slipstick wrote:I use the odd percussion loop because I don't own all the instruments and I can't play that well anyway. Is that allowed in your view ? Or is that cheating ?
If you want to insist on "all stuff he made himself" then shouldn't you also ban samples (unless someone can prove he recorded them himself). And how about presets for synths ? Shouldn't you have designed your own sounds rather than just using someone else's work ?
It seems to me that for the "Best songs made with LMMS", if people want to use sounds/samples/loop kits that are readily available out there then I can't see why not. Isn't that effectively the way many songs are put together these days, pretty much what many famous and professional DJs do anyway ?
Steve
Why are you making this argument? You do realize LMMS allows you to arrange your own musical work instead of remixing other people's works. Everyone has access to everything it offers, so just because you use loops, doesn't mean you should. But here, let me break it down for the sake of an argument.
Take these samples for example: compare snare01.ogg with rave_snare01.ogg. Snare01 is a single hit, which can be used to make any number of continuous patterns, ergo music. Everyone would agree it doesn't count as a musical piece, and anyone arguing otherwise doesn't understand what makes music... music. Here's one definition: "Music - an artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner."
Rave_snare01 is a loop, a structured and continuous pattern, which arguably can be considered a piece of musical work. Not a good piece of work, but a start. You didn't make it, and no one should be pretending so.
If you like a sound used in the loop, extract it. It's easy, just look where that sound is and crop it with the sample processor (whatever the name is).
As a fun fact, there is a thing called copyrighted samples, which are mostly vocal tracks (because copyrighting simpler samples would be futile). Loops are less so, because they are easily replicated
, but please never take a vocal track to remix some popular song. It's pointless, and you'll likely sing better yourself anyway considering the amount of auto-tune artists use nowadays.
I'm trying to explain my point (and the original) in plain English. Creating music starts from point zero, where there is nothing "musical" on the table yet. You put two notes in a row, and VOILÁ, Music! If you take a loop, you take someone else's work. Granted, you could just arrange that yourself, but at least you did that yourself, freeing you to make changes as you see fit.
At some point, you are essentially just mixing and matching. If you take two loops (e.g. a bass- and a drumline), put them together and call it a day, you aren't producing anything original. You're doing a lazy remix. The same thing happens if you take moonlight sonata and add 4-to-the-floor drumline to it. BOOM! Moonlight sonata EPIC HOUSE REMIX by T4l3ntl3ss_f4ck666. A talented_f4ck at least would have arranged the piano and drums by himself, maybe even make changes to the piece (let's not go into "is that moonlight sonata anymore" -argument).
On the other end of the spectrum, you can't really ban synths or instrument sounds (samples), because then we wouldn't have music at all. As a very extreme example, the creator of piano could have just gone "NOPE, y'all ain't having it!", and we wouldn't have the most useful and rich sound in music.
As for popular DJs and shit, I'm not going there. I don't know how they operate, and it varies so much on a case to case basis. Ultimately it doesn't matter. "Best of LMMS" suggests that whatever you hear in the competition is made on LMMS. If someone who didn't know anything listened to any track on the playlist, and went "hey, that sounds cool! How do you do that?", you could give him the project file. Instead of going "Well, you know, I took it from this site" and deal with the accusations of "Technically, you didn't make that then?".
At the end of the day, without banning loops, someone could slap rave_bass02.ogg and 909beat01.ogg together, and submit that. There is nothing original, there is nothing to show that you made it, there's nothing to show that you could replicate that. Hell, there is no way for you to change anything if you wanted to, because it's all in the sample.
It came out as a bit of a rant, but hopefully you picked something up from this.
TL;DR: Yes, I support banning loops. If you don't, chances are you either can't or don't want to learn to make music legitimately. There certainly are means to do so
