germany!
However, one of the strengths with sampling as a method, is that you bring in a lot of resistance with the material. The samples have character and noise from the original recording session, vinyls maybe have scratches, etc. And this gives authenticity to the sound. Just like when we are matching instruments that are not perfectly tuned with each other. Today, a lot of music sounds clean, perfect, almost too good. In the 1970s, that we love to sample from, Auto-tune and computer production wasn’t out there for everyone to use. Instead they had skills, heart and the open-mindedness to embrace imperfection. Qualities that we are fortunate to bring into our music through sampling.
It’s interesting for me to see how my work has progressed and I do think if your work is the same at 40 as it is at 20 then you’re not being honest with your soul. My work used to be very complex — in a world of Modernism that I was reacting to. Modernism for me, at that time, was not sleek European airports but the grim local dole office, or the dirty British Rail train station. It didn’t work so I needed to create design that was a proper human response to the world I hoped to create.
Nowadays, however, we are assaulted by thousands of images of different ideologies everyday — and the only way to break through this is with simplicity and clarity. I don’t mean ‹simple› as in ‹legible› — because something simple can still be open to interpretation — but an aesthetic that is very bold and without decoration.
Jonathan Barnbrook.
As we start to design and build websites with massively larger volumes of content, we find that often they’ve outgrown the ability of individuals to manually organize them. Now we need automation and complex algorithms to find that needle in the haystack. We need the content to include inherent meaning that makes sense to machines, for example, to support data-driven applications based on search, browse, and related links. A content strategist is the person with specialized focus on making sure that the content is meaningful and the site is designed to make the best use of it. Rachel Lovinger.
At the beginning of Facebook, I didn’t have an idea of how this was going to be a good business, I just thought it was a good thing to do. Very few people thought it was going to be a good business early on, which is why almost no one else tried to do it. Mark Zuckerberg.
If you want to be a well-paid designer, please the client. If you want to be an award-winning designer, please yourself. If you want to be a great designer, please the audience. Preston D. Lee.
Because creating content requires such an investment of energy and even a little piece of our souls, we tend to overvalue it. Creative content can stir you, it can bring meaning to your life, it can give you solace. But at the end of the day, any particular piece of content is replaceable for nearly everyone except the creator. For every genius piece of work we consume, there is another. This difficult truth should inform the way we structure business models around open content. There has to be more to the puzzle than good quality content.
Those other pieces of the puzzle should be motivated by what we all know to be true about human behavior. Ultimately, it comes down to common sense. Rather than rewriting the rules of conduct when we think about how we function in the marketplace, we would do well to resort to the tried-and-true principles about what it means to be a good and likable human being, how we make and sustain human connections, and how we give our lives meaning.
Once we apply those rules to the way we operate in the market, we’ll start to see where and how we can provide real value.
Sarah Hinchliff Pearson.
If you are sharing open content with the world, you probably have a social mission or you wouldn’t be doing it. It’s important to emphasize rather than shy away from that underlying mission. Knowing that what you are doing is about more than simply maximizing profit builds goodwill with the public, no matter whether you are an individual creator or a large platform. Sarah Hinchliff Pearson.
In order to be interesting, you must first be interested. Austin Kleon.
— one of the things I really enjoy about hanging out with typographers is, one, they drink like journalists and, two, they will sit there and they will debate like ridiculous nuances and it’s really one of the things I love about hanging out with people who are all in the same craft, is they will get into fist fights about things that don’t matter to anybody else, which is kind of great. Mike Monteiro.
Making sure that you’re not making things that are harmful out in the world is part of the job. And paying attention to stuff like that isn’t extra. It isn’t anything special. It’s just what the job entails. So if I have any message for designers, it’s that: This is part of your job. If you’re not paying attention to the effects that your work have on the world around you, then you are not doing your job correctly. Mike Monteiro.