Given the looming threat of AI, you’d have thought that the ‘is using synth presets cheating?’ debate would be over by now. Making your own music with pre-rolled sounds is practically ‘grafting’ these days, isn’t it?
Some would still argue, however, that if you don’t create your own patches from scratch then your tracks are somehow diminished, however good they are and however many people like listening to them.
Barry Can’t Swim, though - AKA Joshua Mainnie - isn’t one of them. Speaking to the Tape Notes podcast about the making of recent track Still Riding, from his new album, Loner, he admits that full-on sound design isn’t really his thing.
Asked how much he leans on presets and to what extent he tries to make them his own, he says: “I'll mess around with them - as in I'll definitely automate them - but I'm really not one who kind of gets in and builds a sound from scratch. I'm very happy to just use presets and go, ‘this is cool.’ If it sounds good, it sounds good. And then I'll kind of mess around with it from there and maybe effect the dynamics and things like that or I take it where I want it to go.”
Addressing the argument that, for true authenticity, artists should create their own sounds, Mainnie says: “I use a lot of presets all the time. There's sometimes a bit of a taboo around that but I don't know why - there's no shame in that. I think if it sounds good, it sounds good. Like, that's the only thing that really should matter.”
Mainnie also suggests that, if you’re the kind of person who hates on a track just because you find out that it was made using presets, you should probably have a word with yourself.
“If the finished thing sounds good, that's all that matters,” he says. “No one's going away from listening to a song going, ‘I used to like this, but he didn't make that sound’. And if they do, fuck them, man. Those aren't the people you want to be serving anyway. Do you know what I mean?”
You can check out the full Tape Notes interview with Barry Can’t Swim wherever you get your podcasts.
