Episode 8 — Samplers, orchestras and fancy dress harpists
In this solo episode, Steve jumps from a brilliantly pitched London Symphony Orchestra schools concert at the Barbican — built around Dogs Don't Do Ballet and featuring a harpist in full dog costume — to a shed-based deep dive into samplers, breakbeats and UK hardcore. It's a defence of humour and accessibility in classical spaces, and a practical demonstration that so-called "button pushing" rave music is every bit as intentional and inventive as orchestral writing.
Using the Origin of the Pieces theme as raw material, Steve walks through chopping and looping audio like early-90s producers working with Akai samplers, Atari ST computers, the Amen break and synths such as the Moog Prodigy, tracing lines to The Prodigy and UK hardcore / happy hardcore. The episode closes with a DIY hardcore flip of the show theme and a Genre Tombola spin that lands on cowpunk.
What we cover
LSO at the Barbican: Why a world-class orchestra in dog costumes for kids is exactly the right kind of serious fun.
First orchestral encounters: How early, loud, in-person orchestral sound imprints on young listeners.
Samplers 101: Floppy disks, rack units, slicing, looping and why this is composition, not theft.
Amen breaks & breakbeats: From The Winstons to jungle, drum & bass and UK hardcore.
Synth basics: Oscillators, detune, parallel chords and why synths are just voltage-powered instruments.
Genre Tombola — UK hardcore: Building a ravey rework of the podcast theme as a case study.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician and composer and performer from London. Welcome back to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin Of The Pieces. This is the show that helps you to hear and understand music in new ways. So if this is your first time listening to the show, thank you very much for tuning in and checking it out. If you're back after listening to The Last Few, thank you very much for coming back. Apologies for my voice today, everyone. I have the thing that everyone seems to have at this time of year, which is the sort of sore throat, cough, cold, fluy thing. So apologies for that. The last episode, we had some fantastic guests. We had three trombonists, if you remember, albeit some of whom were known less for their trombone playing than more for perhaps being a commander of the International Space Station, which was the case, of course, for Chris Hadfield. We had Chris Hadfield on the show, so if you haven't heard that one, do go back and have a listen. For those of you who don't know Chris Hadfield, he was the astronaut who played David Bowie's Space Oddity on the space station. Quite something, and yeah, we had a really interesting chat about changing guitar strings in space and the logistics of music in space and exploration and music and the links between those two things. It was really, really, I found it fascinating and I think some of you guys did as well. I've had some lovely feedback about that, so thank you very much. But we also had, of course, Rosie Turton, who is a fantastic trombone player and composer. And we talked about how the trombone works and made some fun and silly noises and some very beautiful noises there. And of course, Steve Thompson from the band 1201 Alarm. Now, you may remember from that episode that Steve had his music loaded aboard the Pegasus Lander ready to be the first album on the moon. But unfortunately, I'm talking to you now in sort of early mid-January 2024, and yeah, you may have seen in the news that unfortunately that Pegasus Lander did not make it to the moon. It is currently somewhere orbiting the moon slash in deep space somewhere, heading out across the cosmos. So unfortunately, Steve's music did not make it to the moon this time, maybe next time, but what an amazing thing to have your music aboard a spacecraft sort of gone AWOL, heading across the solar system to who knows where. So commiserations to Steve, but also what an amazing thing to do, to have an album aboard a spacecraft heading out. Amazing, amazing. So if you haven't checked out that episode, I do suggest you go back and check it out. Really interesting stuff there. And of course, the previous episodes as well, we had Knit In Sauny, we've talked about Death Grind, we've talked about music from South Africa, all over the place. So yeah, please do go back and check those out if you haven't already. But coming up on this episode, after the last few episodes where we've had an amazing variety and number of guests, last episode we had three different guests, this episode we have zero guests. It's been Christmas and New Year, so obviously people have been busy,
including myself. But also, to be honest, I kind of wanted to just refocus at the beginning of the year. So you have my slightly tired and hoarse and coldy voice talking to you in this episode about UK hardcore. You may remember that that was the genre tombola thing that was chosen for me a few weeks back. For those of you who are new, every episode I look at a completely different genre of music as chosen for me by a random list picker on the internet, and this episode I'm looking at UK hardcore. So more of that to come. We talk about samplers and synthesizers, and I make a kind of hardcore electronic version of the theme tune for this show, so stay tuned for that. But first, I wanted to talk about something that I actually did a couple of months ago, and have been meaning to talk about on the show for a little while, but of course we've been pretty busy with other stuff. What it was, was that a couple of months ago, I went with my daughter's school to the Barbican in London, Barbican Center, to listen to the LSO, the London Symphony Orchestra playing. They did a special concert, especially for primary school kids. And my daughter's seven, and her class went, and I was asked to go along as a musician. And I thought, yeah, what better way of spending a morning? And it was really, really enjoyable