In
music,
sampling is the act
of taking a portion, or
sample, of one
sound recording and reusing it as an
instrument or a different sound
recording of a song. 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. People who
sample are commonly referred to as producers or beatmakers.
Although
beatmaking can be done using
various live instruments and synthesizers, sampling is the method
most enjoyed by beatmakers.
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,
Dr. Dre,
Eminem,
Mike Oldfield,
Rob Dougan,
Coldcut,
Depeche Mode
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
industrial music, often using spoken words
from movies and TV shows, as well as
electronic music (which developed out of
the
musique concrète
style, based almost entirely on samples and sample-like parts),
hip hop, developed from DJs repeating
the breaks from songs (Schloss 2004, p. 36), and
contemporary R&B, but are becoming
more common in other music as well.
Sampler
Legal issues
Sampling has been an area of contention from a legal perspective.
Early sampling artists simply used portions of other artists'
recordings, without permission; once rap and other music
incorporating samples began to make significant money, the original
artists began to take legal action, claiming
copyright infringement. Some sampling artists
fought back, claiming their samples were
fair
use (a legal doctrine in the USA that is
not
universal). International sampling is governed by agreements such
as the
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic
Works and the
WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties
Implementation Act.
Early cases
Sampling existing (copyrighted) recordings using manipulation with
tape recorders goes back at least as far as 1961, when
James Tenney created Collage #1 ("Blue Suede")
from samples of
Elvis Presley's
recording of the song "
Blue Suede
Shoes."At the time, many artists such as
Brion Gysin and
William S. Burroughs were experimenting with the
new technology that was tape-recording by manipulating existing
works such as radio broadcasts. Brion Gysin's work tended to favor
his permutation poems as the vehicle for cut-ups with spliced
repetition of the same series of words rearranged in every
conceivable pattern, frequently utilizing snippets of speeches or
news broadcasts. Burroughs preferred a much more frantic and
disorganized sound that would later spawn similar disjointed
collage material from modern groups such as
negativland. Burroughs would record, for
instance, a radio broadcast about military action, then dub parts
of the broadcast likely at random often stuttering and distorting
the original work far beyond comprehension.
The Beatles also used the technique on a number
of popular recordings in the mid' '60s, including "
Yellow Submarine" and "
I am the Walrus."
Timothy Leary sampled the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones among others
on his album
You Can
Be Anyone This Time Around in 1970.
In the early '70s and early '80s,
DJ Kool
Herc, who is often credited as the inventor of hip-hop, often
looped hard funk break beats at block parties in The Bronx.
However, sampling did not truly take off in popular music until the
early eighties when pioneering
hip hop
producers, such as
Grandmaster
Flash, started to produce
Rap records
using sampled
break rather than live
studio bands, which had until then been the norm.
Conventional wisdom would hold that the first popular rap single to
feature sampling was "Rapper's Delight" by
Sugar Hill Gang on their own independent
Sugar Hill Label in 1979. However, instead of 'sampling' the
existing record "Good Times" by
Chic,
Sugar Hill employed a house band, called "Positive Force" to record
a copy of "Good Times" which was then rapped over.
Doug Wimbish and other session musicians were
called upon to play live music on many classic Sugar Hill records.
Those sounds are not samples but live musicians.
Earliest examples of this practice include
Grandmaster Flash's - "
The
Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (1981)
(which used the "Apache" break by the Incredible Bongo Bong Band
amongst other famous breaks), Brother D and the Collective Effort's
"How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise" (1984) (which sampled the
beat and bass line from
Cheryl Lynn's
1978 hit "Got to be Real") and UTFO's "Roxanne Roxanne" (1984).
Bill Holt's
Dreamies (1974) is often cited
as one of the earliest examples of sampling in popular music. Later
examples of sampling include
Big
Audio Dynamite and their 1985 album
This Is Big Audio Dynamite
and the single
E=MC² which
Mick Jones (formerly of
The Clash) sampled snippets of audio from
various films including works by
Nicolas
Roeg which make up the Roeg homage
E=MC². The 1981 album by
David Byrne and
Brian Eno,
My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts, used sampling extensively for the songs'
vocals.
One of the first major legal cases regarding sampling was with UK
dance act
M|A|R|R|S "Pump Up the Volume". 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 unrecognizable, and SAW didn't realize their record
had been used until they heard co-producer
Dave Dorrell mention it in a radio
interview.
2 Live Crew, a hip-hop group familiar
with controversy, was often in the spotlight for their 'obscene'
and sexually explicit lyrics. They sparked many debates about
censorship in the music industry. However, it was their 1989 album
As Clean as They Wanna
Be (a re-tooling of
As Nasty As They Wanna Be)
that began the prolonged legal debate over sampling. The album
contained a track entitled "Pretty Woman," based on the well-known
Roy Orbison song of the same name. 2
Live Crew's version sampled the guitar, bass, and drums from the
original, without permission. While the opening lines are the same,
the two songs split ways immediately following.
For example:
Roy Orbison's version – "Pretty woman, walking down the
street/ Pretty woman, the kind I'd like to meet."
2 Live Crew's version – "Big hairy woman, all that hair ain't
legit,/ Cause you look like Cousin
Itt."
In addition to this, while the music is identifiable as the Orbison
song, there were changes implemented by the group. The new version
contained interposed scraper notes, overlays of solos in different
keys, and an altered drum beat.
The group was sued by the song's copyright owners Acuff-Rose. The
company claimed that 2 Live Crew's unauthorized use of the samples
devalued the original, and was thus a case of copyright
infringement. The group claimed they were protected under the fair
use doctrine. The case of
Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music came to the
Supreme Court in 1994.
In reviewing the case, the Supreme Court didn't consider previous
ruling in which any commercial use (and economic gain) was
considered copyright infringement. Instead they re-evaluated the
original frame of copyright as set forth in the Constitution. The
opinion that resulted from Emerson v. Davies played a major role in
the decision.
"[In] truth, in literature, in science and in art,
there are, and can be, few, if any, things, which in an abstract
sense, are strictly new and original throughout. Every book in
literature, science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow,
and use much which was well known and used before." Emerson v.
Davies,8 F.Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845)
Perhaps what played a larger role was the result from the Folsom v.
Marsh case:
"look to the nature and objects of the selections made,
the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree in
which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or
supersede the objects, of the original work." Folsom v. Marsh, 9
F.Cas. 342, 348 (No. 4,901) (CCD Mass. 1841)
The court ruled that any financial gain 2 Live Crew received from
their version did not infringe upon Acuff-Rose because the two
songs were targeted at very different audiences. 2 Live Crew's use
of copyrighted material was protected under the fair use doctrine,
as a parody, even though it was released commercially.
However, the case was
appealed to the United States Supreme Court
where the decision was reversed with Justice David
Souter writing that the lower court was wrong in its determination
that parody alone was a sufficient reason to determine copyright
infringement.
1990s
In the early 1990s,
Vanilla Ice (actual
name Robert Van Winkle) sampled the
bass
of the 1981 song "
Under Pressure" by
Queen and
David
Bowie for his 1990 single "
Ice Ice
Baby".
Freddie Mercury and
David Bowie did not receive credit or
royalties for the sample. In a 1990 interview, Van Winkle said the
two melodies were slightly different because he had added an
additional note. In later interviews, Van Winkle readily admitted
he sampled the song and claimed his 1990 statement was a joke;
others, however, suggested he had been serious. Van Winkle later
paid Mercury and Bowie, who have since been given songwriting
credit for the sample.
More dramatically,
Biz Markie's album
I Need a Haircut was withdrawn in 1992 following a US
federal court ruling, that his use of a sample from
Gilbert O'Sullivan's "
Alone Again " 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.
A notable case in the early 1990s involved the dispute between the
group
Negativland and
Casey Kasem over the band's use of un-aired
vocal snippets from Kasem's radio program America's Top 40 on the
Negativland single "
U2".
