I'd like to sneak in a movie recommendation here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_(2014_film), semi-related to the thread. Be aware that there are a lot of Eden movies, as well as another one in that same year.
Maybe they didn't. They are musicians, not just DJs so it's entirely possibly that they made an entire track from scratch. Their last album I think was a lot of originals not using pastiche IIRC.
There are a hell of a lot of samples used throughout Discovery. If Something About Us was entirely original then it would be an outlier.
Also their latest album (Random Access Memories) came more than a decade later than Discovery and was departure from their older techno roots.
You also have to bear in mind that while Discovery is a great album, it wasn’t created in a vacuum. Electronic artists sampling rock and funk music was in vogue at the time. With artists like Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy having their own seminal albums with heavy use of creative sampling.
If you look at popular electronic music from that era, more tracks have made use of sampling than tracks that haven’t.
> Maybe they didn't. They are musicians, not just DJs
I think that’s rather disparaging to artists who do sample. Producing electronic music might be a different skill to playing the guitar but it’s still a difficult craft to learn. It’s also an entirely different skill to DJing
Source: myself, who was a DJ and producer in the Daft Punk era.
Interestingly, there aren't any listed on whosampled, but a comment there calls out that the bass line borrows extremely heavily from Curtis Mayfield's Tripping Out (and a bit more than the bass, if you listen to it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCR6ecWb064
Not quite a sample necessarily, but more than a bit of inspiration there.
And when you watch the Discovery sample deconstruction videos, it becomes obvious just how much artistry went into their albums... how they'd hear the tiny guitar riff and mix it into exactly what they need for so many tracks.
Something About Us is the odd track on the album that does not use any known samples. The backing music is likely inspired by Oliver Cheatham's "Get Down Saturday Night", which Daft Punk has sampled in two other songs (Voyager and the intro to their 1997 BBC1 Essential Mix).
> Also their latest album (Random Access Memories) came more than a decade later than Discovery and was departure from their older techno roots.
I don’t know. When it came out it felt very off brand, but now another decade later looking back, it feels pretty on brand and more of an evolution than a revolution.
I feel the same about Radioheads Kid A. It was quite controversial when it came out, but looking back it’s like OK Computer was 1 step and Kid A another step.
As to sampling being in vogue, I think it’s more of a copyright enforcement thing that have pushed a lot of artist to create their own samples.
Using samples doesn't mean not musician. A lot of progressive rock used the Mellotron which are clever tape loops. The biggest artists of the 80s used Fairlights and Emulators. Entire genres of music owe some lineage to Akai. If you are "producing" (in the arranging, mixing, mastering sense) today in a DAW you probably use sampling techniques all over the place even if you did a live take of real instruments. The sampler is a real instrument.
I don't think parent tried to say they're not musicians because they used samples. But more like they had more options, since they weren't just DJs, so it's possible they actually did sound design themselves, rather than sampled it. Someone who only knows DJing obviously has less options available in the beginning if they start producing.
That said, Daft Punk did rely heavily on samples all over the place (not a bad thing), and it would be surprising if there was tracks out there where they didn't use any samples at all.
I think the false dichotomy is really jarring. Setting up a straw-man population of "just DJs" that are yet capable of making sample-based music is fairly uninformed. And even "just DJs" picking the right tracks, cross fading at the right time, and potentially beat matching is still an artistic endeavor.
Listening to the break down of the tracks, they barely takes any music playing ability so I imagine they could have easily made them from scratch instead of using samples.
Artists don’t sample because they’re unable to perform elements of a track.
They sample because they hear an element of one track and go “that’s awesome, I want to use that creatively but in a different way”.
To that end, most of the samples you’ll hear are pretty simple to reproduce. And sometimes artists don’t get the license to use the sample so they are forced to reproduce (this happens a lot more with vocal samples from what I’m aware)
I don't know. I think it would be pretty difficult to reproduce say the Amen Break. You would have to be a great drummer and be able to reproduce that particular sound it has.
Drum machines have been around for literally decades.
You could take a sample of real drums and then structure it in a step sequencer which, again, is technology that’s been around for decades.
Or if you’re already signed to a label (like Daft Punk were at the time) and neither yourself nor any studio engineers have a clue how to use your hardware (also highly unlikely) then you’d pay a session musician to come in and record an original sample.
In fact this last part happens all the time even for artists who are actual musicians but want collaboration as part of their creative process.
So there are plenty of options available to create original samples. More often than not, artists don’t sample because they don’t have other options, they sample because it’s a desired part of the creative process.
Not to argue the point, but in the article, he can't get the snare sound right so he needed to revert to a sample. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of recreating sounds. It would be impossible for instance, to recreate the amen break with a sequencer because nothing would be on a quantized beat and every single drum hit is different.
> Not to argue the point, but in the article, he can't get the snare sound right so he needed to revert to a sample.
That’s a different problem. He is trying to exactly recreate a sample but without using the sample.
You wouldnt do that in released music because if you didn’t have clearance to use that sample then you’d be still breaking copyright law if you were to recreate it exactly. So what you’d do is recreate the essence of that sample but without making it exactly the same.
Also you ignored my point that professional studios have access to more resources and professionals too.
> I think you're underestimating the difficulty of recreating sounds.
I never said it was easy ;)
> It would be impossible for instance, to recreate the amen break with a sequencer because nothing would be on a quantized beat and every single drum hit is different.
Sequencers don’t quantise beats. You’re thinking of trackers and they are a completely different beast.
You can have your samples aligned any which way you like in sequencers. And even if you were to user a drum machine, you can add padding to your samples. Some drum machines also support dequantisation where they deliberately trigger the samples off beat to give the drums a more natural sound.
To give an example of how sequencers don’t quantise: I was hopelessly bad at producing and some of my earliest efforts had little to no quantization at all (if you can forgive the made up word) and thus I required an engineer to come in an redo most of what I did but have those samples triggered on beat. So I’m very familiar with how easy or hard it is to get drums aligned and how quantisation works in a DAW.
I did get better at producing as time went on but never good enough to even consider making a career out of it.
I couldn’t find anything on the samples used in Something About Us specifically, but chances are they did sample a few funk tracks to create that.
Discovery is a great album. And the anime story that runs through the album is a delight to watch too.