As much as I love electronic music, there are great limitations on one's artistic creativity if they have to rely on sampling someone else's music, as opposed to creating their own.

If I play a brass or string instrument (Saxophone, guitar ect) I can go anywhere I want on the musical scale. I can make any arrangement of chords I want, to convey the feeling I'm going after.

If I'm relying on my sampler or the arpeggio in my synthesizer than I'm really limited on what I can do. I can sample a beat from another artist and loope it, but normally I can't make a chorus or a bridge. I'm creatively restricted.

If your say Portishead, and in addition to sampling you can compose your own songs and play instruments than you get the best of both worlds, but if your just your standard trance or house dj, chances are that the majority of your work is going to sound pretty boring & monotonous

who are you actually talking about? the "sampling a whole song" is the largest strawman casting its shadow over pop music ive ever heard.

Anyways Frownland I wish you the best on your own creative endeavors.

Its been a long time since I created my own electronic music, but I held on to my synth after all these years in case I want to take another crack at it. Hopefully software like Cubase has become a lot more user friendly from when I had to lug away at it.

All those things you're complaining about are good for what they are used for; doing ecstasy and grinding on each other in clubs. I don't see why it has to be technical or full of talent to be considered good music. Music isn't a talent contest, except to those looking to prove their superiority.

Well there is already so so so much music out there that you could take samples and create pretty much anything. In fact, doing something like that through samples could be more difficult than composing something and playing it yourself because you have to do a lot of research or have a lot of knowledge to find those sounds that you want. Talking against samples or electronics as if they're not capable of doing anything apart from what you've heard in top 40 stuff, it's kind of like saying that you don't like the guitar because you don't like what George Harrison played. I don't think that those limitations really exist, because the end result is all that matters and I know examples from both electric and acoustic acts that have good and bad outcomes.

Tl;dr it's not the instrument, it's the artist.

Fowns, I have to wonder if you have been reading anything I wrote, outside of the sampling? :)

1. I love electronic music, in the 90's I probably listened to more electronic based music than I did rock or rap.

2. I have made electronic music, and yes sampling can be challenging, but I find that having to learn how to play an instrument really well is more difficult.

3. From my own experience of making electronic music, I can say first hand that you have much more creative freedom if you can play your own instrument, because you can play whatever note you like in whatever arrangement. Your not tied down to the sample or the arpeggio beat in your synth.

(One of my most frustrating experiences in trying to make electronic music was that I would find this really wicked synth beat in my arpeggio bank, but I couldn't build on it, no matter how hard we tried it was near impossible to make a chorus or bridge that would match the sounds beat and tempo, so we were stuck with being forced to build around this one beat, which is pretty much what most Dj's do. Its like having the verse through a whole song. We were using Cubase VST 3.5 at the time, so maybe the technology has advanced, but it doesn't appear to have.

4. I think some of the confusion here may lie in the fact that the acronym EDM has been hijacked by $hit artists and dj's, (Skrillex, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia) it no longer means Leftfield, Burial or Underworld)

You can sample single notes and combine them all together.

And there are slicers that slice up samples so you can recombine them note by note.

Didn't know they could do that but that just further proves the point. Thanks Grindy.

At least FL Studio has the slicer. It's used for cutting up drum loops, but I use it to sample and cut up melody as well. It's not very clean, but one can work around that.
I'm pretty sure there are also more sophisticated programms made for exactly that purpose.