Creative References

Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” This isn’t advocating for plagiarism, but inspiration. You may like the drum sound from one song, the guitar tone from another, the bass of another, the vocals from yet one more, and the overall feeling of another song. This list is limited by only your imagination and taste. In finding songs to reference for your creative ideas, you can better explain and execute these ideas with your producer, recording, mixing, and mastering engineers. 

This creative attitude towards a reference track is very similar to the mixing engineer’s attitude towards a reference track. We’ll talk more about mixing reference tracks soon!

Pharell is quoted as having drawn inspiration from Marvin Gaye in the creation of the song “Blurred Lines” featuring Robin Thicke and T.I. It is reasonable to say that Got To Give It Up was used as a reference track during the creative process. However, since nothing was directly used from the song, the lines between sample, interpolation, and plagiarism became quite blurred. This became a large profile case of copyright infringement, which we will discuss more on in subsequent posts.