Take a listen to “The 90s Tapes” and you’ll hear vocals, tons of them and at the time when I made the tracks from my bedroom in the early 90s I had no access to singers or the gear to record them well enough. These days we’re very used to huge libraries of royalty free vocals but in those days such things were few and far between. Back in the day we had to use Sample CDs that were audio, not even data. This meant we would have to literally plug a CD player into our sampler and play the audio in realtime, recording it, editing it and truncating it in order to reduce the amount of RAM the sound would take up.
Now the best source of vocals at that time was a CD available on Time & Space called Vocal Bytes and it become completely and utterly rinsed by not only me but other producers of that era. It’s funny, if there were a way to trace every single recording now it would reveal multiple people using the same vocals on tracks.
Consider a ‘song’ like “Gotta Love You” that has verses and choruses. These were not prepared in that way on the CD at all. I had to scan through randomly scattered one shot words and phrases and attempt to piece together something that (almost) made grammatical sense – a huge challenge! It was an approach I used on “I Just Can’t Stop” and many many more. Thanks to Danny Taurus on the Underground Music Production group on Facebook I’ve actually found out that it’s still available for sale so take a look for yourselves and see if you fancy purchasing a slice of music production history!
Buy now – http://www.midimark.com/smplcds.html
Danny J Lewis 
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