Another notable case involved British
dance music act
Shut Up And Dance. Shut Up And Dance were
a fairly successful
Breakbeat
Hardcore and
rave scene outfit who
like their contemporaries had liberally used samples in the
creation of their music - without clearance from the individuals
concerned. Although frowned upon the British music industry usually
turned a blind eye to this mainly underground scene, however with
rave at its commercial peak in the UK, Shut Up And Dance released
the single "Raving I'm Raving" an upbeat breakbeat hardcore record
which shot to #2 on the
UK Singles
Chart in May 1992. At the core of "Raving" were significant
samples of
Marc Cohn's hit single
"
Walking in Memphis" with some of
the lyrical content changed and sung by Peter Bouncer. Shut Up And
Dance hadn't sought clearance from Marc Cohn for the samples they
used in "Raving" and Marc Cohn took legal action against Shut Up
And Dance for breach of copyright. An out of court settlement was
eventually reached between Shut Up And Dance and Cohn which saw
"Raving" in its current form banned and the proceeds from the
single given to charity. Ironically Shut Up and Dance were later
commissioned to produce remixes for
Cher's 1995
cover version of "Walking In Memphis" and were allowed by Cohn to
use parts from the deleted "Raving I'm Raving" for this
remix.
The Shut Up And Dance case had major ramifications on the use of
samples in the UK and most artists and record labels now seek
clearance for samples they use. However there are still cases which
involve UK artists using uncleared samples. In October 1996
The Chemical Brothers released
the single
Setting Sun inspired by
The Beatles Tomorrow Never Knows and featuring
Oasis' Noel
Gallagher on vocals - a long admirer of The Beatles work.
Setting Sun hit #1 on the
UK Singles
Chart on first week of release and the common consensus was The
Chemical Brothers had sampled/looped significant parts of Tomorrow
Never Knows in the creation of Setting Sun. The three remaining
Beatles' took legal action against The Chemical Brothers/
Virgin Records for breach of copyright,
however a
musicologist proved The
Chemical Brothers had independently created Setting Sun - albeit in
a similar vein to Tomorrow Never Knows.
In 1997
The Verve was forced to pay 100%
of their royalties from their hit "
Bitter Sweet Symphony" for the use of
a licensed 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.
2000s
In the summer of 2001,
Mariah Carey
released her first single from
Glitter entitled "Loverboy"
which featured a sample of "Firecracker" by
Yellow Magic Orchestra. A month
later,
Jennifer Lopez released
"
I'm Real" with the
same "Firecracker" sample. Carey quickly discarded it and replaced
it with "Candy" by
Cameo.
In 2001,
Armen Boladian and his
company
Bridgeport Music Inc.
filed over 500 copyright infringement suits against 800 artists
using samples from
George
Clinton's catalogue.
Public Enemy recorded a track
entitled "Psycho of Greed" (2002) 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.
Danger Mouse with the release of
The Grey Album in 2004,
which is a remix of
The Beatles'
self-titled 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.
On
March 19,
2006, a
judge ordered that sales of
The
Notorious B.I.G.'s album
Ready to
Die be halted because the title track sampled a 1992 song
by the
Ohio Players, "Singing in the
Morning", without permission.In 2007, Avril Lavigne was accused of
sampling The Rubinoos' " I wanna Be your Boyfriend" when she
released "Girlfriend".
On November 20, 2008, electronic music pioneers
Kraftwerk convinced the German Federal Supreme
Court that even the smallest shreds of sounds ("Tonfetzen") are
"copyrightable" (e.g. protected), and that sampling a few bars of a
drum beat can be an infringement.
Legal issues in practice
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
criticised 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 license 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 349 F.3d 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
recognizable. 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.
The New Orleans–based company
Cash
Money Records and former rapper
Juvenile were taken to court by local
performer DJ Jubilee (signed to Take Fo' Record Label) for using
chants from his song titled
Back That Ass Up. Both artist
had used the same chant in each song, but Juvenile won the case
because of the title's name change to
Back That Azz Up,
which sold 2 million copies. Because of the name change, Jubilee
lacked evidence that Juvenile had stolen from him, and Jubilee
could not earn Juvenile's income from his song.
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
- unless they seek the services of a professional sample replay
company or producer.
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.