event. You might find me on this show sometimes kind of giving the classical music establishment a bit of a hard time, because I think, I do think there's a lot that it could do better to be more inclusive, to be more welcoming, to be less prescriptive. And that's something we'll keep coming back to as the show rolls on, no doubt. But I also think it's really important to celebrate good things when they happen. And certainly, plenty of good things do happen. And this was definitely one of them. So the LSO, one of the great orchestras in the world, of course, wonderful orchestra. And they put on this concert that was based partly around the kids' book Dogs Don't Do Ballet. So there's a kind of theme, loose theme around that. There's a brilliant presenter. And they did some music that was based around that book, but also lots of interesting orchestral excerpts. And it was just really, really beautifully done. And I found it quite moving, really, being there with all these kids. I was there, as I say, with my daughter's school, so probably about, what, 50 kids in that year, 50, 60 kids. But then the Barbican was practically full. And this is Barbican Hall, so around 1500, 1600 seats in that room. And so it was really quite special to be there with all of these kids listening to a full orchestra. And for many of them, it will be the first time, not only that they've heard a full orchestra playing, but the first time maybe that they've heard any substantial live music at all, beyond maybe a busker playing on the tube or something. So it's really quite an amazing thing to hear an orchestra, a top-notch orchestra, especially in full flight. And so to have that experience at that age, the age of about six, seven, eight, that kind of age, it's incredibly powerful and very formative. And I know this because pretty much exactly that experience happened to me. When I was a little bit older than my daughter, I got to meet a couple of musicians from the LSO who came
to my primary school. And then we went all, I think the whole year then went to a concert also at the Barbican Center. Where I remember we, I think we all had to sing or play, all played recorder or something. There's a picture of me in the local paper with this French horn player and violinist from the LSO. Looking very gormless with a very, very sort of early 90s haircut, amazing bowl cut. I remember it really vividly, just this enormous orchestra. You know, when you're that kind of age, you're in this huge concert hall. It's really quite overwhelming. This massive, what feels at the time like an enormous concert hall and what feels like hundreds of musicians on stage. It's probably only in inverted commas, what, 60, 70, maybe 80. There's still a lot of musicians to experience playing live, playing together, playing difficult, interesting, complicated, beautiful music. And yeah, it's an experience that really stayed with me and I think that will stay with my daughter as well and her friends. I mean, of course, needless to say, they were completely wrapped throughout, very, very excited and very engaged all the way through the concert. Of course, you talk to them afterwards and say, oh yeah, what do you think of that, how was that? Yeah, it was all right. That's nothing more than that. But nevertheless, watching their faces and seeing them concentrate on this music in this very kind of formal concert hall environment was really quite something. And absolute hats off to the LSO for being so inclusive and doing so well at bringing the kids with them. And for me, above all, for not being afraid to have a sense of humor when it comes to music because there was a couple of really lovely moments in the show, one of which involved getting a kid up from the audience to do some sort of shenanigans with the presenter and a couple of the musicians, which was really enjoyable. And the other of which was when the harpist, I saw him sneak off in the penultimate tune. I thought, hmm, this is interesting. I wonder what's gonna happen now. He snuck off and he came back on, dressed in full dog costume on all fours, climbed up the stairs to the Barbican stage, and then got up onto his harp and did the most beautiful harp cadenza. Absolutely stunning harp playing, but dressed fully head to toe as a dog, having crawled on the stage. Which I thought, be fair play. You know, you're playing one of the world's great orchestras and you're prepared to put on a dog costume and crawl onto stage in order to help engage young people and kids in what you're doing. This is not to say, by the way, that I think music should always rely on gimmicks to pull people in. But, you know, we're talking about young primary school kids. This might be their first experience of music, probably almost certainly their first experience of classical music for many of them. And so I think humor is fine. You know, the concert was really beautifully done, very well played, very well presented, but I think just using a little bit of humor, using a little bit of a light touch, it can really, really help get kids on board. I think in a way, there's maybe something that we can learn from
