THIS version of my beat is comprised wholly of samples taken from the source material. NO extra drums or bass or any other sounds have been added. Everything you hear here is from the sample source.
The judge of the competition gave me a fairly low score for "sample usage", which is an agreed-upon matter of opinion, a subjective determination made by listening to a finished stereo mixdown. Obviously no one else is going to completely comprehend the work put into a piece of production if they weren't there with you looking over your shoulder the whole time. No hard feelings, toward the judge or the worthy opponent who defeated me.
I just wanted to post this for my own personal edification, because for years - okay decades - I've suspected that my style of sample production, where I strive to achieve a final product which sounds smooth and songy, can obscure the breakdown and reconstruction going on. I feel that people tend to listen to my stuff and just nod appreciatively, accepting the flow and arrangement as something I must've just found that way. Which is rarely the case.
Anyway, in THIS particular case, I used about sixteen loops and snippets from the source, edited and re-arranged in many different ways to play well together in the final mix. The bassline is one separate isolated track. I then have a harmony bassline track which comes in over it. The rimshot drum track is its own isolated track. The piano, the flutes, the vocal snippets, all on their own isolated tracks. The "cymbals" are actually an open hihat from the rimshot track that I isolated, extended and EQed. The ending section with an upbeat reggae arrangement of bassline and piano is a completely new construction by me.
So that's what I did. Obviously whether or not anyone likes the final product is up to them, a matter of opinion and taste and preference. I just wanted to clarify what my actual "sample usage" was. (Here is the actual submitted version including my drum programming: https://soundcloud.com/type4/less-is-more-head2head-2022-round-two) Thanks for your time!
