Sampling and remixing is at the very core of dance music culture. Genres like house, garage and jungle owe many of their stylistic traits to the way pioneering producers reworked sampled sounds such as funk drum breaks, disco strings and R&B vocalists.
Relying heavily on sampling comes with numerous pitfalls though. For one thing it can result in copyright issues, creating a need to haggle with the owner of the original source material in order to release your track and potentially end up giving away a chunk of the royalties. It also means relying on the same pool of classic recordings as every other producer out there.
The approach used by rising UK producer Silva Bumpa for his speed garage-influenced track Feel Da Same seems like a smart middle ground.
When we sat down with Silva Bumpa for our latest track breakdown video, he explained how he wanted to capture the sound of classic R&B-sampling garage records of the early-’00s. Rather than dig out an old school R&B track to work from, he opted to make his own with the sole purpose of remixing it into something with a higher tempo.
“The sound I was going for was like the classic sort of garage and bassline sound,” he explains. “All the R&B acapellas were sped up, so the runs and vibrato and the slides in the vocals were kind of accentuated. It just makes it sound more like the music that I grew up on – the music that kind of made me fall in love with dance music.”
By his own admission, this approach of recreating and remixing his own source material isn’t anything new.
“Last summer I was hanging a lot of old school bassline producers,” he says. “I was in the studio with this guy called TS7, who's like a legend to me. He's made loads of classic bassline tunes. He was talking me through how they used to make R&B instrumentals and then they’d almost like, remix those old R&B instrumentals.
“I was itching to try this, and I was actually in the studio with [vocalist] Carla Monroe the week after. So I had this piano melody already written, I exported it, pitched it down and slowed it down so that I could write to it.”
The piano loop is pitched down by two semitones and slowed down to a more R&B-like speed of 105BPM. It’s in this state that Carla Monroe recorded the vocal hook that runs through the finished version of Feel Da Same.
By pitching the vocal up to a higher tempo, it takes on more of a warped and wonky quality reminiscent of classic turn-of-the-millennium dance tracks. Silva Bumpa helps to maintain this by keeping the processing rough-and-ready.
“I was just trying to make [the vocal] sound almost a little bit cheap, in a way which is kind of the vibe that I was going for. It's like that cheap, YouTube-ripped style of acappella that I like built my entire sound from.”
In the video, he demonstrates how the vocal was layered with retro house pianos, swung drums and old-school organs to create the track's infectious, high-energy sound.
Watch more track breakdowns on our MusicRadar Tech YouTube channel.