that as musicians, playing to adults as well. I'm not saying we should dress as dogs. And as you will find out, I think next episode, I have worn some very strange things and not worn some things for various concerts over the years. I'm going to be talking about that a bit next week. But yeah, I think nevertheless, I think not being afraid to have fun with music is really important. And for me, taking music seriously and having fun are not mutually exclusive. And so I think that's something that we as musicians would do well to remember. We can take our art seriously, but also have fun with it. I mean, it's music after all. I mean, if we're not having fun with it on some level, what are we doing it for? Anyway, so there we are. Thank you once again to the LSO for the opportunity that all of those kids had to hear a wonderful orchestra playing live in a concert hall. And thank you to my daughter's school for organizing the trip there. And yeah, everyone involved. It was really quite something. And I'm really grateful to everyone who made it happen because it's a lot of work staging a full orchestral concert for 1,500 kids. So well done to the LSO, well done to the Barbican and all the schools and institutions involved. Well, from the glamour and beauty of the concert hall to my shed. I am in my studio shed today, and I'm gonna be talking to you through UK Hardcore, the genre that was chosen for me by the genre Tombola a few weeks ago. Yeah, so I've got a load of gear set up, and I'm gonna cut now to a little chat that I had into this microphone a little while ago, talking through the different aspects of UK Hardcore. So here we go, here's me in the shed a few hours back. What are the characteristic elements of UK Hardcore? So I'm gonna sort of do this in a slightly different way than I've done before. Been listening to a lot of UK Hardcore in the last few weeks. And this, I'm gonna kind of explore different aspects of it, combine the genre Tombola aspects, in other words, exploring that genre with a bit of the music theory section. If you're new to the show, I do this genre Tombola, which is where I explore a completely different and randomly chosen genre every episode. But also, I sometimes do a section called Music Theory, which is a way of kind of breaking down some of the more technical aspects of music and hopefully making them a bit more accessible for people without any background in music theory. Now, today, the music theory is gonna be very different from usual, because in the past, sometimes we know we've touched on things like scales, on things like rhythms, something called modes as we did with Knitting Sonny a few weeks ago. But today, we're gonna take a completely different approach because my understanding of UK hardcore and that whole scene around the kind of early rave scene in the early 90s is that a lot of those musicians were not really trained in music theory. I mean, not at all in a lot of cases, I think. But it's a completely different approach. And again, it kind of vindicates what I've been saying all along with this show, which is that there are practically infinite approaches to how you can make music and even conceive of music. And of course, with this style of music, it's all made these days on
computers. So I've got a computer in front of me and lots of other things. But back in the day, it was mainly made, I think I'm right in saying, on pieces of audio hardware. So what does that mean? That means things like samplers and synthesizers and that kind of thing. Believe it or not, in the early days of electronic music, there were computers involved, but they were called Ataris. The Atari ST was a really important machine in all of this. And also the Amiga, for anyone old enough to remember the Atari or the Amiga. These were kind of beige keyboard looking machines about a foot deep, I suppose, and the width of a keyboard. And they connected up to primitive computer monitors. And you would have to kind of do everything by keyboard. And occasionally, as things got fancier, maybe a mouse could be just about starting to get involved. But almost everything was done by computer keyboard. Rarely musical keyboard, although they were involved in synthesizers and things, of course. But it's just a completely different approach to making music. And I think that's, it really brings out what I've been saying all along in this show, which is that taking completely different approach to making music is no less creative than sitting down with a score and a pen and writing it out by hand, or these days, playing the piano beautifully into a computer and that translating into like a big orchestral score or something. And so I think what I'm going to do today is use some of the similar equipment that they would have used then. I'm not going to do everything on an Atari ST. A, because I don't have one. B, because I don't want to learn how to do that. I'm an Atari ST when there's no need these days. But I've got a few things here. And so as we go through, I'm just going to break down some of the things that I'm using and explain very briefly how they work and why they're important to this genre and associated genres. I'm going to get a lot wrong as ever, especially as this episode, I don't have a guest to bounce things off. So I'm going to be working. If I say something that's wrong, please do let me know. Drop me a line at Steve Pretty on social media and we can talk about it next time. I don't profess to be an expert. I've been exploring this stuff myself. I know a little bit about this scene, but not really very much at all. So I've been kind of trying to learn as much as I can the last couple of weeks. I think it's probably fair to say that we should start with the sampler, because the sampler is what's really, really key to UK hardcore music. And another way of thinking about UK hardcore music, I think, again, could be wrong, but as far as I'm aware, is called happy hardcore, right? So that's one version of UK hardcore, which tends to have kind of slightly hookier, more upbeat sounds than some of the darker kind of hardcore music that can be made. So we're probably mainly gonna be working in that kind of area today, and I'm gonna be using some samples. Now, what is a sample? A sample is a recording that has been made of, it can be anything. It can be, in the early days, it was often vinyl records. So DJs, producers would take vinyl records, they'd plug their turntables into their sampler. So around me, I have a few pieces of what's
