Sampling (music) |
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an musical instrument or element of a new recording. This is typically done with a sampler (musical instrument), which can be a piece of hardware or a computer software on a digital computer as in digital sampling. Sampling is also possible with tape loops or with vinyl records on a phonograph.
Often samples consist of one part of a song, such as a break (music), used in another, for instance the use of the drum introduction from Led Zeppelin s When the Levee Breaks in songs by the Beastie Boys, Mike Oldfield and Erasure, and the guitar riffs from Foreigner (band) s Hot Blooded in Tone-Loc s Funky Cold Medina . Samples in this sense occur often in hip hop and Rhythm and blues, but are becoming more common in other music, as well.
= History =
==Early precedents==
In the 1940s, some musique concrète composers utilized portions of other recordings to create new compositions.
In the 1950s, Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman released a song, The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 and 2) , which featured samples of various then-popular songs, all taken out of context from their original material and used as answers to a wacky reporter s question about Unidentified flying object. Goodman would later make a career out of similar break-in or snippet records, including such recordings as Mister Jaws and Energy Crisis 74, and is today considered one of the fathers of pop music sampling.
In 1966, minimalist composer Steve Reich created Come Out, a piece comprised of tape loops culled from a recording of a young man arrested in the infamous Harlem riots. The manipulated use of recorded speech as a repetitive rhythmic element qualifies the piece as an early precedent of sampling and a precursor to the hip-hop genre.
1968 saw Revolution 9 from The Beatles The Beatles (album) , composed partly of portions of orchestral recordings.
An interesting early use sampling was on , but integrated as part of a new song.
==Modern sampling==
Modern sampling in popular music, however, probably dates back to the 1960s when Jamaican DJs developed dub music. These DJs combined instrumental reggae recordings with other albums into single works. Frequently, they would rap over the music, singing unrehearsed lyrics. These early practices made their way to America in the early 1970s. With the assistance of Jamaican-born Kool DJ Herc, who moved to the Bronx, dub, a buoyant predecessor to hip hop, fashioned latter-day DJing and sampling techniques. Initially, DJs did not have the technological comfort of samplers.
By the late 1970s, the stylings of Herc spread from the West Bronx all over New York City. Like any musical style, dub became modified to its surroundings. Instead of reggae, disco and funk were mixed together. New Yorkers were improvising their own variety of poetry and dub, which was soon christened hip hop .
Sampling made its real breakthrough at the end of the 1970s when The Sugarhill Gang took portions of Chic s Good Times and had them replayedby a live band as the basis for Rapper s Delight , which became the first commercially successful hip hop single. It was also the first to be hit with legal difficulties, as Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, who had written Good Times , were not credited on the disc. According to some sources, Rapper s Delight was in fact based on a tape loop of Chic s Good Times , rather than being re-played by a live band in the studio.
The first record to use an actual sampler is Cuba Gooding Sr. s Happiness Is Just Around The Bend . It just sampled their own voices.
When the Ultimate Breaks & Beats LP compilation series hit the shelves in 1986, sampling became really popular. Early uses of sampling can be found in Doug E. Fresh s The Show, which used a tiny snippet of the Cold Crush Brothers Punk Rock Rap . Before that, most records like Rapper s Delight or the Fearless Four s Rockin It were based on tape loops, in the latter case of Kraftwerk s Man Machine . Even Public Enemy s Public Enemy Number 1 is based on a tape loop of the James Brown Band s Blow Your Head , even though at that time it was possible to sample in a very similar manner.
The Emulator was the sampler of choice until Emu s SP12 came out in 1985, which when tied with the Beats and Breaks compilations, shows how loops became the vernacular for Hip-Hop production. Then the SP1200 was released in 1988 and solidified it well into the 90 s.
The first digital sampler, the Fairlight CMI, was invented in Sydney, Australia by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie in the late 70s. It was an artistic success but a commercial failure due to its high price tag.
Hip hop was far from the only popular music to use sampling processes during the 1970s and early 1980s. The Temptations Psychedelic Shack (song) features a sample from a vinyl record of their hit I Can t Get Next to You , and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (album), a 1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne (musician) made extensive use of vocal samples.
Near the mid-1980s, hip hop music was nearing a mainstream, commercial breakthrough, and the price of sampler (musical instrument) became accessible to the general public. It was at this time that sampling finally became mainstream.
