post004: library crew AKA bargain blog raiders
this isn’t about my old rap group, although my old deejay put me up on this fun new hobby! in a effort to look for music and stay motivated in this super shifting counter culture, I started exploring various blogs in the hopes of finding some “old-new shit” to flip for these new seasons. not unlike fashion designers trawling second hand/vintage stores and estate sales for inspiration amongst the piles and piles of moth-ridden garments worn by whoever, whenever. SO much amazing music has gone unsung amongst the throngs of titles that have been released in the last 60 years alone. as technology progresses, so does the vast library of music that is both made as a reaction to said, technology and preserved for archival purposes. even though the archival of physical recordings of decades past is often frowned upon and even dismissed due to occupying space, the original recorded works are more than music encoded on a medium. the fabrication of the vinyl medium itself is a time capsule into the technological processes and artistic representation of the particular time. some records had all sorts of wacky and wild “processes” that helped record the material in question, along with preserving the initial “pristine” quality of the live recording situation. the record was supposed to be a substitute for the live show experience, one that could not be easily appreciated by the average listener due to any number of physical, regional or logistical scenarios. what brought the record to the 3-D world was inconsequential, as was the artistic compensation and entitlement that is now boxed with a record. people just wanted to enjoy the music in the most advanced way available to them. this is why the first 7 inch sold over a million copies, everyone WANTED it.
anyway, back to library records. the blogs are doing a great job (with emphasis on a finite amount) keeping everyone up to speed on the more acquired vinyl that haunted bargain bins and collector’s crates over antiquity. with the whole WAV and FLAC/OGG_VORBIS formats, dudes are essentially encoding records with a 65-75% accuracy rate in respect to dynamic range and spectrum. for the modern day sound sampling individual, this is a dream come true. you have to remember that most production equipment in the “golden age” of hip hop was probably 12 to 16 bits with an output of 44.1khz. the SP-1200 had a rate of 26.04khz with 12 bits of resolution! what type of sound were you hoping to get with 12 bits?!? all the shit that MADE the music had to do with outboard gear, the recording source (most likely 2” tape, thanks to SweatsonTake for that old school reminder) and the engineer behind the boards. those dudes were still cutting tape like Teo Macero back then! if you are into sampling source material, you only need to give a care about the source and the signal path. if you have shady wires or a suspect source, your sampler will take a picture of that and crunch it to however many numbers between 8 and 48 that you see yourself dealing with, give or take 44,100 slices every second.
be up on some game and familiarize yourself with the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, if you aren’t already up on it. it helps explain some stuff in a complex (but scientifically analytical way) and if you mix it up with other stuff like time stretching and anti-aliasing and phasing fuck-ups, you can get some odd sounds and that is the WHOLE POINT. I thought sampling was all about sampling, not what you sampled it off of…….