called rack equipment, which is sort of bolted into these big cases. And these samplers would sort of sit there, these big, beige shampilers. And they would have, in the 90s, they would use floppy disks, right? These little floppy disks, which, for those of you too young to know what those are, they are kind of square bits of plastic that can contain, for those of you who are computer literate, they contain between one and a half to three and a half megabytes of data, right? So they're digital bits of gear. And to put it in context, if you have got a standard, fairly bog standard computer laptop, the minimum it will have these days, the absolute minimum on most computers these days in terms of storage is 256,000 megabytes. So it's quite a different set up to one and a half or three and a half, I think I'm right in saying three and a half megabytes on these square floppy disks. So they would go into these samplers and DJs and producers would then sample, so record music from say a vinyl, from their vinyl collection, a record. And they would just, so they were listening really carefully to their record collection, they would think, I really like that drum loop there. I really, really like that. I'm gonna use that as the basis of this tune. We haven't got time today to go into these kind of ethics of sampling. It's quite, you know, it can be quite controversial when you're obviously using people's music that's already been created, but then doing new creative things with it. We'll try and deal with that in another episode because it's a really interesting area, actually. But they would record these little samples and then from that point on, they would mess around with them. So let's hear a sample, right? So this, for example, is a little sample that I found. So I didn't have time to go and record it off a record or anything, but this is one that someone else has recorded, I think off a record at some point in the past, and it goes like this. So that is a sample that has already been manipulated by someone else, right? It's a recording of some drums that someone has chopped up and then re-chopped into that drum loop. So let's just hear that again. Again. So you can hear, it's got a kind of really interesting combination of a very organic drum quality. It's a real drum kit being played possibly there and recorded, but then it's got this very computerized, mechanized, sort of almost machine gun effect as well. And so, yeah, so we've now got that sample, and what we can then do is chop that up further, right? So we've got that sample in the drum loop. So I can make some chops with that, it goes like this. So on this over here, I've got, this is, today I'm, as I say, mainly using this in the computer, but back in the day, you would have had this big beige box and you would then try and, through little dials and maybe you've hooked it up to a keyboard or something like that, you would then chop it up. So there's the... Right, so that's the sort of chopped up sample. Right, and then you put that all together, and it sounds pretty much like the original. So here's the original.
And here is the resampled version, the chopped up. So it's the same, but I can then manipulate that. You Right, and that allows me to create new drum loops with that. That allows me to manipulate it in all sorts of ways. I can do things like this. I can get them to repeat, so I can get the... And then, of course, the classic dance music thing, which is so overused, it's become almost a cliche. Yeah, so that's what you're doing when you've got this little sample and that's recorded to a floppy disk back in the day and then played over and over again like that. So played maybe with a keyboard, maybe often with some drum pads. There's something which we'll talk about at some stage in the future, a machine called the MPC, which is very important to this kind of world and particularly the hip hop world. But the company called Akai, who make these bits of gear. And these days, this sort of stuff is incredibly ubiquitous. But back in the day, this was quite a technical involved process. Again, maybe these people don't read music, but they are masters of this sound, this manipulating sounds in different ways. So, there we go. That is a drum sample. Now, of course, that's with drums, but you can also do that with a more of a melodic thing, right, and so that's what you find in my listening to UK hardcore and happy hardcore over the past few weeks. What I'm finding is there's a lot of really unusual samples from really odd places. A lot of the kind of early prodigy stuff is created with some really strange samples, some samples of, I don't know if it's kids' TV or if it's strange, unusual records, or maybe records made for kids to listen to, but there's some really weird and wonderful sounds there. Now today, for that kind of more melodic type material, I'm going to be using, very self-indulgently, I'm going to be using the theme tune and the intro to this show. So this is how the beginning of the last episode sounds by itself. And then it's me. Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. Yes it is. I'm a musician, composer and performer. So that is what I have sampled, right? And again, today I'm using the computer to do this, but back in the day I would have played that from, I would have played that maybe off a radio, plugged that into my sampler and sampled that little snippet of audio. So then what I can do is then manipulate that recording, that sample, in all sorts of ways. So the minute I start manipulating this, you'll hear there's different ways that it can change. And one of those ways, and certainly the way that would have happened a lot back in the day, would be that the pitch of it changes. As you speed up and slow down the sample, the pitch changes. These days, the pitch and time are not as related as they were then, but here you can hear, as I've manipulated it and tried to correct the timing a little bit so that it's gonna be useful for the track, the pitch also changes. So let's have a listen. Now you can hear the pitch moving up and down there. That's because the way I have manipulated that sample is to chop it up into particular bits, as you'll hear now. So there's this bit. So that's one bit, which I can then loop round and round and round.