== Legal issues ==
Sampling has been an area of contention from a legal perspective. Early artists simply sampled and used bits of previous recordings; once rap and other music incorporating samples began to make significant money the original artists began to take legal action, claiming Copyright infringement. Some artists fought back, claiming their samples were fair use.
One of the first major cases of illegal sampling was Pump Up The Volume by M/A/R/R/S, released in 1987. As the record reached the UK top ten, producers Stock Aitken Waterman obtained an injunction against the record due to the illegal use of a sample from their hit single Roadblock . The dispute was settled out of court, with the injunction being lifted in return for an undertaking that overseas releases would not contain the Roadblock sample, and the disc went on to top the UK singles chart. Ironically, the sample in question had been so distorted as to be virtually unrecognisable, and SAW didn t realize their record had been used until they heard co-producer Dave Dorrell mention it in a radio interview.
In the early 1990 s, Vanilla Ice came under criticism for the unauthorized use of a sample from the Queen (band)/David Bowie hit Under Pressure . Vanilla Ice s case rested on the addition of one ornament (music) not present in the original. No lawsuit was filed, but it is likely that Vanilla Ice agreed to pay Queen and Bowie if they agreed not to sue.
More dramatically, Biz Markie s album I Need a Haircut was withdrawn in 1992 following a US federal court ruling (Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records, Inc.) that his use of a sample from Gilbert O Sullivan s Alone Again (Naturally) was not merely copyright infringement, but criminal theft. This case had a powerful effect on the record industry, with record companies becoming very much concerned with the legalities of sampling, and demanding that artists make full declarations of all samples used in their work. On the other hand, the ruling also made it more attractive to artists and record labels to allow others to sample their work, knowing that they would be paid - often handsomely - for their contribution.
Cases have still emerged since then involving uncleared samples. In the late 1990 s, The Verve was forced to pay 100% of their royalties from their hit Bittersweet Symphony for the use of an unlicensed sample from an orchestral cover version of The Rolling Stones hit The Last Time . The Rolling Stones catalogue is one of the most litigiously protected in the world of popular music - to some extent the case mirrored the legal difficulties encountered by Carter USM when they quoted from the song Ruby Tuesday in their song After The Watershed some years earlier. In both cases, the issue at stake was not the use of the recording, but the use of the song itself - the section from The Last Time used by the Verve was not even part of the original composition, but because it derived from a cover version of it, Jagger and Richards were still entitled to royalties and credit on the derivative work. This illustrates an important legal point: even if a sample is used legally, it may open the artist up to other problems.
Today, most mainstream acts obtain prior authorization to use samples, a process known as clearing (gaining permission to use the sample and, usually, paying an up-front fee and/or a cut of the royalties to the original artist). Independent bands, lacking the funds and legal assistance to clear samples, are at a disadvantage.
A notable case in the early 1990s involved the dispute between the group Negativland and Casey Kasem over the band s use of unaired vocal snippets from Kasem s radio program America s Top 40 on the Negativgland single U2. More recently, in 2004, DJ Danger Mouse with the release of The Grey Album , which is a remix of The Beatles The Beatles (album) and rapper Jay-Z s The Black Album (Jay-Z) has been embroiled in a similar situation with the record label EMI issuing cease and desist orders over uncleared Beatles samples.
Public Enemy recorded a track entitled Psycho of Greed for their album Revolverlution that contained a continuous looping sample from The Beatles track Tomorrow Never Knows . However, the clearance fee demanded by Capitol Records and the surviving Beatles was so high that the group decided to pull the track from the album.
Recently, a movement - started mainly by Lawrence Lessig - of Free Culture has prompted many audio works to be licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows for legal sampling of the work provided the resulting work(s) are licensed under the same terms.
