Synthetic Substitutions
Hip-hop has been a part of my life since the early 80s — not in the background but as a major part of what made me who I am today. I Experienced how it evolved through each era, how it adopted new technology and innovated new sounds and kept moving relentlessly forwards. Of everything the culture gave us, one of the elements that I had always found absolutely fascinating, almost magical in fact, was the art of sampling and how the music was created. The heavy hitter producers of the late 80s and 90s such as Marley Marl, DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Buckwild, Diamond D, Q-Tip, Easy Mo Bee, Madlib and the Beatnuts, to name a few, were utilising drum machines & samples in an amazing way — these guys created whole new compositions using equipment & sample source material and totally flipped them to something else that was unique to their ear. These visionaries built entire careers on their ability to hear potential in just seconds of original music and piece together something special.
Hip-hop has always been a genre of ingenious workarounds. Looping a breakbeat on two turntables because there was no other way to extend it. Sampling a record at 45 speed in order to slow it down on the sampler thus squeezing out more sampling time out of hardware that wasn’t strictly designed to give it. Every limitation became a technique and every technique became a unique signature in hip-hops DNA. A genre of music that’s been in a conversation with its tools from the very beginning.
The library I’ve put together is still kind of built in the tradition of the records those producers were chasing — old soul, funk, anonymous library music, TV style themes and pretty much anything that sounded like it could have been found on the B-side of a bargain bin record that nobody was really interested in until it blew up. Hundreds of tracks generated, listened to and most discarded, its very hit and miss, but mostly miss. Everything that did make it through was shortlisted to about 100 or so, and from that hundred I made 50 beats across 5 volumes of ten tracks each these were then all sequenced and compiled in the spirit of those dope beat compilations from the late 80s and 90s — think 45 King, Hydra Beats and so on. I even made all the artwork look and feel like it was straight out of my record shelves.
I really wanted to test these beats validity — could I actually play them to people and would they feel authentic and stand up? Would people ask where the sample was from? The best way I knew how to do this was to put together a mixtape — two sides, 18 minutes each. Mixed on real life turntables (using Serato). Overlaid with some classic vocal scratches and sampled dialogue from movies and other sources — not just as decoration, but as context, as a way of putting these beats in conversation with the tradition they’re inspired from and to also frame the purpose of it all. When a scratch or sample sits over a beat made from AI-generated samples and nothing feels weird or jarring, that’s where — in my head at least — it still feels authentic.
The big ethics question
There are real troubling questions around the ethics of replacing real source material with synthetic alternatives, it’s not a straightforward answer and I won’t pretend otherwise. You simply can’t replace human creativity, AI can mimic this, it can generate a convincing approximation of it in a matter of seconds - this raises genuine questions about what we value and why. However, at the same time, hip-hop has never waited for the argument to catch up with the music. When the sampler arrived it changed what a producer could be. Uncleared samples built entire careers before the lawyers figured out what was happening. Early electro and later trap created entire sub-genres on a drum machine preset that cost nothing apart from the machine and time. Each time, the culture absorbed the new tool, asked questions later, and kept moving.
AI-generated sample sources feel like the next version of that conversation. What I can say honestly is that the synthetic library I generated (“created” is a word I still struggle to use when talking about AI) was a starting point only. The hundreds of generations that didn’t make it were trashed because my human taste said no. The 80 or so that did make it were then shaped, arranged, edited and produced into something else by a human, one who has been listening to this music for 45+ years. The mixtape was mixed on real life turntables in the same way I’d use real records, the decisions about what sits next to what, what scratches appear where, what overlaid samples get used — none of that was automated. The source material may be synthetic, but for the most part this was all still created by a human.
This brings up a broader question of the use of AI in the creative world, that I keep thinking about - Why are we automating fun? whether it’s music or my design career, the fun part is always in the creating, what’s going to be left for us if we replace that with AI? It makes no sense at all.
All 50 beats will be released on the usual platforms over 5 volumes, Apple Music, Tidal etc - “Real? To Reel Volume One” is out now.
The Physical Mixtape & all volumes are all on bandcamp now:
djsuperix.bandcamp.com