And here's the next bit. And just the way that works, the pitch is slightly different. But that has provided us already a lot of interesting things to start with. We've got that drum loop that owes a lot, I think, to things like jungle and drum and bass, which are genres I'm sure we'll cover at some stage. But that have, I think I'm right in saying, some relation to UK hardcore. There's a lot of the time all of those genres use something called break beats, which again is something you can hear in this original loop that we sampled. So you can hear there, that's a fairly typical break beat. The kind of absolutely stereotypical break beat is one called the Amen break, which sounds like this. Yeah, so you can hear, it's very, very similar in style to that, but these are all kind of variations of that Armin break. And that was from a record, which I think was from the 60s or 60s, I think, a fairly obscure record, just a little drum break that a fantastic drummer for, I think the band was called the Winstons, I think it was. And the drummer for that band just played this, a really nice drum break, and then 20 years later, various producers started listening to it, thought, oh, we really like this. And then from that point on, whole genres were born, so that Amen break and its derivatives have created countless genres, some of which we'll, I'm sure, look at in this show, including this one, UK Hardcore. So that is the sampler. We've got the drum break as we heard, we can break that down however we like, and then we've also got that melodic break, that sample of me talking and of the theme tune to the show. So what we can then do is manipulate those in all sorts of different ways. So even if we just play the sample by itself. So that's that drum break. Okay, there's that drum break. What we can start doing is kind of what's called glitching that up, so just altering that, changing that around. And again, these days, that's relatively easy to do. Back in the day, that would have required a lot of programming, a lot of typing, and maybe clicking and fiddling with dials on bits of obscure equipment. But these days, we can sort of chop and change that in quite clever ways using computers. So it sounds like this. Here's the break. Thanks So, all sorts of fun to be had with that. And that is a lot of where this style and associated styles gets its interest, its variation. You've got these beautiful classic kind of break beats that have got a great groove to them, very, very danceable. But then the producers and the composers of this music then start monkeying with the fabric of those breaks. They start messing around with it until you get something completely different. And it's that, again, it's that pattern recognition in the brain that we have for all sorts of music. It's one of the reasons that we as humans are so addicted to music, is that we're constantly trying to determine patterns, trying to work out patterns from everything we hear. And music, when it's done at its best, I think, operates somewhere between the very, your brain can follow it, so it's kind of easy to understand on one level. But then when composers and producers just manipulate that
slightly, it just becomes, your brain tries to work out these new patterns and it's constantly working to find these new patterns. We can also do that with the theme tune sample. So, if we go back to this. So we get all sorts of fun glitchy effects going on here. All sorts of fun there too. So we've got the sampler controlling that loop of the drums, and also the little chopped up loops I've made there of the Origin of the Pieces theme. But I've also chopped up that Origin of the Pieces theme into even smaller chunks, we call them slices, right? And then the and I can manipulate those, I can change how long they are. They start having their own pitch. Because those loops go round at a rate of what's called an audio rate. In other words, it repeats so quickly that it becomes pitched and becomes a pitched noise. Hello, my name is... And what we can then do is turn these, let's turn some of these into... Steve, Steve, I. Mean, Prodigy, I guess, are more of a kind of electronic punk band. That's what they're thought of now. But my understanding, again, please correct me if I'm wrong, at Steve Pretty On The Socials. But my understanding is that Prodigy, in the early days, were kind of a UK hardcore band. And they were certainly very influenced. They used to sample us a lot and synthesizers. In fact, the Prodigy are named after a synthesizer. They're named after a very iconic synthesizer by arguably the most famous synthesizer company in the world. And that is Moog or Moog. And the synthesizer called the Moog Prodigy. And they managed to have the license to use that name from Moog. And so that shows you how important synthesizers are. Now I think for those of you listening who mainly listen to acoustic music of whatever sort, orchestral music or jazz or folk or whatever it might be, I think synthesizers often can get a bit of a bad name. And I understand why that is. Some people think of them sometimes as cheesy or as in some way not real instruments. I guess some people were kind of purists like that. Again, I understand that. But