After a while, I figured out that the SP-202 had one purpose: triggering wacky vocal samples.

In Highschool, Liquid Pegasus and I used to hook his up to the car stereo with a tape adapter and pump effect-drenched pre-recorded fast-food order requests at our local drive-thrus.

Ring-mod and reverbed "t-t-two-two-t-t-two hard shell tacos."
Suburban fun!

we get these fancy turntables and mixers so that we can... play other people's music? Why become a writer who starts works from scratch when you can "creatively" select bits from other people's novels and short stories and "mix" them together and then be left with basically no enduring output?

I think it's perfectly possible to be highly original using only samples. It all in the way you put things together. And, after all, when you think about it, systems like the alphabet, the dictionary, the piano keyboard or guitar fretboard are just limited palettes of sound that everybody else is choosing from. They're "samples" too. But by the time we've made our own combinations, originality emerges.

I think it's perfectly possible to be highly original using only samples.

I definitely don't want to say that sampling is not creative, and I guess I was referring more to DJ culture than sampling in toto.

I have not totally bought the idea that being a DJ is the same as being an "artist" - besides the very top people who have the position to push in more interesting directions. DJs are important as selectors, but so are curators, and we clearly delineate them from artists. Picking up a guitar makes you become an artist, or at least long to be an artist. Getting turntables and a phrase sampler inherently asks you to be a curator.

Everything in the world CAN be creative, but I think playing other people's music just in your own personal order takes some serious, serious effort to escape the easy trap of exhalted curation.

Phrase sampling, for me personally at least, limited my songwriting opposed to opening it up. This may not be true for everyone, and the best people clearly can use lots of loops and phrases to go wherever they want to go. But by using anyone's material - even more abstractly, someone else's message or structure - you are ultimately less required to input your own. This can get complicated and is not cut-and-dry, but is it lazier to loop a YMO bass line or have to write your own because you don't have access to it?

These are all grey areas, of course, but I certainly am glad I started out life on a guitar and not a Vestax.

That being said, the MPC strikes me as an instrument in a way a turntable does not, in that you are using samples specifically to create new music. The SP-202 is no MPC, and my problem is probably less with "DJ Culture" than trying to be a producer/artist with limited disc jockey tools. That didn't work for me.

Picking up a guitar makes you become an artist, or at least long to be an artist. Getting turntables and a phrase sampler inherently asks you to be a curator.

I can't agree with this. I think a lot of guitar bands now are using guitars as "samplers" in the sense that they just learn old licks and reproduce them manually rather than electronically. Actually using a sampler would be a lot more creative... and honest.

Very englightening post. Being one to suspect the worst, I'm going to speculate that Roland had a massive production over run of unsold SP202s and the solution was to fob them off onto the JR (at full MSRP of course), thus "solving" the problem of lack of demand.

Oh and if you like the MPC, take a look at the many MPC videos on youtube, you may feel quite differently afterwards...

There's something to marxy saying for example cornelius is not an artist/songwriter, (maybe just rockism though i find that definition 'problematic' since everything post-punk, particularly say the pixies and other stuff so-called rockists seem to hold dear , is already post-rock .. etc) ; i'd venture to say according to marxy('s not elaborated) definition, Brian Eno (he's a producer anyway), Anton Webern, John Cage ( didn't Schoenberg call cage an inventor not composer) etc are all not-artist/composer/songwriter

Oh, I am not that strict. My point with Cornelius is that he is not really a pop songwriter in the "I am going to sit down at the piano/guitar and write a ditty" kind of way. I am not really going to take the time to decide who is an artist or not.

Think of things this way - new legos vs. old legos. Old legos had very basic shapes and you had to do everything from scratch. New legos come in shapes that only make one specific model kit. Can you be creative with new legos? Sure, but it's a lot easier to be lazy with new legos. There are a lot of bad, lazy people masking as artists in both lego sets, but I bet the old lego people are not as boxed in with their tool sets. Phrase samplers feel like new legos to me.

I took out the original offending sentence, because it was bogging down the ideas and making all sample culture seem guilty. My problem was never with "sampling" as much as trying to compose normal pop songs with sample loops.

I have a cold, and it's clearly affecting my blogging.

my favorite post ever. we have a "musical" project that involves many sp202 (and 303, too), and this makes this ekiin the coolest guy on earth.

i'll say it. .sampling does not make you a musican.. nor producer or anything. a "reuser" may be good. a dreamer maybe?
using samples as a reconisable sound, to draw your listener in is an interesting idea and use. but making music totally out of samples. (as in other people music.. samples) does not make you a musician. not even close. a remixer at best.
but you can argue it is still "art". no problems there. not a prdocuer though. i think a producer is just that. some one who creates original content. dj shadow, and the avalances are just remixers. and in general poor ones at that.. i will dissmiss all music made entirly out of samples the same way i will dissmiss god.. a joke and delusion..
you can dissagree, and that fine. doesn't make you any more right then i am. people like shugo tokumaru can bring tears to my eyes with pure skill (just guitar and voice).. shadow or the likes never ever will.

I'd just like to point out the existence of Stanton's Final Scratch at this point in the dialogue. Surely being able to lay your own mp3s over timestamped records and then manipulate them using decks as if they were pre-pressed records nullifies a lot of these arguments..?

Yeah, I forgot to mention that a computer and the wide availablity of HD-recording software made all these gadgets irrelevent immediately.