the nuum back lash

gek-opel

entered apprentice
IMO, it's harder to do the grime dayglo sonic plastic thing than it is to do grainy stuff. To do the latter you layer samples or just programme up something with a "realistic" patch. To do the plastic sound in a way that sounds primitive and basic is actually very hard to do properly. And the rhythmic invention in grime programming is significant - you don't just knock it out of Music on a PlayStation2, you have to have real technical chops (in music on a ps2!). Or Fruity - it's not easy at all to do a dillemma or a know we.

Just a geeky perspective on this :).

And anyway there's loads of "grain" on grime records - it's called MCing!

Im not getting into the rhythmical aspect as my opinion on that (ie: early Grime=cubistic anti-funk genius and the last word in rhythmical innovation in pop to date) is known (hopefully). Just in textural/timbral terms... I always personally found with soft-studios the non-realist plasticky sound pretty easy to create. Not that "ease" is a problematic thing for a musician per se by any means (or that authenticity resides in "grain" or that even if it did that was immediately to be valued over the smooth/denatured...)
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Yes it's about what happens when you let the technology, in this case software, be itself. You can get close to the sound of older discrete equipment but that actually takes a deliberate effort in that direction - introducing bit reduction, saturation, small timing inconsistencies etc., aside from aping the obvious compositional aspects of earlier styles.
 

straight

wings cru
rhythmically speaking i think you're forgetting the syncopation that was going in turn of the century RnB in tunes like Busta Rhymes 'whats it gonna be' which was clearly a blueprint for future grime with its icy, funkless drums and double time rapping. they didnt exctly pull this out of the air, they were replicating the biggest sound of the day with shit software. doing anything with funk in fruity is a pain in the arse.
 
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Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
Im not getting into the rhythmical aspect as my opinion on that (ie: early Grime=cubistic anti-funk genius and the last word in rhythmical innovation in pop to date) is known (hopefully).
Yeah man :). But I think it is deeply, deeply funky, and not just early grime either, I think it's got better since 03!

Just in textural/timbral terms... I always personally found with soft-studios the non-realist plasticky sound pretty easy to create.
Well, you can make a patch fairly easily - I mean you could just have a sine wave and a square wave - but the rhythm of the sequence is really hard to do. (Though a bit easier on my ancient PC laptop than on my nice sleek mac...)

Not that "ease" is a problematic thing for a musician per se by any means (or that authenticity resides in "grain" or that even if it did that was immediately to be valued over the smooth/denatured...)
Yeah yeah... the grain and authenticity comes when you hear these plinky noises on the radio with an MC on it... Another angle here is the string sounds... using (pirated) orchestral sound libraries that were recorded very expensively and authentically, and then deliberately making them sound as mechanical and unauthentic as possible.

So. Dancehall really...
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
rhythmically speaking i think you're forgetting the syncopation that was going in turn of the century RnB in tunes like Busta Rhymes 'whats it gonna be' which was clearly a blueprint for future grime with its icy, funkless drums and double time rapping. they didnt exctly pull this out of the air, they were replicating the biggest sound of the day with shit software. doing anything with funk in fruity is a pain in the arse.
Yes yes yes... you're absolutely right...

And that copying goes back further than grime. Garage was all about taking r'n'b rhthym programming and speeding it up to house speed and then twisting in jungle basslines / warps and jungle break manipulation. (And it goes back to junglists like Tom & Jerry using r'n'b rhythm templates at 80 / 160 bpm.) You take some Lauryn Hill tunes and speed them up to 130bpm and it's 2step.

Grime was doing exactly the same thing but with even less kit than the garage mob had (the 2step people often worked out of proper studios, grime out of the bedroom).

Again, I think those records were immensely funky - not in a James Brown Funky President sense, but in a George Clinton Loopzilla / Computer Games sense. It's still da funk! And so's Grime!
 

dHarry

Well-known member
Kant believe you're too jung, freudened and deleuded by the joyce of whitehead guattari music indie bands plato you by descartes-load. Just the sort of nietzcherk reaction I'd expect from a bunch of nancy boys in lyotards. What the hegel are you thinking? Get the foucault while you lacan - my kristeval ball tells me it'll soon be all about the benjamins, you marx my words. Don't get derrided for barthesing up the wrong tree.

Pierce, out.




:rolleyes:




:eek:
 

straight

wings cru
and its a lot to do with the fact the default tempo when you start up fruity is 140, 90's techno hangover.
 

Pestario

tell your friends
Surely, you could have worked Dewey into there somewhere ;)

Anyway, on the grime and Fruity thing: the default Fruity sounds when you start the program up i.e. the very inorganic, plasticy kick, clap, highhat and snare samples seemed to have set the baseline sound palette for the whole genre. I wondered what would have happened if the default sampleset was dramatically different, like organic hiphop drums or jazz samples. Would grime have sounded completely different or were the cheap samples purposely sought?
 

Blackdown

nexKeysound
my take is that, taken from a distance, the 'nuum theory functions well as it says in general that 'from this demographic/location/community interesting music will emerge, mutating a loosely similar set of reference points.'

where is breaks down, which a lot of people seem to have pointed out, is when you get close and try to include every single genre and it's causal relation to others. at this point, exceptions and overstretching are inevitable.

as for the philosopher pun-off... i reckon: "respek" and "you geeks!" in equal measure!
 
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