I would say give synthesizers a chance because all instruments are doing, every instrument in the world is a way of humans creating a tool to manipulate sound, right? And sound on a string instrument is created using a string. Vibrating a sound on a brass instrument is created by vibrating air, vibrating the lips, and then the brass amplifying that. Same with the conch shells, of course. I'm a trusty conch shell desk in front of me as always. So that, the air vibrates from the lips, and then the shell or the trumpet is amplifying that sound. Wind instruments, similarly with a reed or blowing over a pipe. And yeah, so all of these instruments are about manipulating vibration in some way, right? And the synthesizer, all the synthesizer does is manipulate voltage, or in the case of more modern synthesizers, digital information, so ones and zeros. But let's just stick with voltage for now. They manipulate electricity in order to create vibration. Now of
course you need to then get that electricity out of the synthesizers and into speakers, so they do obviously need some sort of speaker to be able to be heard. But that's what's happening. They're using fluctuations in voltage to create sound. So yeah, I think it's really worth bearing that in mind when you're thinking about synthesizers. And I've got two synthesizers here, which they're called analog synthesizers, and that means that they're using voltage rather than ones and zeros to create sound. And in fact, I do have a Moog or a Moog, not the Moog Prodigy, but I thought that for this tune, we should surely use the Moog. So I'm going to go up here and move over here and play the Moog. Now what I've done with this is you can hear not a very interesting sound by itself. It's just a fairly static sound and I can change that. So the thing that's creating the vibration in the synthesiser is called an oscillator and that is just purely the voltage fluctuating, oscillating up and down and that's what creates the waveform, the vibrating air. So here we have four oscillators, so here's one. And we can have different shapes of sound there. We can have this, which is a very pure sound. We've got this, which is a very triangular sound. This is called a square wave. So the shape of the sound is kind of up and down like that, straight up, across and down, and so on. Now, what we can then do is we can add a second oscillator. And once you do that, you have slight fluctuations between the two, and that's where the interest comes in the sound you can hear already. Even though they're playing the same note, here's the second oscillator by itself, and here's the first one. You've got this slight warbly nature, which is what you get when you have more than one instrument playing together. So when you have two trumpets playing together, you have this same sort of what's called phasey effect where things are in tune, but there's natural imperfections between those two things which can move around. And in fact, on a synthesizer, you can deliberately detune things to get different warbly sounds. And then we've got the same thing with the third oscillator and the fourth one. And of course, that's where the complexity lies. You can shape the different way that these waveforms are being created, the different vibrations that each one of those is creating, and then combined together, they create this very rich sound. So, we're going to do that. But the way that bands like The Prodigy and lots of other similar bands in this genre of UK hardcore would often do things, again, sometimes they would be sampling synthesizers, they would be sampling pianos. So, they might take a sample of a chord, just a simple piano chord. In this case, we're going to do a synthesizer chord, which is going to sound like this. And they might take that. And then what they do, rather than playing chords like a normal pianist would, where it goes, here's one chord, here's another chord, here's another chord, let's say, here's another chord. So, those are all slightly different shapes of chords, and of course the word chord means is two or more notes played together. So, those are all slightly different shapes. But what these guys would often
do is have one chord, so let's say a nice major chord, which would be nice, it's obviously a bit funky with that sound on the synth, but there we are, that sound. And then, they would just play that up and down in different places, so you go... So, that's that same shape moved around, right? It's the same shape, the same three notes just moved up and down the keyboard, so you often hear that in this sort of style of music. That kind of thing. Which is again very different from a lot of styles of music, of more traditional music, where you're thinking about the harmony, where you move from one chord to the next chord and that creates what's called a chord sequence. But in electronic music, in UK hardcore and other genres like it, none of those things really apply, so that you don't have this traditional approach to harmony at all. Instead, you've got these samples going on, you've got a manipulation of those samples, which might be pitched up and down. When I demonstrate here, you can hear that these are not in tune with one another. You