I love sample based music. Think of Beck when he worked with the Dust Brothers to make his Odelay album, or the Beastie Boys when they worked with the Dust Brothers to make Paul's Boutique, or more recently LEN when they worked with one half of the Dust Brothers to make Steal My Sunshine.

But the Dust Brothers weren't the only ones using samples to make awesome music. DJ Muggs from Cypress Hill (and momentarily House of Pain) could easily be considered one of the best, so could Dr Dre and more dance oriented DJs like Fat Boy Slim, Groove Armada and The Crystal Method.

Now with this, there is just one tiny problem. These were the late 80s and 90s when sampling other people's music wasn't considered too bad an act. But there were lawsuits eventually and so artists started getting permission and paying a fee to use samples to shield them from future troubles.

These fees became larger and larger and independent acts (Like myself) today simply cannot afford to use even a millisecond of someone else's music without fear of total financial collapse.

All the name dropping I did just a moment ago is the stuff I was raised on and so It makes sense I would use similar techniques. (Namely looping samples)

This is the genesis of how I make music. But where do I get my samples? I make them myself.

I'm not a trained musician or even a particularly gifted on, but the way I figure it is like this:

Press the record button, play something (On guitar or drum or synth) and, even if most of it is non-sense, after I apply some effects to my sounds, sometimes I find a one-bar nugget in there that sounds great. So I loop it, and restart the process.

This track is a good example of that if you listen to the guitar part. I probably recorded 10 minutes of junk only to get a tiny two bar riff good enough to be repeated throughout. It's not a very efficient way to make music, but It's what I got :)