sgaparchivalinitiative:

SGaP never made it clear whether any of the instruments appearing in his music were played by his own hand, but I have long suspected that the answer is no. As I described in this post, his music (the earlier stuff at least) was almost certainly entirely sample-based, with the exception of his own vocals



It really does appear that his first publicly-released song was made with little to no prior experience in music production. Of course, what we don’t know is how many songs he played around with in his digital audio workstation but never released, or even how long he spent on Flutterwonder (though his second released song, Your Faithful Student, took “the whole day” to produce, so we can assume Flutterwonder took at least longer than that). Furthermore we don’t know how much research he did between the time he decided he wanted to try and make MLP songs, and the time he finished his first. Since in the comments of YFS he said “None of [the sampled songs] ended up in exactly the key they were presented”, it’s clear he either had some existing knowledge about general music stuff like keys and scales (perhaps from past singing experience), or he did that research and picked it up pretty quick when he started messing around with production

So in summary, all I have for you at the moment is speculation. I welcome any suggestions anyone else might have, by reply to this post or through an ask

@becomebirdflyaway​ said:

Did the S2 videos have sources to the samples on them like the Standard Model videos? I’m thinking about the “live instrument playing” thing, and the guitar playing in E40 (Faithful and Strong) is unlikely to be sampled. I’m not sure how well the sourcing was kept up in S2’s videos, but the guitar is pretty important to the song. If it’s not sourced, then maybe it’s also done by him? I know this isn’t fact and doesn’t help but add speculation, but it’s just something to think about.

@galaxygroove​ said:

He only plays some guitar, he played/sung for me once irl. :’)

Cool! That almost certainly means the guitar in E40 (Faithful and Strong) was played by SGaP himself, which I agree would have been tough to sample and probably unconvincing to virtualise

