Stop Working So Hard

Last weekend, I was in the recording studio with a fellow producer. It was his studio, and we were working on some ideas for a rapper/singer.

Any time you’re working with another producer or songwriter, you have to be open-minded. Their ideas are just as valuable as yours. Your best hope is that, collaboratively, you can bring something to the table.

As to what I was bringing— it was samples. Namely, a library I’ve been collecting for more than 25 years. They were organized on a playlist, which sounds simple enough, but on each song were specific parts that I felt the best samples could be found.

For example, on one song, the sample might have been the drum break; on another, a small loopable section, one or two bars in length; other songs, I felt the whole composition could be used as inspiration (in other words, we want the new song to feel like the old song, but not use any of the original).

We’re talking hundreds of records; a playlist that made sense to me, but to someone else, would be quite confusing. Like someone placing a bunch of random ingredients on a table and saying, here, turn this into cake.

With a little direction though, we very quickly decided on a sample. And the producer (I’ll leave him nameless, just because I don’t want to put his business out there like that) got to chopping the loop. Now, I heard something very specific on this record that I wanted to sample; he heard something different.