Did Aphex Twin cross the line? "XTAL" How was it made?

can sampling ever be morally wrong Exile contains a sample of evil at play and its creator Steve Jeff said this in a YouTube comment using somebody else's music for your own benefit is not morally right and has always been the problem with sampling and effectively stealing someone else's copyright as you can hear apart from the drums and the change in one beat of the Rhythm xtel musically is basically what we created our tune our chords our playing her voice but no recognition no payment no royalties for 30 years Richard lifted our track in full and used it throughout extel so the morality of sampling and the line between using it creatively and just ripping off the original Creator is often incredibly difficult to judge but if we take a deep dive into xtel not only will we be able to see clearly the differences between the two tracks but more importantly we'll also get a deep insight into the musical craftsmanship possibly the most gifted electronic producer that's ever lived firstly let's have a look at the drums so he used a Roland R8 I found online these Roland R8 samples and I just simply selected them all and dragged them in to make a drum rack like this and there's a link to these samples in the PDF that accompanies this video These are actually from a CR 78 and the pattern is fairly simple here I'm actually using the amp envelope so I've got full sustain and low release so essentially the size of the midi note determines the length it cuts off there because of that so if it was longer has a different feel that's something that's really nice to play with when you're doing drum programming so the whole whole signature sound of this track is the sound of the tape it was recorded onto and just tons and tons of Reverb so I'm using satin all over this track it's my favorite tape plugin by yui there's a link to it in the PDF but essentially I've got this preset heavy Exciter which adds a lot of highend and I'm doing that in the EQ as well and I'm really boosting the input if we hear it without the Satin and without the EQ so you can hear there's kind of tape Distortion It's relatively subtle and then the Reverb I've got on Ascend I'm using the Valhalla vintage verb throughout but for this one I've got this one the Reverb he used was a quadraverb which is kind of a classic noisy old Reverb unit so I'm trying to get close to that so I suspect this is one of the closest ones it might be Celtic Hall so that's what's going into taking these sounds from fairly boring to the sound of the track so then we have a big drum sound coming in I use the Roland Cloud tier 808 I'm just using the kick drum it's not quite like the original it's a bit more weighty actually but I like what it's doing so again I've got the satin and the and the Reverb so there these two plugins throughout without these it sounds like this with the satin it sounds like this so that's really nice isn't it I reckon that's lovely again I'm using this heavy excited preset which does add quite a lot of high end and I'm cranking the input and the output and then lashings of Reverb so we've got 3.69 seconds of Decay mix is really high over 50% generally you wouldn't put Reverb on this kind of sound anyway but you might put it on like that but for this track then so I never would have spotted this and I didn't believe it at first when I read it that this break is actually Incredible Bongo Band Apache with loads of Reverb [Music] I'm pretty sure that is the correct one so what I did I got that sample I hit right click slic to new midi track that gave me this essentially which I've edited slightly and then I just picked out two sounds a kick and a snare that's all there is to it really um matched with the hats it's like this and then with the 808 kit it's like this yeah this is a different hat it's just this eighth note with the same amount of Reverb on and then here we have the two hats that we used before yeah it's quite subtle in the mix but um here the other hats aren't in and you can hear [Music] it and then we have this this pattern where we have the the open hat on the one two and the [Music] three so we've got this lovely 808 base which is made from a kick drum but it's essentially a base have it without the bhalla sounds so nice and it's just these two notes probably doesn't really need all that Reverb technically but then it's such a dreamy track you know when he made it he wasn't following any guidelines or rule books he was just playing experimenting and he probably never even thought that he would see a release so he just went with it and you know it's an iconic amazing track that stands the test of time okay I really want to get into the sample but first let's have a very quick look at the pad sound what's going on here firstly I got the cords from Ali Jameson and to get the patch I fired up my trusty chip synth ops 7 this is like the best DX7 plug-in in my my opinion there are other great ones but this has an extra level of jqa they've really modeled every little thing and it just sounds great and then I just got a patch that was vaguely [Music] similar I mean that's really nice bit of sound design in the patch actually and then I whacked an auto filter on it which I think sounds really nice it's got a real Boards of Canada vibe to it the chords really feel like he was just experimenting so we've got this chord which is a B flat major but then we have this chord which is like a kind of suspended chord or something and I just feel like it's a sort of thing you get by playing rather than by thinking about things technically and then we go to this inversion of a [Music] chord and just for fun I was playing about with adding some different CES and it's just fun interesting to hear how the vibe changes so [Music] much [Music] I think that's really nice I'm not saying it's better or anything but it's quite cool to have a play about it's got such a board with Canada feel that so let's just have a little listen to the original track and then we can really see how close they [Music] are that is essentially it towards the end we get this kind of noise comes in there are there's some laughing I mean it kind of has a lot of Apex Twin vibe in it if I'm honest that kind of evil side that's the original obviously an XT it's pitched down so if we just listen to the more straightforward use of the sample it's the vocal so this is very straightforward it's just pitched down just from the beginning of the track and it's just going from the original key which is in C but he's just pitched it down to semitones and then here there's an extra note here so that's why this isn't playing it up a pitch I've set this to be a different [Music] zone so that's really nice I like the way this leads back into that and that's just starting the sample here so it's it it's fairly simple but it's quite Nifty It's very effective in my [Music] opinion so now let's look at the main pad sound so I so lucky to find this video about it cuz otherwise I think it would have been really tough because it's not obvious it's something it's it's about 16 seconds in so it's about here on the original it's got that little and it's got but then it's playing this three notes at once which makes it very difficult to work out so I'm very glad someone else did that hard work for [Music] me so we've got yeah just that part of the track and playing this kind of a chord and then underneath we've got this so if we listen to that in [Music] isolation [Music] I mean to me that really shows the beauty of sampling it's really a marriage of creativity you can't say that without AIX twin the tune is just the same but also without the original sample the tune wouldn't exist because so much depends on it there's so much texture and movement and stuff going on that is achieved relatively simply to me it just shows how cool sampling is just listen to that without this [Music] bit and how the little bells come in and these are a bit longer so we get a bit more Bells got this [Music] variation so like everything else I've put this satin on it it's boosting the high end and it's got a nice long Reverb bhalla chaotic chamber so we'll listen to it without so the effects are doing a lot mainly the Reverb but also the tape I mean that is just make it a lot louder but the the [Music] combination it's just so nice isn't [Music] it so to me it's absolutely clear it's not fair to call XEL a complete ripoff of evil at play but it does really depend completely on it and it wouldn't exist if it weren't for this sample the sample is just bringing so much tambra and movement and life and mood to this track let me know what you think whether we use sampling or not when we make our own tracks it's so easy just to start something make a loop and then get stuck but arranging a track doesn't have to be rocket surgery it's can be quite simple as demonstrated by orbital on their track chime check it out [Music] here

Channel: Gyu Beats

Views: 254,088

Keywords: Aphex twin, selected ambient works, richard d. james, aphex twin, saw 85-92, aphex twin (musical artist), richard d james, die antwoord, ugly boy, aphex twin ambient, aphex twin selected ambient works 85-92, aphex twin music, selected ambient works 85-92, selected ambient works review, xtal aphex twin, xtal

Id: lu9utvfumwM

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024