i want to address a point that i have to address periodically. i'm actually not sure what it is that leads people to the conclusion that i'm a dj working with sample libraries, but, for whatever reason, it's something i've had to address for years...

i think it's partly just the age we live in. people just assume that a one-person project must be sample-based. it's the null hypothesis, in some sense. i also think i should probably take it as a compliment, in the sense that it suggests a perception of complexity.

but, it's not true.

i'm a guitarist by training. i've dabbled in blues, jazz and classical - and it's all there. i'm also a self-taught punk guitarist, if that makes any sense. i use a lot of effects, and some of it is in the production stage. but the actual truth is that the vast majority of sounds coming at you in my songs are produced by a guitar.

ok, you're thinking, that's believable - but what about the horn parts? the string parts? the wind sections? they must be samples, right? well, no...

they're actually sequencers. when i'm doing a horn or string part, i don't take riffs out of existing songs. rather, i write them out in a score (like a composer would) and use a sequencer to play them back. some of these sequencers are sample-based. and, i think i need a brief discussion of the three different ideas of "sampling" in contemporary music.

sampling can mean taking sounds out of existing songs and reusing them. this is popular in a lot of contemporary music - including hip-hop, techno, trip-hop and industrial music. i've never created anything with this kind of sampling. however, sampling can also mean recording individual notes on an instrument for use in a sequencer. what does this mean?

well, imagine that you've got a saxophone in front of you, and a saxophone player. you don't play the saxophone, but you might want to create a saxophone part later. so, you might ask the saxophone player to slowly run through the scale on the saxophone. sampling, in this context, means connecting each note played on the saxophone to a key on the keyboard. once this is mapped together, a composer can then use the keyboard to compose saxophone parts.

there's complexities - saxophone players breathe, buttons click, etc. but this kind of sampling allows for full composition, rather than mixing and matching existing isolated riffs and pasting them together.

what i want to get across is that these are two very different things, on a compositional basis. i don't expect most listeners to really care. but i want the record set straight on the issue, for those that do: when you hear these orchestrated things that i do, they are created by a computer mapping an original score to a sequencer to trigger samples. if you don't believe me, note that many of my eps actually come with sheet music in the download, in the form of midi files. they are *not* collages of existing snippets of sound, as is common in a lot of modern trip-hop and otherwise electronic pop music. they are compositions created the old fashioned way.

i am not a dj. i am not spinning. i am not mixing samples. i do not use fruity loops. i am a composer of original music, and my main instrument is the guitar.

that said, there is a third type of sampling, and i did make some use of it in the past. this kind of sampling reclaims found sounds for use in creative collages. i haven't created anything like this since about 1999, but a few things do exist like it in my discography. here is one example:

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrisampled