27 essential ambient production tips

[MetaDronos]

getting someone to find four or five examples you are giving over part of the selection to someone else even if you make the final selection, therefore the population from which you select is determined by someone else and will be different because of that. That may actually make the final result better, but even so it will be different. Secondly the usual "while you do one thing you aren't doing something else" applies. In this case you aren't undertaking the search process and so you won't have the possibility of the "happy chance" serendipitous find that may be tangential to the goal but of great value.

I often work with samples and I higly value the role of chance and serendipity in creative process.
For example, clicking THIS LINK allowed me to find many unique sounds for further reprocessing in my tracks.
I make my own field recordings for this purpose, too.

I prefer to find and create such samples personally and I would not refer that work to others. I think that
every person is a kind of "filter", so I want to keep all sonic input without "human prefiltering" as much as possible.

[MetaDronos]

Both of these stories captures something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/08/01/networked-knowledge-combinatorial-creativity/

[GaryG]

But hang on, are we talking about being artistically influenced by others, or having a team of flunkies to do the "heavy lifting".

That's where I got lost in Golodkins argument.

No one can argue with the former generally, maybe a few 'outsider' artists have just spontaneously created something without ever having heard or seen art before but... generally, no.

Heavy lifting: having someone source your samples is a collaboration in my book. If I ever wanted to release any of my one sample dare challenges, the source of the sample would be credited too. How could they not be? It's not like sending someone out for a new tube of chromium blue...

I guess I see inspiration as an amazingly complex net, you'll always be standing on the shoulders of giants, whether you have the 'talent' to apply those influences and create something markedly new is the question. Even if not, most art is a variation on something that's gone before and no shame in that. A cliche I know but it's about personal expression not creating new art forms in my book.

[Thought Experiment]

...it's about personal expression...

I totally agree

[Guest]

But hang on, are we talking about being artistically influenced by others, or having a team of flunkies to do the "heavy lifting".

That's where I got lost in Golodkins argument.

No one can argue with the former generally, maybe a few 'outsider' artists have just spontaneously created something without ever having heard or seen art before but... generally, no.

Heavy lifting: having someone source your samples is a collaboration in my book. If I ever wanted to release any of my one sample dare challenges, the source of the sample would be credited too. How could they not be? It's not like sending someone out for a new tube of chromium blue...

I guess I see inspiration as an amazingly complex net, you'll always be standing on the shoulders of giants, whether you have the 'talent' to apply those influences and create something markedly new is the question. Even if not, most art is a variation on something that's gone before and no shame in that. A cliche I know but it's about personal expression not creating new art forms in my book.

I think the difference between influence and heavy lifting is more one of degree than one of kind -re collaboration Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side popped in to my head a an example of collaboration - for me that song is totally made by Herbie Flower's bass line and I have never liked the idea that Reed wrote that song, for me it is a collaboration.

[YnotB]

Even classic "lone nut" artists like Kafka or Van Gogh were in fact intensely networked guys, and their networks kept producing for them even after their suicides,

Errr... Kafka didn't commit suicide.... :daydream: