Styles don't just develop randomly - they are usually a combination of influences and borrowed ideas from a range of music. It can be deliberate or subconscious, but it doesn't happen without plenty of creative input from somewhere. So let's take a look at how you can take influence from other artists, scenes and genres without stepping into those dangerous territories of pastiche, or worse, just plain rip-off!
It's all very well being a scene player - as we've outlined on this blog before, writing tracks that fit
neatly into a particular scene can get you a fair level of
recognition in that scene - but to really stand out you need to
bring something else to the table. This is what the best producers do, and
you can afford to be quite open about it, so long as you approach
things in an artistic way. Consider the early tracks of bass music
mainstay Untold - tracks like 'Stop What You're Doing' were a
welcome breath of fresh air in a scene that was looking for new
sounds, as they used huge bass stomps in place of kick drums. Untold
himself was very open in interviews about how this was strongly
influenced by Wiley's early productions, but what made it fresh was
that he took this technique and incorporated it into a
dubstep-inflected scene, combining the two to bring a whole new take
on an existing style. As it was also extremely well-executed, it
immediately catapulted him up into the ranks of respected producers.
A 'pastiche' is copying a style
completely - take the melodic styles, the same kind of synth
patches, the same drum machines or patterns, and write an original
track. It's not plagiarism, as you've written an original piece, but
people could easily think it actually came out years ago, when that
style was originally popular. Writing a pastiche is often actually a
lot of fun, and you can learn a lot from it, as you try to copy
production techniques and figure out how they were done, but it
will never excite people in the same way as something genuinely new.
So, a better way to think about
incorporating other styles into your beats, is to take what you've
learned about these genres and bring it into your existing tracks.
This way you can take a signature sound from a genre and bring it
wholesale into your own stuff, without compromising your identity.
Basement Jaxx are a classic example; their tracks pull in samples and
riffs from latin, soul and early 80's boogie records all the time,
but since they are then putting these in the context of a UK house
music sound, the result is something fresh and original.
Or take dBridge, who saw the sparse
minimalism of early dubstep and started using those clipped halfstep
beats in his drum and bass tracks. It was a straightforward concept,
splicing together two existing genres, but it was a fresh new
sound, and simply by dint of being one of the first people to do it
properly, he was rightly hailed as one of the originals in the scene.
It's something you hear constantly in
the evolving field of dance music. Right now producers across the
globe are taking footwork and juke sounds and throwing them into bass
music structures; veteran dubstep producers are taking their
soundsystem roots and using them in house tracks; classic Chicago
house drum machine beats are suddenly all the rage amongst UK bass
music producers.
So instead of just waiting for your
productions to develop their own signature style, take them by the
scruff of the neck and make one! Draw on that love you've always had
for salsa music, or classic New York house, or experimental noise,
and start referencing it in your garage, jungle or hip hop tunes.
Take influence from wherever you can, and don't worry about being too
obvious – just make something new. Be bold, make a statement!
