The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on the practice of sampling and its legal ramifications.

Sampling has, for years, been a routine practice in the music industry.  Sampling is taking a part of an already recorded musical composition and repurposing it in a new composition.  It used to be that people would simply sample freely, release the material, and pay up if they got caught.  But, there were a good number of high profile court cases in the early 90s that showed that this wasn’t a very legally sound practice. The whole process of sampling is complex because the owners of the composition (the publisher or the artist) and the owners of the masters (probably the label or the artist) don’t have to let you use the material at all.  This means that they can essentially ask whatever they want from you if you a) approach them with an offer or b) get caught after releasing a sampled track.

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This post focuses on the various parts of a song and many typical ways in which they are arranged.

Over time several tendencies in songwriting have emerged as far as the arrangement of music is concerned. It all comes largely from classical music, which often is composed with attention to variations in musical ‘motifs’.
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The focus of this post is on capturing SysEx information from external MIDI devices in order to have a record of your presets right in your session or automate the settings throughout the track.

It happens to producers time and time again: you’ve created an awesome synth sound or guitar tone, you’ve recorded the midi part, but when you load up the session to work on it some more your sounds are completely different! Oh no! You didn’t save the preset…

Don’t let this happen to you! There are a ton of cool things you can do with a special feature of MIDI called SysEx. Essentially, SysEx is a way for a MIDI device’s system settings to be transfered over MIDI. This means that you can save the settings to the patches on a synth, guitar tones on a MIDI capable modeler, or automation/device states on a capable digital mixer.

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