A random thought came into my head about The Field, as I just picked up a Tracker and I thought I might go back to Sublime for a bit of inspiration on ways of working with that sort of sequencing. I stumbled upon another comment from a different interview where Axel discusses his use of samples.
“I absolutely can’t talk about the specific samples, but what I’ve realized is that if I don’t have an emotional connection to the track I want to sample or the sample itself, it doesn’t really work.”
Interesting that he says he simply can’t talk about them. But aside from that, it got me thinking again about what to sample.
I’ve often felt that I’d work best with a close connection to the song I’m sampling from, and in fact I asked a question about this earlier on in my time on this board. I will say that I do use loops from packs in music I’d like to release for the simple reason that I can release with a clear conscience. That music is synth based, mostly, so the samples play less of a role anyway. I know others have a devil-may-care approach where they will sample literally anything. But I guess in my wonky way of thinking, if a sample is just meaningless sound source material, then sampling from commercial records seems like a risk when you could just get any old sound from a sample library and work with that… Anyway, I digress.
I would like to go back to just ripping stuff out of my favourite songs that inspire me and loop them in a somewhat similar way to the snippet I posted earlier. The only thing is I’d have to maybe keep them to myself in the era we’re in. But it would be awesome to go in with feeling to records I’m into to pull from and sample and try and loop the heck out of them in a Field inspired project. I never did finish that idea I had because it may contain fragments of a famous song, but if I can find a way of working through that, I might at least privately make some stuff that’s not for public consumption.
I bet it’s a minefield for Axel compared to when The Field started!