I don't know if vaporwave can even be called electronic music but it occurred to me I've been dabbling in it since before it had a name. I used to cut up and edit shit for fun in Audacity, slowing things down, using reverse, adding echo, making loops, fucking with compression, etc. I remember taking a lo-fi tape of my old band's rehearsal sessions and cutting and pasting different parts into some really cool, slowed down ambient shit. I really wish I had saved some of those old experiments but most of them died with my last computer. there was probably enough for a couple EP length releases but at the time (early 2000s) it didn't occur that someone might actually be interested in any of it.
So last night I took
Donna Summer's Down Deep Inside, slowed it down, and copied several sections for use in looping. I find disco music to be very good for this, because much of it was extremely precise in timing--I assume most disco would've been recorded on 24 track at the time and that metronomes would have been used frequently aid in creating highly syncopated beats. Because of this, sampling any disco or dance has always been easier to me than say, a prog or classical piece with shifting time signatures and tempos. Once you can locate the spikes of the beats in the waveform, knowing where to select and cut is easy. Incidentally certain rock music like Queen and Bowie featured very professional drumming, so they can also be easy to sample.
I'm still not sure if I want to make this an instrumental or use some snippets of Summer's vocals. They sound eerie slowed down, but I'll probably just kick the speed up a bit once the entire sample track is ready. I will probably wind up making multiple versions. I could adjust the pitch but I think I'm leaning toward making this a sick instrumental remix. And I've been thinking it would be cool to do a John Barry remix project for a while.
Once I have the sequence of loops figured out (I currently have about 2 minutes worth) I will then take the sample and import it into my DAW, then experiment with the right sounds to lay over it. The key challenge will be leaving enough "space" as I make the sample track, otherwise any additional instrumentation might just clutter the thing up. Not that clutter is bad when mixed correctly, but I tend to lean toward a minimalism in my music. Sometimes less is more.