Sampling (music)

In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion of one sound recording, the sample, and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer. 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, 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's "Hot Blooded" in Tone-Loc's "Funky Cold Medina". "Samples" in this sense occur often in hip hop and R&B, 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 spaceships from another planet. 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 White Album, composed partly of portions of orchestral recordings.

An interesting early use sampling was on Charlie Haden's 1969 release, Liberation Music Orchestra: A few of the album's numbers (such as "Song For Che") feature fragments of Gramophone recordings of songs from the Spanish Civil War, but integrated as part of a new song.

In 1970, Miles Davis in A Tribute to Jack Johnson sampled his own earlier recording In a Silent Way from 1969. The samples were overlaid and interspersed with Sonny Sharrock's heavily distorted guitar.

Modern sampling

Despite these important early examples, modern sampling as generally used in popular music probably dates back to the 1960s when Jamaican DJs developed dub. These DJs combined instrumental reggae recordings with other albums into single works. Frequently, they would rap over the music, singing unrehearsed lyrics, making dub a buoyant predecessor to hip hop.

These early practices made their way to America in the early 1970s. The Jamaican-born Kool DJ Herc, who moved to the Bronx, was among the pioneers of latter-day DJing and sampling techniques. Initially, DJs did not have the technological comfort of samplers--their sampling was done live, using records and turntables.

By the late 1970s, the stylings of Herc spread from the West Bronx all over New York City. Like any musical style, dub was adapted to its environment. 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 replayed by 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 Ultimate Breaks & Beats LP compilation series hit the shelves in 1986. Consisting entirely of rare and popular "breaks" and "beats" used by DJs, the series helped make sampling became widely popular.

Early uses of sampling in rap 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 "The 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", although at that time it was already possible to sample via computers.

Perhaps the first record to use an actual sampler is Cuba Gooding Sr.'s "Happiness Is Just Around The Bend"; the song just sampled the singers' own voices.

The first digital sampler was the Computer Music Melodian, invented by Harry Mendell in 1975. Stevie Wonder used it heavily in his The Secret Life of Plants, released in 1976.

The first polyphonic digital sampler, the Fairlight CMI, was invented in Sydney, Australia by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie in the late 1970s. It was an artistic success but a commercial failure due to its high price tag.

The E-mu Emulator was the sampler of choice until E-mu'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.

Hip-hop was far from the only popular music to use sampling processes during the 1970s and early 1980s. The Temptations' "Psychedelic Shack" features a sample from a 45 of their hit "I Can't Get Next to You", and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a 1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne made extensive use of vocal samples.

Near the mid-1980s, hip hop music was nearing a mainstream, commercial breakthrough, and the price of samplers became accessible to the general public. It was at this time that sampling finally became mainstream.

Many modern professional music sequencing software programs now include a selection of samples as an aid to music creation.

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 legal cases regarding 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 unauthorized 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 1990s, Vanilla Ice came under criticism for the unauthorized use of a sample from the Queen/David Bowie hit "Under Pressure". Vanilla Ice's case rested on the addition of one grace note not present in the original. No lawsuit was filed, but it is conjectured 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 willful infringement. 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 1990s, The Verve was forced to pay 100% of their royalties from their hit "Bitter Sweet 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 the Unstoppable Sex Machine 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, Mick Jagger and Keith 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 Negativland single "U2". More recently, in 2004, Danger Mouse with the release of The Grey Album, which is a remix of The Beatles' White Album and rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album 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.

On March 19, 2006, a judge ordered that sales of The Notorious B.I.G.'s album Ready to Die to be halted because the title track sampled a 1992 song by the Ohio Players, "Singing in the Morning", without permission.

The most recent significant copyright case involving sampling held that even sampling three notes could constitute copyright infringement. Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films, 410 F.3d 792 (6th Cir. 2005). This case was roundly criticized by many in the music industry, including the RIAA.

