Sunday, April 22, 2012

Doctor Snuggles Theme

Early sampling devices had the ability to "lower the bandwidth" when you sampled a sound, so that the file you were creating would take up less space on the teeny tiny disk you were storing it on. A lot of excellent early rap has this lower bandwidth as a quality that almost defines it. It made sampled drum sounds have a little fuzz on them, it added a bit of a computer vapor to a sampled bassline, it made voices sound doubled up or lost in a fog. It sounds like Nintendo one. It sounds dusty. Dopey. Sometimes bigger. Sometimes more bedroom-like. It's the sound version of a xerox paper "zine". It's basically always a good thing, especially because it transformed a known sound into something different.

Today, I present this super-low bandwidth recording of the Dr. Snuggles cartoon show theme as an example of how this low digital quality sound is a building block of "cracked out creativy" - an essential component to Frankie's Apartment.