I just paid close attention to Fred Again's works after watching his Tiny Desk.
In his song Kyle (I found you) he sampled a poetry audio.
How do you even find a sample like this, change the pitch and put it into a song?

Real question is, how can you get the best possible quality from streaming services such as YT, Spotify or simply radio? I've seen apps like this: Viwizard Audio Capture v1.1.0.1. Are they worth the try? or any default computer recorder can do the job?

 

I like Fred Again, he is using Logic Pro. So for the part of changing the pitch, it could be done inside logic pro. Also you can use some plugins like Melodyne, but there would be more tools for that.

 

Last edited: Mar 5, 2024

If you want to sample from Youtube stay away from youtube to mp3/jdownloader or any sort of thing that rip the video for you. The best (if you soundcard allow it) is to record directly the audio with a loopback (if your soundcard doesn't give you that option I think some plugin are made for that). For some weird technical reason I forgot, Youtube playback will give you something like 192kbps audio but download will give 128kbps or less (with no frequencies above 15k). It's not with all video, but most of them. For Spotify, if that's not from a podcast then you can usually find the same track on download plateform (like Bandcamp if you take the legal or even some stuff like free-mp3-download that rip directly from Spotify or Tidal in hd - not sure about the source here, but it give a real flac option).

In Fred again.. case I don't know if he sample directly from youtube or if he got access to the original source, but he's notorious for using sample recording made with his phone, like all the conversation part you can hear in his song, it's mostly come from voice memo or video he made. But the quality is not important really here, as it can give this lofi vibe sometime and all the production around it make it sounds like it's on purpose.

The main idea in his sampling technique is to not care about the quality but more about the vibe and the feeling of the sample. Like his track "we lost dancing", the audio sample the Blessed Madonna talking on a computer or phone mic in a Zoom conversation uploaded on youtube, so at best he had access to the original video recorded from Zoom, so still nothing great in quality, but it works, because he make it works in the context of his track. And the sample is not even that much process in the track, he doesn't try to clean it, but embrace the sound he got and move on with the idea. That's one of the reason he make such great music with this unique vibe, great global vision of the sound in its context instead of focusing on each sound by themself.

 

The video in question

He is a genious. I would really like to learn his techniques.
How doy you use the samples and in tempo with the videos? I really like the effect, of watching the video and the sound coordinated.