can hear they're all slightly different pitches, and again, that is something that is pretty common in electronic music, that the pitch is not really defined. And then you have the synthesizers, which again are often playing these what are called parallel chords. So they're moving... So they're moving that same structure up and down. And this creates a really interesting effect, which is very hard to sort of write down in traditional form. So we've got that. And then sometimes in this style again, particularly the more kind of uplifting side of it, as I've been listening to it, I think, okay, there's also alongside this slightly almost sort of unsettling, but very dancey approach to drum loops and samplers and that kind of thing, and these parallel movement in the synthesizer, you have other synthesizers or sometimes pianos or that kind of thing playing, I guess, more traditional lines over the top of this, more traditional chords, shapes and that kind of thing. And so often you would get something like a string sound, so this kind of thing, a synthesized string sound, that kind of slightly spacey thing, and those would often be used in breakdowns, which is what I'm going to be using today. So we've got all of these different elements to listen out for as we go through the track. A little bit of a dive into UK hardcore and electronic music more generally. Let's hear the track. Here we go. Welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty, on The Origin of the Pieces. So, there we are. I'm not quite sure I'm ready to put down the trumpet and pick up the Akai Sampler and make my living as a UK hardcore producer quite yet, but I really, really enjoyed putting that together. Yeah, so I'd love to know what you think of it. Was I Mars Off Bass? Was I kind of more or less in the right ballpark? I don't know, let me know if you're a UK hardcore fan. But of course, since we're at the end of that bit of the genre tombola, it is time to choose the next episode's focus. So, here we go. Putting that list of about 1300 genres on Wikipedia into the random list picker. What am I going to be listening to for the next two weeks? Come on,
I'm quite ill and tired. Let it be a nice thing. It is going to be... Okay, this is good. It is going to be cow punk. Cow punk. C-O-W punk. What a better way to start 2024 than spending two weeks listening to cow punk. Oh, that's really tickled me. Okay, so I'm going to be listening to cow punk and taking a look and listen to what on earth is going on with that and how you combine those two words. It doesn't seem like an obvious combination. But yeah, meanwhile, the Wilton's show that I've been talking about for the last few weeks is happening between this episode and the next one. So I really urge you to get your tickets. There's a few left. It's the 20th of January at Wilton's Music Hall in London. It's going to be really special. I have had some fantastic meetings and chats with the choir who are going to be absolutely sensational. I'm really excited about having them on board. But also Hackney Colliery Band and doing some new material from our forthcoming record and some older stuff as well, reworking it with a little quartet of us, just a few of us. And of course Valerio on harp and Chris Lintott, the astronomer. We're going to be talking about space and music a bit more. So if you enjoyed the previous episode, then you're going to like that bit of the show. And either way, there's a lot of fun stuff lined up. A reminder once again, there's going to be lots of Patreon stuff happening over the coming months. I've been a bit quiet on that front recently. But as the year gets going, I'm really going to be putting a lot of interesting stuff, behind the scenes stuff and extra content, songs to download, all sorts of stuff on my Patreon. So do sign up for that. If you go to originofthepieces.com, or if you search for Origin of the Pieces on Patreon, you'll find me. It's $5 a month US or the equivalent in pounds. And for that, you get all sorts of fun stuff. But mainly, you get to support this independent podcast. There's a lot of very ambitious and exciting stuff coming up for the year. So yeah, all of those contributions really, really help me to make this the best that it can be. Right, plugs over. I'm going to go and start my two week listening binge of cow punk. And I will see you in a couple of weeks' time. We're back here as always in two weeks' time. So that's going to be the 25th of January. Burns Night, of course, although I'm not sure we're going to be talking about that. We're going to be talking about the Naked gig and the Wilton's gig that I have between now and then. Yeah, that's right, I'm doing a Naked gig, but I will reveal more next time. In fact, reveal all next time, it turns out. So meanwhile, thanks once again for listening. Thank you to, of course, Angelique Kidjo, Hackney Colliery Band and the Roundhouse Choir, who are now the Filament Choir, who you can hear at Wilton's on the 20th of January for the theme song. And once again, thank you to the LSO and my daughter's school and everyone involved for putting on that fantastic concert at the Barbican. Meanwhile, stay musically curious, and I will see you next time.