brubecksong.wav   This song marks the beginning of my love for sampling. It was the summer of 2004 and I was living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on Nostrand Ave. This was the third apartment I had moved to since graduating from architecture school. I made this with Reason on a desktop PC using a sample from a Dave Brubeck piano solo. I forget the name of the original song. I cut up one or two bars of the original song, drew a composition of the samples on a grid with the mouse, played the composition as an endless loop, then applied filter envelope and delay. I then switched between adjusting the cutoff and resonance of the filter envelope, and recorded the session with Audacity. I  also used Audacity to trim the session down to what this piece is now, but I made no other editing - no splicing or mastering.

 

dreamsong1.wav   I used the same method as brubecksong to make this soon after, using a sample from "I've got dreams" sung by Otis Redding. I made several other songs using this method, but ultimately abandoned the process because I felt it was too much about the delay, and that my projects were beginning to sound the same. While these two works were not created portably, they are the starting point for my love of creating with existing recorded music. It would be another year and a half before I got my first laptop.

 

emerson 2006-07-25 edit 1 2008-06-07.wav   This was a collaboration with my good friend Emerson, aka White Animal Sound System, who I was visiting in Cape Cod, in the summer of 2006. He is a laptop DJ who uses Ableton Live almost exclusively. Emerson played a sample from an instrumental track played by a Chilean band, and I recorded him with my laptop, using Sound Forge. I then played back the sample from various starting points which I determined by looking at the wave form. At the same time, Emerson manipulated the sample with Ableton Live's effects processors. I recorded the session with my portable sound recorder. The session was much, much longer, and we used more of the source and added drums, but I feel this section best captures the mood we were in, and it was in this session that I found in Emerson someone who I genuinely enjoyed improvising with. Every time I see him, we make music, but we don't always get a chance to record. In fact, it always turns into a headache every time we try to record because we're missing a certain cable or adaptor, or someone forgets to press the record button. EDIT 2009-01-11: Check out White Animal Sound System here!!!

 

Peru - KALIMBA.mp3   I made this with my Sony Playstation Portable, using a homebrew application called PSP Rhythm, which is primarily a sequencer, but also has some sampling capabilities. This piece was an entry for a song contest held on the program developer's website. The rules were to use one sample of my choice and the drum sounds that they provided. For my sample, I recorded myself playing a kalimba. I stopped using this application when I got my MPC 500, but I would still recommend it to anyone looking to make music with their PSP (the PSP must have a custom firmware on it). I also made a custom skin for PSP Rhythm 7 called Minimal Style, which is available on the developer's website. Oh yeah, my user name on that site was 'peru', and I did not win the contest.

 

emerson 070710 - edit 2 - 2008-06-07.wav   I had just gotten my MPC 500 and I was still learning the basics when I visited Emerson again in Cape Cod, in the summer of 2007. While he was working, I went to the library to go through their CD's on my laptop, looking for samples. I got the sample used here from a Yo Yo Ma album, I think it's called "The Silk Road". When the library closed, I hung out at Emerson's work and cut up the samples with my laptop. That night, it took me about half an hour to load the samples onto my MPC and to assign them to the drum pads. The drum sounds used are from a CD that came with a compact flash storage card that I got off ebay. I played the samples and drums live, while Emerson did his thing on Ableton Live with the same Yo Yo Ma samples, and I recorded the session with my laptop. Soon after, I decided to sample only from the radio, and to cut up samples only with my MPC, since I did not want to rely so much on my laptop.