A brilliant 18 minute documentary available on YouTube. The “Amen Break” is a 6 second drum loop from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. It is surprising how many times it has been used in different tracks over the years especially in Hip Hop, Drum & Bass and Jungle.


Direct link to Actual YouTube Video

One thing that every electronic musician should have is a big collection of samples in which they can come to when composing and quickly select one needed or to experiment with, these are my tips on sound sample collecting which can help you expand your collection, keep organized and create some interesting results.

1. With samples one of the most important things to do is to stay legal and organized. A simple way to do this is to sort your samples into different folders on your hard drive by license type (for example folders called Royalty Free, Free To Use Non Commercially and Creative Commons Samples). Then within those folders put the samples into more folders entitled by the source you found them (for example a folder called The Freesound Project). Using this method you can easily see the license and source of sample when choosing.
2. Some days when you aren’t feeling musically creative it is much better to have a day of creating samples instead. I’ve had many a day when I’ve either sat in front of a synth experimenting making patches or in front of a microphone recording sounds. Splitting the making samples process from the writing music process can really benefit both areas
3. Experiment as much as possible with different sounds in front of a microphone. You can get some great sounds from simple household objects. One of my favourites is pots and pans (Now everyone thinks I’ve gone mad!) but I’ve ended up layering these sounds together with other drum sounds to create whole new sounds. Try reversing them too and you get these metallic sounding whooshes from pots and pans (I hear them in films all the time). Sounds like you banging on cardboard boxes or slamming doors layered with kick drums can create whole new sounding kicks. Go round your house finding different things to hit with different things. The list is endless, family will think you’ve gone mad but the results can be amazing, interesting and really add something different to your music. That band called Stomp with the metal bins comes to mind.

4. Lots of sounds can be made with the mouth too, check out HumanBeatbox.com. Now you might be thinking but I can’t beatbox like that Gavin TyTe (The guy in the vids). No maybe not, but on that site there are some excellent tutorials on how to replicate kicks, snares and hats with your mouth which can on their own be done quite easily and quickly (the hard part is putting it all together). Then create your own personal HumanBeatBox drum kit in your favourite drum machine software or in Propellerheads Reason or Fruity Loops. The results can be very good especially with some reverb, delay and chorus effects on.
5. Keep a look out on eBay and in your charity shops, I’ve managed to buy some shakers, tambourines for next to nothing. Sampled them as much as I could and then got rid by reselling on eBay or donating back to the charity shop.
6. Make shakers out of containers and those dried peas and rice you can get from the supermarket. Sometimes they might not sound like the real thing but with a little bit of reverb on they can sound pretty good. Plastic drinks bottles or those plastic yoghurt drink bottles work really well for this. Small gravel from the garden is good too.
7. If you have friends who are musicians and create their own samples then maybe you can swap ones you’ve made with ones they’ve made, this can increase your collection and theirs very quickly.
8. Borrow instruments off of friends or relatives, sample them and then give them back. Ask to go round and sample their piano, guitar or violin. Maybe you have a wannabe singer in the family, ask them to do some simple vocal singing phrases.
9. There are some music making magazines which regularly have CDs full of samples on (make sure you check the licensing though and put them in your appropriate folder (see tip #1). I regularly visit my market where there is a magazine stall which sells magazines that are a couple of months old and I pick up these for £1 each. Libraries may also have them if they stock the magazines.
10. Subscribe to our RSS feed or bookmark this site in your favourites as we are going to release lots of sample packs over the coming months which are free to use as well as links to other sites with free samples.

Hopefully from this list of tips and ideas for samples you can go away and maybe introduce something new into your music or create some personalised sound samples. I shall release a few of my own samples which use some of the ideas in this article over the next couple of months so look out for them.

Article written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation

This featured web site is a great little site for all us musicians who want to release our tracks for distribution on the internet (or anywhere else). When releasing our tracks most of us want our listeners to distribute them around as this is great and free exposure, but it does kind of feel like you’ve either got to copyright your music completely as if it was being released by a major label or just give it away and let anyone do what they like with it. Thankfully this is where Creative Commons comes in.

Creative commons is a non-profit organization which provides pre-written licenses for us musicians (as well as many other forms of licenses for other mediums). All you’ve got to do is go on their web site and choose a license that you feel will work best for you, keeping some of your rights whilst waiving other rights (Some Right Reserved).

I release all my music files and sample files on Rhythm Creation under the creative commons licenses. I believe people find the licenses very easy to understand as Creative Commons provide these very easy to read “Human-readable” versions of the licenses and it really sets out in plain English (or any other language) the rights that you are keeping as well as what you are letting your listeners do with your music.

They also provide you with buttons and links so you can direct people from your Web Site, Blog, My Space or whatever you use to the copies of the licenses. It really is a great way for us musicians who want to keep some rights reserved and not all rights reserved or reversed.

This is one of the things that I have always had trouble with, getting my tracks out to the public and at the same time starting to receive some sort of income from any sales I make. I managed just that recently and thought that my story and experience so far should be shared with other musicians who want to do the same without the need for a record label…

As you may of seen I recently released my first ever EP called The Rhythm Creator EP. I had actually made this 3 track EP with the intention of it being a demo to send off to a few record labels. I went on the search for a few labels that might be interested in my tracks, only to find that my music doesn’t really fit any of the dance/electronic music labels, as they tend to release from a very narrow genre of music where most of their tracks sound the same on each label (Which I actually think is killing electronic music, but that’s another post).

