In a recent interview, Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz) showed Zane Lowe where the hit song โClint Eastwoodโ came from โ the โRock 1โ preset on hisย 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 Smithโs โUnder Mi Sleng Teng,โย which came out of Jamaica in 1985 and โkick-started a new genre and changed the islandโs culture almost overnight.โ The beat came from ย the โrockโnโrollโ 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 โthe greatest preset sounds in pop music,โ including:
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 obviousย 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 โ50s and โ60s 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 Driftersโ โSave The Last Dance For Meโ and suddenly Panda Bear started singing. (The song was โLivinโ in the After.โ)
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 โobviousโ samples feel rich to me while other obvious samples sound cheap.
For example, I was at my kidsโ swim lesson the other day and a song that turned out to be Coldplayโs โTalkโ came on. Iโd never heard it all the way through, but the song takes a riff from Kraftwerkโs โComputer Loveโ and plays it throughout. It felt really cheap somehow to me in a way that โPlanet Rockโ โ which samples the Kraftwerk songs โTrans Europe Expressโ and โNumbersโ โ doesnโt.
Coldplay even cleared permission with Kraftwerkโs Ralf Hutter to use the song. But maybe thatโs 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 โ usually by someone in a more humble position (like with early hip-hop, the kind of Robin Hood theft of taking from your parentsโ 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 youโd hear on the mix at your kidsโ 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 โ whatever talents you may have will, in time, abandon you. If you steal, you must honour the action, further the idea, or be damned.ย
And speaking of Cave, I need to wrap this post up, so letโs bring it back to the beginning with a tweet by his bandmate and collaborator, Warren Ellis, on using presets to get started: