Recreating Daft Punk's Something About Us
thoughts-and-things.ghost.io
thoughts-and-things.ghost.io
Daft Punk: Discovery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqHSvR9bqs
Daft Punk: One More Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwOpRh-IfI
Mos Def: Mathematics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--A_89lTuiA
Pogo: Alice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au7RYxqaO10
Fatboy Slim: Rockafeller Skank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBsRzyQ-TfM
And this 30 minute compilation that spans four decades is utterly mesmerizing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpaoCUEhZJM
> The samples they use are from all over the place
> built around a handful of seconds
have you seen/head this?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mondovision
the original was at www.giovannisample.com which disappeared..
Any starter tutorials on how to make music like this? Ordering a drum pad rn
I couldn’t find anything on the samples used in Something About Us specifically, but chances are they did sample a few funk tracks to create that.
Discovery is a great album. And the anime story that runs through the album is a delight to watch too.
Also their latest album (Random Access Memories) came more than a decade later than Discovery and was departure from their older techno roots.
You also have to bear in mind that while Discovery is a great album, it wasn’t created in a vacuum. Electronic artists sampling rock and funk music was in vogue at the time. With artists like Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy having their own seminal albums with heavy use of creative sampling.
If you look at popular electronic music from that era, more tracks have made use of sampling than tracks that haven’t.
> Maybe they didn't. They are musicians, not just DJs
I think that’s rather disparaging to artists who do sample. Producing electronic music might be a different skill to playing the guitar but it’s still a difficult craft to learn. It’s also an entirely different skill to DJing
Source: myself, who was a DJ and producer in the Daft Punk era.
Not quite a sample necessarily, but more than a bit of inspiration there.
And when you watch the Discovery sample deconstruction videos, it becomes obvious just how much artistry went into their albums... how they'd hear the tiny guitar riff and mix it into exactly what they need for so many tracks.
God, I love Daft Punk.
I don’t know. When it came out it felt very off brand, but now another decade later looking back, it feels pretty on brand and more of an evolution than a revolution.
I feel the same about Radioheads Kid A. It was quite controversial when it came out, but looking back it’s like OK Computer was 1 step and Kid A another step.
As to sampling being in vogue, I think it’s more of a copyright enforcement thing that have pushed a lot of artist to create their own samples.
I don't think parent tried to say they're not musicians because they used samples. But more like they had more options, since they weren't just DJs, so it's possible they actually did sound design themselves, rather than sampled it. Someone who only knows DJing obviously has less options available in the beginning if they start producing.
That said, Daft Punk did rely heavily on samples all over the place (not a bad thing), and it would be surprising if there was tracks out there where they didn't use any samples at all.
Of course they're musicians and they could make the track from scratch, but where's the fun in that :)
They sample because they hear an element of one track and go “that’s awesome, I want to use that creatively but in a different way”.
To that end, most of the samples you’ll hear are pretty simple to reproduce. And sometimes artists don’t get the license to use the sample so they are forced to reproduce (this happens a lot more with vocal samples from what I’m aware)
You could take a sample of real drums and then structure it in a step sequencer which, again, is technology that’s been around for decades.
Or if you’re already signed to a label (like Daft Punk were at the time) and neither yourself nor any studio engineers have a clue how to use your hardware (also highly unlikely) then you’d pay a session musician to come in and record an original sample.
In fact this last part happens all the time even for artists who are actual musicians but want collaboration as part of their creative process.
So there are plenty of options available to create original samples. More often than not, artists don’t sample because they don’t have other options, they sample because it’s a desired part of the creative process.
That’s a different problem. He is trying to exactly recreate a sample but without using the sample.
You wouldnt do that in released music because if you didn’t have clearance to use that sample then you’d be still breaking copyright law if you were to recreate it exactly. So what you’d do is recreate the essence of that sample but without making it exactly the same.
Also you ignored my point that professional studios have access to more resources and professionals too.
> I think you're underestimating the difficulty of recreating sounds.
I never said it was easy ;)
> It would be impossible for instance, to recreate the amen break with a sequencer because nothing would be on a quantized beat and every single drum hit is different.
Sequencers don’t quantise beats. You’re thinking of trackers and they are a completely different beast.
You can have your samples aligned any which way you like in sequencers. And even if you were to user a drum machine, you can add padding to your samples. Some drum machines also support dequantisation where they deliberately trigger the samples off beat to give the drums a more natural sound.
To give an example of how sequencers don’t quantise: I was hopelessly bad at producing and some of my earliest efforts had little to no quantization at all (if you can forgive the made up word) and thus I required an engineer to come in an redo most of what I did but have those samples triggered on beat. So I’m very familiar with how easy or hard it is to get drums aligned and how quantisation works in a DAW.
I did get better at producing as time went on but never good enough to even consider making a career out of it.
I’ll be sure to check out Eden too.
Who knows? Today it has no samples, maybe tomorrow someone will find them.
https://reverbmachine.com/blog/how-kavinsky-created-nightcal... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-homework-synth-soun... https://reverbmachine.com/blog/daft-punk-discovery-synth-sou...
All their work is amazing. Perhaps I will post all of these here as posts individually? Someone should...
"As a visual artist, why don't you compose the music too?"
All writing, visual art and music is an act of expression and communication. If one delegates that human element to a machine, they're a poseur, and that's the end of it.
Thanks for calling that out and saving a click. There are lots of nice reconstructions of dance music on YouTube, which are fascinating to learn from as someone who likes to play with DAWs and synths, which are more worth the time.
> I tracked the vocals in my apartment in the Mission, San Francisco
This has no relevance at all to what is being said at that point in the article. But it feels very much like dropping in references to a specific guitar brand or plug-in before it's relevant elsewhere too. Like an LLM has based the style on SEO blogspam.
> In April 2023, [Thomas] Bangalter released a solo work, the orchestral ballet score Mythologies. He gave interviews about the project and allowed himself to be photographed without a mask. He cited concerns about the progress of artificial intelligence and other technology as to why Daft Punk split, saying: "As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."
Then again, looking at the Ghibli trend, I'm not surprised.
It's also just one image, clearly just for aesthetic. It's not that big of a deal.
I haven't touched music production stuff for about 18 years (Mackie D8b + protools represent), however its great to see someone break down a song bit by bit. It also helps that the song they are covering is a banger.
For a slightly tangentially related podcast you might like https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106lb which is where a bunch of musicians each week create a playlist of 4 songs that each have a link.
Daft Punk especially for me represent a merger of musical genius and perfect execution.
As this is on HN I wonder how far in the future AI will excel at recreating/analysing songs. It seems like it could lend itself extremely well for this type of task.
Also Plastic Love is the best Pop song if you go by Vice[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOTlyCZmVa8 [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mariya-takeuchi-plastic-love...
Keep them coming! <3
which seems so weird to me, because when you listen to the isolated sample, it sounds like a fairly standard Lindrum fare, a snare hit plus some kind of other perc sample, maybe a wood block or one of those 'congo' bell samples or something.
> "A huge part of the joy came from working in Ableton Live 12, which now feels like an extension of how I think" I feel the same way, but for Reaper
Seeing the author mentions that decomposition of the snare is the hardest, and that’s what I was trying to solve in https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce (just an idea).
Multimodality AI is much more powerful now. I wonder how helpful it would be for music and art education if AI could help us deconstruct some songs.
When I was teaching kids with Glicol, I often used KraftWerk’s Das Model as an example:
https://glicol.org/demo#themodel
This rough midi version is very different from the original, but the kids had a lot of fun messing around with it.
Was thinking along the same lines as I fell into the trap of Ghiblifying pictures earlier this week. As someone who spent countless hours in my childhood trying to copy the styles of my favorite comic books (Japanese and otherwise), at some point in this AI exercise I started rendering each picture in the artistic styles of each of my favorite artists and placing them side by side for comparison. Realized an exercise like this would have been very useful back when I drew in comparing different styles and what _exactly_ made them different. Maybe it speaks more to how I think —- lacking a true artistic intuition —- but simply comparing styles and giving words to their distinctions helped me appreciate them in a way I hadn't (of course the AI didn't produce a perfect representation but a crude enough approximation)
My one gripe is the caption on his guitar. Almost spit-take level…seeing a Gibson Les Paul Honeyburst described as “humble” is tongue in cheek, but the sign of a person who could use a reality check. I get it’s an attempt at humor, but come on bro, that’s a brag haha.
I went through a period of recreating songs during Covid. Here's my attempt at Short Circuit from the same album: https://on.soundcloud.com/F5dcikiLb9RNQ4jC9
The chords at the end were really difficult to get 100% right. Think I got to about 95%. I didn't get around to the bit crushing. I was a bit deflated that the chords weren't spot on :)