So I skipped the whole getting signed to a label thing and thought to myself about what a label actually does for a musician today in the age of the internet and realised that the only thing a label does for you today is to promote your music (And it looks like they sometimes do a bad job at that too) and then take a large cut of any royalties. So I decided I’m going do this myself and release my tracks digitally on-line via the now many Mp3 stores such as iTunes.

So I went along to the mp3 stores web sites, went to their FAQs and looked for the question “I am a musician, how do I sell my music in this store”. Only to see the answer at all of these sites to be along the lines of “we only accept bands/musicians who are established/signed to a label” or that “you’ve got to fill out this hefty long form and then wait months” (With the possibility of not being accepted and I’ve even heard of people not even getting a reply just to say they are not accepted)

Surely this has got to be easier and that’s when I came across TuneCore . At first I was a bit sceptical because I have seen companies like this in the past who want to firstly charge you a hefty sign-up fee running into 3 figures, they then want to take commission on your royalties and then they also have the cheek to want to take ownership of your copyrights. But I’m glad to say that TuneCore does none of that and that’s why I’m happy as both a musician to use them for my own work as well as advise you as my blog readers to use them too.

Click here for TuneCore

So with my three Mp3 files and a cover I knocked up in GIMP (A free picture manipulation program), I applied to TuneCore to release my tracks on iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic, and GroupieTunes on December 3rd. I uploaded my files and cover, paid the sum of $32 (about £16), they said that it would take about 6-8 weeks and so I sat back and waited.

As I post this my EP is still in the processing stage but I decided to write this post as I am pleased to say that all my tracks have appeared on both Amazon and Napster official site after just 5 days (They may have been there before this but I just didn’t look) which is way before the 6-8 weeks, I’m still waiting for the other stores and I can’t wait to see them on there especially on iTunes. The best thing about this though is that I keep any royalties made and TuneCore doesn’t take a thing and I get to keep copyright control. What could be better than that? If you decide to use TuneCore I believe you are making a wise choice, I also believe that this looks like we could be getting towards a good era for musicians where you will see more going it alone without record labels and anyone who decides this is the way to go after reading this, I wish you good luck.

There may be some other companies that offer the same services as TuneCore, but obviously I can’t comment on them because I haven’t used them. I’m going to be using TuneCore again definately. The only thing left to do is to promote my tracks to get some interest, which is probably where I am going to struggle so if anyone has any great ideas on how to do this I would love to hear them and if anyone has had anything to add about TuneCore, I would love to hear it especially any success stories.

Article written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.

When I was looking for ways to promote Rhythm Creation over the internet I came across Seth Godin’s Blog and I noticed this facinating article today about lessons that can be learnt from the current music industry. It is a very interesting read and I thought I would point out this article because I think it brings up some very good points and also some ideas for us musicians.

I particularly like this following quote…

“Many musicians have understood that all they need to make a (very good) living is to have 10,000 fans. 10,000 people who look forward to the next record, who are willing to trek out to the next concert. Add 7 fans a day and you’re done in 5 years. Set for life. A life making music for your fans, not finding fans for your music…”

When you spread that out over 5 years it makes success seem very achievable? Also check out Seth Godin’s other articles because he does have some wonderful ideas towards marketing and promotion which you may be able to utilise for you music.

Music Lessons Article Link
Seth Godin’s Blog

Releasing your music on the bit torrent network for people to download can help get you some free publicity and I have a few tips for those who are starting to upload their own music through the torrent networks and sites such as The Pirate Bay that can help distribution and get people downloading your tracks.

• 1. Write a readme file and include information about any of your releases and where you can get them from, include web addresses, myspace accounts and any other way in which they can find out more about your music. Save this as a txt file so everyone can open it just by clicking on it.
• 2. Place a good track as the first one in the torrent by numbering them in the order you want them in. I’ve noticed that most people download the first track to see whether they like your music before downloading the rest of torrent, so make it a good one that shows off the style and quality of your music that you produce.
• 3. Make sure you can seed the torrent well and ask friends to help you seed it. Also encourage other people to seed for as long as possible in your descriptions and readme file. If you don’t want to leave your computer on over night, make sure you upload the torrents to these sites early in the day, so some other people can seed through the night to other locations around the world.
• 4. Describe your music to people by telling them the closest style of your music in the readme file and the descriptions on the torrent sites and even in the title of your torrent, try to go as broad a style as possible to get the most people downloading it. For example I used Electronica as my category. Also maybe give a few bands that your music sounds like, for example some of your musical influences.
• 5. Encourage people to distribute your tracks, tell people they can use your tracks for podcasts, youtube videos, radio stations etc as long as they credit you as the artist. Tell them that it’s legal to distribute for any free and uncommercial projects. You never know you might just get someone who wants to use your tracks on their popular podcast or radio station. It’s free exposure for your music.

Hopefully these quick tips I have learnt and thought about may go some way to helping you make the most of using torrents for promotion. If anyone has any other tips they think will be useful to others that should belong here, please add them to the comments of this post.

Article written for Rhythm Creation by Edward Cufaude