I was curious about the new Music Weeklies Challenge theme, and when I went to see what it was, I learned the friendly music-making community hit a big milestone.
I absolutely had to participate. And it was an opportunity to try out my latest project to find some good samples.
My instinct told me to see what the very first theme was.
Humanity.
Alright, that’s a good one. There’s definitely a few ideas I can play with. Maybe I could make a song that’s entirely made with vocal samples. That could work pretty well.
(Note that the following outtakes are pretty rough, very demo-level quality. I’m just playing around with some ideas here.)
Alright, I guess I was wrong. Way too dramatic.
Maybe I could try some tribal drums, that ties into the theme of (early) humans.
Yeah, I don’t know, maybe I should go back to the first idea and just try to make it more upbeat.
I genuinely can’t tell if this is better or worse. At this point I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere. I need a fresh start.
This is not a terrible starting point, brass can definitely represent humanity. But it’s a bit, I don’t know. A bit boring, maybe even obvious. Too celebratory.
Alright, fifth time’s the charm. Let’s maybe play around with those film samples.
That’s better. And the fact that the time (more or less by accident) added up to exactly 2:00, that’s just a nice little touch.
This process of trial and error reminds me a story about a pottery class that shows that quantity matters just as much, if not more, than quality.
If done right, it turns out that, quantity leads to quality.
And if you’re curious, here’s the full list of films that I sampled:
- A Bucket of Blood
- A Star Is Born
- Angel and the Badman
- Beat the Devil
- Blood on the Sun
- Letter of Introduction
- Meet John Doe
- The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
- The Front Page
- The Last Time I Saw Paris
- The Man with the Golden Arm
- The Third Man (also used in challenge #174)
