Especially back then, in the time of vinyls and cassettes (browsing music wasn't exactly as easy as pressing "play"), it shows the amazingly deep musical culture of these artists. The samples they use are from all over the place, and their songs are often built around a handful of seconds from obscure b-sides.
A genuine confusion for me - as a visual artist - about how two things can be true: this can be a great love letter to such an iconic and brilliant song, and also why generative AI was used to create accompanying imagery in this article. I don't see how an piece about the 'joys of music production' - aka, creativity - should also actively be anti-creative. To me, those two thoughts seem completely opposing.
Not just the imagery, very clearly the text as well. It really puts me off of reading an article when it's so obvious, I'm not sure why. It almost feels like the author is trying to pull something over on me.
> "A huge part of the joy came from working in Ableton Live 12, which now feels like an extension of how I think" I feel the same way, but for Reaper
Seeing the author mentions that decomposition of the snare is the hardest, and that’s what I was trying to solve in https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce (just an idea).
Multimodality AI is much more powerful now. I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
When I was teaching kids with Glicol, I often used KraftWerk’s Das Model as an example:
> I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
Was thinking along the same lines as I fell into the trap of Ghiblifying pictures earlier this week. As someone who spent countless hours in my childhood trying to copy the styles of my favorite comic books (Japanese and otherwise), at some point in this AI exercise I started rendering each picture in the artistic styles of each of my favorite artists and placing them side by side for comparison. Realized an exercise like this would have been very useful back when I drew in comparing different styles and what _exactly_ made them different. Maybe it speaks more to how I think —- lacking a true artistic intuition —- but simply comparing styles and giving words to their distinctions helped me appreciate them in a way I hadn't (of course the AI didn't produce a perfect representation but a crude enough approximation)
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).
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.
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'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.
I haven't touched music production stuff for about 18 years (Mackie D8b + protools represent), however its great to see someone break down a song bit by bit. It also helps that the song they are covering is a banger.
For a slightly tangentially related podcast you might like https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106lb which is where a bunch of musicians each week create a playlist of 4 songs that each have a link.
It's incredible how deeply ingrained in memory some of those songs are that I immediately start to notice the slightest deviation.
Daft Punk especially for me represent a merger of musical genius and perfect execution.
As this is on HN I wonder how far in the future AI will excel at recreating/analysing songs. It seems like it could lend itself extremely well for this type of task.
If you're a fan of both Daft Punk and the late 70s/80s Anime aesthetic mentioned in the article and haven't yet seen "Interstella 5555", drop everything and do so now.
Daft Punk have been my favorite artists for most of my life. Waking up to the announcement of their disbandment was the first time I've been truly sad about the "passing" of an artist
This youtube channel has a whole pile of sampling recreations.
Daft Punk: Discovery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqHSvR9bqs
Daft Punk: One More Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwOpRh-IfI
Mos Def: Mathematics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--A_89lTuiA
Pogo: Alice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au7RYxqaO10
Fatboy Slim: Rockafeller Skank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsRzyQ-TfM
And this 30 minute compilation that spans four decades is utterly mesmerizing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpaoCUEhZJM
Thank you for this, amazing to see a glimpse into how they come up with the songs!
Especially back then, in the time of vinyls and cassettes (browsing music wasn't exactly as easy as pressing "play"), it shows the amazingly deep musical culture of these artists. The samples they use are from all over the place, and their songs are often built around a handful of seconds from obscure b-sides.
not about Daft punk but..
> The samples they use are from all over the place
> built around a handful of seconds
have you seen/head this?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mondovision
the original was at www.giovannisample.com which disappeared..
A genuine confusion for me - as a visual artist - about how two things can be true: this can be a great love letter to such an iconic and brilliant song, and also why generative AI was used to create accompanying imagery in this article. I don't see how an piece about the 'joys of music production' - aka, creativity - should also actively be anti-creative. To me, those two thoughts seem completely opposing.
Not just the imagery, very clearly the text as well. It really puts me off of reading an article when it's so obvious, I'm not sure why. It almost feels like the author is trying to pull something over on me.
We humans can't be great at everything.
Very interesting article and process.
> "A huge part of the joy came from working in Ableton Live 12, which now feels like an extension of how I think" I feel the same way, but for Reaper
Seeing the author mentions that decomposition of the snare is the hardest, and that’s what I was trying to solve in https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce (just an idea).
Multimodality AI is much more powerful now. I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
When I was teaching kids with Glicol, I often used KraftWerk’s Das Model as an example:
https://glicol.org/demo#themodel
This rough midi version is very different from the original, but the kids had a lot of fun messing around with it.
> I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
Was thinking along the same lines as I fell into the trap of Ghiblifying pictures earlier this week. As someone who spent countless hours in my childhood trying to copy the styles of my favorite comic books (Japanese and otherwise), at some point in this AI exercise I started rendering each picture in the artistic styles of each of my favorite artists and placing them side by side for comparison. Realized an exercise like this would have been very useful back when I drew in comparing different styles and what _exactly_ made them different. Maybe it speaks more to how I think —- lacking a true artistic intuition —- but simply comparing styles and giving words to their distinctions helped me appreciate them in a way I hadn't (of course the AI didn't produce a perfect representation but a crude enough approximation)
Discovery is a great album but what this article misses is that Daft Punk, like a lot of electronic artists, heavily used samples.
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.
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.
God, I love Daft Punk.
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).
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.
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.
> Using samples doesn't mean not musician.
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.
Part of the magic of Daft Punk is using samples even when it does not sound like they're doing it
Of course they're musicians and they could make the track from scratch, but where's the fun in that :)
It looks like maybe they didn’t sample anything in that songs, https://www.whosampled.com/Daft-Punk/Something-About-Us/
For a super duper long time daft punk asserted that one more time had no samples, then one day someone figured it out.
Who knows? Today it has no samples, maybe tomorrow someone will find them.
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.
if you wanna find out who sampled who theres great sites where people collect this info (whosampled)
This is the kind of content I am here for.
I haven't touched music production stuff for about 18 years (Mackie D8b + protools represent), however its great to see someone break down a song bit by bit. It also helps that the song they are covering is a banger.
For a slightly tangentially related podcast you might like https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106lb which is where a bunch of musicians each week create a playlist of 4 songs that each have a link.
Related: this recreation of Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up. I'm amazed at the level of musical knowledge needed to do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU5Dn-WaElI
Damn I was about to post that, one of the best Ableton showcase ever made.
It's incredible how deeply ingrained in memory some of those songs are that I immediately start to notice the slightest deviation.
Daft Punk especially for me represent a merger of musical genius and perfect execution.
As this is on HN I wonder how far in the future AI will excel at recreating/analysing songs. It seems like it could lend itself extremely well for this type of task.
Related: Theremin cover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkp9bDGDd1w
If you're a fan of both Daft Punk and the late 70s/80s Anime aesthetic mentioned in the article and haven't yet seen "Interstella 5555", drop everything and do so now.
Hey Marca, thank you for this art and the inspiration bomb first thing in the morning
Keep them coming! <3
Yo! Don’t hate on BBEdit, it’s old but it’s still really really good. I’m using it everyday for everything.
Daft Punk have been my favorite artists for most of my life. Waking up to the announcement of their disbandment was the first time I've been truly sad about the "passing" of an artist
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