= Samplers on sampling =
[Samples have] a certain reality. It doesn t just take the sound, it takes the whole way it was recorded. The ambient sounds, the little bits of reverb left off crashes that happened a couple of bars ago. There s a lot of things in the sample, just like when you take a picture-- it s got a lot more levels than say, the kickdrum or the drum machine, I think. (...) Looking at a sampler the way it was used first-- to try and simulate real instruments-- you didn t have to get a session guitarist and you could just be like, Hey, I can have an orchestra in my track, and I can have a guitar, and it sounds real! And I think that s the wrong way to use sampling. The right way is to get the guitar, and go, Right, that s a guitar. Let s make it into something that a guitar could never possibly be. You know, take it away from the source and try to make it something else. Might as well just get a bloody guitarist if you want a guitarist. There s plenty of them. - Amon Tobin [http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/t/tobin_amon-00/]
Producers like Organized Noize mix samples and live instruments really well, but for me, it almost feels like a cop-out, because I m a collage artist. It s like, Damn, if only I could find this one part. Well, maybe if I just had somebody paint it, and then I ll put it out. That almost feels like cheating. Lots of times, I have trouble finding bass lines, because it s not very often on a record that there are good open bass lines. Sometimes I wish I could just have somebody come in and do what I want him to do on a bass line. It would be so easy. But what I do just keeps things much more challenging, I guess. - DJ Shadow [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0KYX/is_2002_July_1/ai_88684017]
Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It s about drawing from what s around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it. - DJ Shadow [http://to-the-quick.binghamton.edu/issue%202/sampling.html]
A lot of people still don t recognize the sampler as a musical instrument. I can see why. A lot of rap hits over the years used the sampler more like a , The Wu-Tang Manual , 2004
For hip hop, the main thing is to have a good trained ear, to hear the most obscure loop or sound or rhythm inside of a song. If you can hear the obscureness of it, and capture that and loop it at the right tempo, you re going to have some nice music man, you re going to have a nice hip hop track. - RZA
Lets say I find a loop or something that I want to use you attach yourself to a particular aspect or emotion that you find in it part of it is looking for like-minded sounds and part of it is just laying things out in a way that kind of helps accomplish what you want. Its what you can hear in a particular sound. - RJD2 [http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/interviews/rjd2iw.htm]
I look at all the different parts and see how I can organize them in a way. Its like maths. Very mathematic. Its like graphs ! Youre always searching for the combination that sounds best. Its kind you set back, and feel the thing. If you want something to come in, you have to search for it, listen to it. - Blockhead [http://www.trip-hop.net/interview-10-Blockhead.html]
My music is based in hip hop, but I pull everything from dancehall to country to rock (music) together. I can take a Led Zeppelin drum loop, put a Lou Donaldson horn on it, add a Joni Mitchell guitar, then get a Crosby, Stills & Nash vocal riff. - Prince Be Softly of PM Dawn, Musician magazine, June 1993
Sampling artistry is a very misunderstood form of music. A lot of people think sampling is thievery but it can take more time to find the right sample than to make up a riff. - Prince Be Softly of PM Dawn
Sampling s not a lazy man s way. We learn a lot from sampling, it s like school for us. When we sample a portion of a song and repeat it over and over we can better understand the matrix of the song. - Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, cited in Black Noise by Tricia Rose, Wesleyan Press 1994, p. 79
You got stuff darting in and out absolutely everywhere. It s like someone throwing rice at you. You have to grab every little piece and put it in the right place like a puzzle. Very complicated. All those little snippets and pieces that go in, along with the regular drums that you gotta drop out in order to make room for it. - Eric Sadler of Public Enemy s Bomb Squad, Black Noise by Tricia Rose, Wesleyan Press 1994, p. 80
It s a context issue, because not every sample is a huge chunk of a song. We might take a tiny little insignificant sound from a record and then slow it way down and put it deep in the mix with, like, 30 other sounds on top of it. It s not even a recognizable sample at that point. Which is a lot different than taking a huge, obvious piece from some hit song that everyone knows and saying whatever you want to on top of that loop. An example that s often brought up in court when we get sued over sampling is a Biz Markie track where he more or less used a whole Gilbert O Sullivan song. Because it was such an obvious sample, it s the example lawyers use when trying to prove that sampling is stealing. And that s really frustrating to us as artists who sample, because sampling can be a totally different thing than that. - Beastie Boys, [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/beastie.html]
Its pretty much impossible to clear samples [in 2005]. We had to stay away from samples as much as possible. The ones that we did use were just absolutely integral to the feeling or rhythm of the song. But, back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies and stuff, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now its prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70 percent of the song and $50,000. Thats where sampling has gone, and thats why hip-hop sounds the way it does now. - Beck [http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/articlearticle_id=1816]
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