For decades now, there has been a cultural division in music production: loops/samples v. real instruments. Before this turns into a debate, let’s agree that music, in general, has benefitted from both sources. More so, most recently, the line has been blurred with countless examples of both sources being incorporated in countless hits. That being said, let’s explore this horizon!
At the onset of music production, which is to say the recording and distribution of original music to the masses, all there was to capture was musicians in a room, with their instruments, being collected as “sound” by rudimentary recording technologies. Hard to imagine, but there was once a time that large orchestras, and even “pop” artists of the day, were being recorded by one single microphone, strategically placed to capture all of the song’s elements, to a very basic single track recorder.