This one is going to be pretty loose. I think everyone of us here has got a few things that we have squirreled away that we never figured out how to use. And that’s what I want you to bring, whether that’s a record you wanted to flip or maybe a little piece of music you recorded yourself. Anything you’ve got that you think is cool or at least has potential but you haven’t figured out exactly how to use.
I’m going to put one guideline for the sample submissions. I’d like you to limit them to basically just music or something you think could be made into music like a weird percussive thing. But something that could potentially be the centerpiece of a track. In other words, I don’t have dialogue in mind for this.
Now for the legal:
Anyone who wants to join has to confirm in this thread by Sunday, September 12th. If you join, you have to supply a single sample for everyone else to use. This can be a youtube video, a link to a sample, or a sound file you’ve recorded yourself.
You cannot use the sample you posted in the thread.
The deadline for submitting your song is Monday, September 20th. You can submit the song in any format or on any platform, by posting it to this thread. You can only submit one single beat for the battle!
After this deadline we will vote in a new thread. Only people who participated can vote, and only after listening to each song. You’ll choose one song as your first place pick and two runners up. Each first place pick will be worth two points. Runners up will each receive one point. You cannot vote for yourself.
Please don’t post beat entries before the deadline for posting samples (9/12), as things will get confusing!
Here are the battle-specific rules:
No restrictions on other instruments or outside samples. Acapellas welcome.
Use at least one sample provided by someone else in the thread.
And this one isn’t a rule, it’s more of a request. Since we’re focusing on samples that people have tried to figure out how to use, I’d like for you to put the focus on at least one of the samples that you use as opposed to piecing together bits from everything. But the creative process is going to take you where it takes you so again, this is just a request.
Anyway, I like this a whole lot but for whatever reason every time I tried to flip it was a bad time.
Another Dutch prog rock one. I tried to get this to sound like ‘me’ a couple of times, but failed each time. I feel one of you guys could make a total banger out of this one though…
I can’t think of anything that fits your exact criteria, i tend to sample randomly without even checking song titles sometimes and if it doesn’t work for me first off, I quickly forget about it.
Although I was going to resample this track at some point, not necessarily because I didn’t like what I did with it originally but because I thought I could make something different as there’s some nice chords in there.
The drums are also panned to one side so you can easily remove them to get open sounds.
I’m in! Last year i took a big box full of old vinyl records in my grandma’s house, in which there’s a lot of Sardane records. It’s a traditional music from catalonia, a region in the south of france/North of spain, mediteranean side, grandma is from there. I never manage to use those records convincingly. So here is my submission!
Here is quite a personal one. Maybe 15 years ago I was on a business trip to Hungary, interpreting for some Japanese engineers. I was really into record digging at the time so on our one day off, I dragged these old Japanese dudes around used shops in Budapest looking for records.
One of the places we went to was a tiny little used shop (sort of like a thrift store) and the young guy that ran it was all disco’ed out in an all white suit. I explained to him that I was looking for something from Hungary or Eastern Europe that was kind of funky and he busted this gem out.
I never ended up doing anything with it, but it reminds me of something DJ Shadow would have murdered back in the day, especially when the drums kick in.
I hope somebody makes something dope out of this one.
Dope. I like all the stories and explanations that go with these. Mine’s not that interesting. It’s just one of the records I got from my dad when I started making beats way back when.
Damn your submissions are so good! Your’s is already chopped @Doug and i think i will feed my digitakt in the next few days, there’s tons of material !
Yeah, listening to these, I’m thinking that after the voting is said and done we should share our outtakes as well. I think I’m going to wind up making a bunch of beats.
I hope this hasn’t been submitted already in a previous battle. Let me know if it did.
This one is a long video, but it’s really the first part that I tried to grab pieces of to make something.
I should have taken these parts and make something about it instead of trying to bend them to my track I guess.
Another time. Now is your turn!
(Plus there are some instrumental at the end, this video is rich, buddy)
As I’ve said previously, I come from a band/guitar background… so my failures are only slightly more rare than my 2 non-failures… those being the last 2 Beat Battles…
Anyway, in the spring of 1997 I got my hands on a Fostex D-160 and got to know the digital editing side of it quite well… my first attempt at sampling was on the D-160, and I used to painstakingly copy and paste drum hits on it.
The Who’s ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ was the first commercial track I sampled… I took the ‘chang’ vocal/accent hits at around 4.25 to emphasise some chords I had in a track.
The results were pretty horrendous… so here you go.
At the end of the 90s I was mining the charity shops of Southampton (where I lived at the time) for open drums, promising loops and spoken word (with my successes in each being very much in reverse order).
By the time I got to making my own tracks and sending them to labels it was 1999 and one of the samples I’d found was this:
I paired it with some dusty drums and a bit of Captain Beefheart spoken word and was relatively happy with it. Fast forward a few years and Amon Tobin dropped ‘Supermodified’ - which featured “my” sample! I was gutted - of course I couldn’t do anything with my track now, I decided… and then, to add further insult to injury, Luke Vibert used the same Beefheart sample! If I had considered rescuing the track before then, that was definitely the final nail in the coffin.
I always intended to go back and flip it harder, but I never got around to it so now it’s time for somebody else to do the honours.
okay, this is a jam. it hasn’t defeated me yet, but my last attempt using it was not satisfying. for whatever reason, it didn’t quite fit, no matter how i chopped it. please turn this into a banger.
I’m in. I’m pretty new to sampling, so everything’s a challenge. I’ve never sampled this song, but I think one of you could make something good with this tune; it has one of the best bass lines I’ve ever heard!
Congratulations Again on the win. This is a great theme @Doug! I have just the thing. Last winter we went to the Palm Springs area since the kids could do school from anywhere (remote learning) so it was a chance to at least miss the the crummy PNW rainy season (the one great upside of COVID). The place we rented had a bunch of records and since I brought my digitakt I had a few whiskys one night and started sampling all these records. I got this one little passage (that comes in at about 1:33) from this record. I have come back to it again and again but have had no luck in making something useful out of it. I really hope one of you creates something beautiful out of it but I also hope I can eventually do it.
Nice one @Doug - while I think of my sample I did wonder if I could suggest a scoring change .
Two pts for the winner, one for each runner up.
I know it can be difficult to pick runners up in order, and the current scoring puts quite a Gulf between 1st and 3rd… when often the ordering is down to the day rather than 1st place being three times as good as third. I think it will keep the scoring a little closer, and maybe more interesting. Just a thought…
and i think i will feed my digitakt in the next few days, there’s tons of material !