There has been a second important US case on music sampling involving the Beastie Boys who sampled the sound recording of a flute track by James Newton in their song "Pass the Mic". The Beastie Boys properly obtained a licence to use the sound recording but did not clear the use of the song (the composition on which the recording is based including any music and lyrics. In Newton v. Diamond and Others (2003)349 Fd.3 591 (9th Cir. 2003)the US Appeals Court held that the use of the looped sample of a flute did not constitute copyright infringement as the core of the song itself had not been used. It seems that the position in law now is that with use of the sound recording any use without permission will constitute an infringement; however with the composition there must be some substantial use—the 'heart' of the song itself must be at least recognisable. This extends to both the music and the lyrics: a June 2006 case involving Ludacris and Kanye West held that their use of the phrases "like that" and "straight like that" which had been used on an earlier hip-hop track by another artist was not infringing use.

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.

Artists who do not sample

The cost and legal hurdles of sampling have meant that some mainstream artists, as a matter of practice, do not sample. "Weird Al" Yankovic always replays his parody music in the studio rather than sampling either from the original songs or the songs the original songs sampled from. The rapper Juvenile does not sample, either. The rap group Gym Class Heroes used studio recorded instruments instead of Samples.

Producers on sampling

"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 ^*

"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 ^*

"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 Xerox machine. If you take four whole bars that are identifiable, you're just biting that shit. But I've always been into using the sampler more like a painter's palette than a Xerox. Then again, I might use it as a Xerox if I find rare beats that nobody had in their crates yet. If I find a certain sample that's just incredible—like the one on 'Liquid Swords'—I have to zap that! That was from an old Willie Mitchell song that I was pretty sure most people didn't have. But on every album I try to make sure that I only have 20 to 25 percent that kind of sampling. Everything else is going to be me putting together a synthesis of sounds. You listen to a song like "Knowledge God" by Raekwon: it took at least five to seven different records chopped up to make one two-bar phrase. That's how I usually work." —RZA, 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

"Let’s 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. It’s what you can hear in a particular sound." —RJD2 ^*

"I look at all the different parts and see how I can organize them in a way. It’s like mathematics. Very mathematic. It’s like graphs! You’re always searching for the combination that sounds best. It’s 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 ^*

"My music is based in hip hop, but I pull everything from dancehall to country to rock 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 from 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 ^*

"It’s pretty much impossible to clear samples 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 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 it’s 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. That’s where sampling has gone, and that’s why hip-hop sounds the way it does now." —Beck ^*

Types of samples

Once recorded, samples can be edited, played back, or looped (i.e. played back continuously). Types of samples include:

Loops. The drums and percussion parts of many modern recordings are really a variety of short samples of beats strung together. Many libraries of such beats exist and are licensed so that the user incorporating the samples can distribute their recording without paying royalties. Such libraries can be loaded into samplers. Though percussion is a typical application of looping, many kinds of samples can be looped. A piece of music may have an ostinato which is created by sampling a phrase played on any kind of instrument. There is software which specializes in creating loops.
Samples of musical instruments. Whereas loops are usually a phrase played on a musical instrument, this type of sample is just a single note. Music workstations and samplers use samples of musical instruments as the basis of their own sounds, and are capable of playing a sample back at any pitch. Many modern synthesizers and drum machines also use samples as the basis of their sounds. (See sample-based synthesis for more information.) Most such samples are created in professional recording studios using world-class instruments played by accomplished musicians. These are usually developed by the manufacturer of the instrument or by a subcontractor who specializes in creating such samples. There are businesses and individuals who create libraries of samples of musical instruments. Of course, a sampler allows anyone to create such samples. Samples used in musical instruments sometimes have a looped component. An instrument with indefinite sustain, such as a pipe organ, does not need to be represented by a very long sample because the sustained portion of the timbre is looped. The sampler (or other sample playback instrument) plays the attack and decay portion of the sample followed by the looped sustain portion for as long as the note is held, then plays the release portion of the sample.
Resampled layers of sounds generated by a music workstation. To conserve polyphony, a workstation may allow the user to sample a layer of sounds (piano, strings, and voices, for example) so they can be played together as one sound instead of three. This leaves more of the instruments' resources available to generate additional sounds.
Samples of recordings. There are several genres of music in which it is commonplace for an artist to sample a phrase of a well-known recording and use it as an element in a new composition. Two well-known examples include the sample of Rick James' "Super Freak" in MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" and the sample of Queen/David Bowie's "Under Pressure" in Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby".

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