Producers 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
kick-drum 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 dead link, view archive
here
- "Producers like Organized Noize
mix samples and live instruments really well. 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 [701835]
- "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 de-contextualizing it." —DJ
Shadow [701836]
- "When I sample something, it's because there's something
ingenious about it. And if it isn't the group as a whole, it's that
song. Or, even if it isn't the song as a whole, it's a genius
moment, or an accident or something that makes it just utterly
unique to the other trillions of hours of records that I've plowed
through" —DJ Shadow, 33⅓ Volume 24: DJ
Shadow's Endtroducing..., 2005
- "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 [of 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
- "Modern recorded music has evolved from focusing principally on
musicianship and performance into an auditory collage where no
sound is off limits. Sampling is simply another color on our
palettes. Whether we're sampling old records, using advanced
multi-sampling, or recording sounds ourselves, the final artistic
product is paramount and should not be compromised in the face of
any corporate legalities." —Sono
- "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 [701837]
- "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 [701838]
- "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[701839]
- "It's pretty much impossible to clear samples now [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 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
[701840]
- "I think it's wonderful, and it's a kind of poetic justice.
When I was a teenager, I used to go down to Birdland and hear
Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke. Later on,
when I was at Juilliard, I heard John
Coltrane. This had an enormous impression on me. In 1974, after
a concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall, this guy with long hair and
lipstick comes up to me and says, "Hi, I'm Brian Eno." Then in Berlin in 1976, after a
performance of "Music for 18 Musicians," I met David Bowie. Now cut to the
Orb and their generation. That's the way life ought to be.
That's the way Bach and Bartok and Stravinsky
worked, and it's how Kurt Weill worked.
There should be a back-and-forth between what goes on in the street
and the clubs and what goes on in the concert halls." —Steve Reich [701841]
- "Basically, you go to the root of memory, and it's all about
interaction with found documents - look at how you acquire
language. You mirror the environment around you. That's what
sampling does - it's a process of recall that changes memory as you
recall it. Think of James Joyce or
William S. Burroughs as turntablists and you get
the same result - the turntable is a permutation machine. Look at
the root word of "phono-graph" and it's basically "writing with
sound - phono (sound) - graph (writing), the rest is just pushing
many elements together in unexpected ways. It's the basic
vocabulary of the 20th and 21st centuries."—DJ
Spooky
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 usually 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.
Possibly the earliest equipment used to sample recorded instrument
sounds are the
Chamberlin, which was
developed in the 1940s, and its better-known cousin, the
Mellotron, marketed in England in the 1960s. Both
are
tape replay keyboards, in
which each key pressed triggers a prerecorded tape loop of a single
note.
Musicians can reproduce the same samples of break beats like the
"Amen" break which was composed, produced
and mastered by the
Winston Brothers in
1960s. Producers in the early 90's have used the whole 5.66 second
sample; but music workstations like the
Korg
Electribe Series (EM-1, ES-1; EMX-1 and the ESX-1) have used the
"Amen" kick, hi hat and snare in their sound wave libraries for
free use. Sampler production companies have managed to use these
samples for pitch, attack and decay and DSP effects to each drum
sound. These features allow producers to manipulate samples to
match other parts of the composition.
Most sample sets consist of multiple samples at different pitches.
These are combined into
keymaps, that
associate each sample with a particular pitch or pitch range.
Often, these sample maps may have different layers as well, so that
different velocities can trigger a different sample.
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.
A common standard format for generating such sample sets is the
soundfont protocol.
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".
Samples of spoken word
Usually taken from movies, television, or other non-musical media,
often used to create atmosphere, to set a mood, or even comic
effect. The American composer
Steve
Reich used samples from interviews with
Holocaust survivors as a source for the
melodies on the 1988 album
Different
Trains, performed by the
Kronos
Quartet.
Many genres utilize sampling of spoken word to induce a mood, and
Goa trance often employs samples of
people speaking about the use of
psychoactives,
spirituality, or
science fiction themes. Industrial is known
for samples from horror/sci-fi movies, news broadcasts, propaganda
reels, and speeches by political figures. The band
Ministry frequently samples George Bush.
Paul Hardcastle used recordings of a
news reporter, as well as a soldier and ambient noise of a protest,
in his single "Nineteen," a song about Vietnam war veterans and
Posttraumatic stress
disorder. The band
Negativland
samples from practically every form of popular media, ranging from
infomercials to children's records. In the song "Civil War",
Guns N' Roses samples from the 1967
film
Cool Hand Luke, on the album
Use Your Illusion II. Other
bands that frequently used samples in their work are
noise rockers Steel Pole Bath Tub and
death metal band
Skinless.
Unconventional sounds
These are not musical in the conventional sense - that is, neither
percussive nor melodic - but which are musically useful for their
interesting timbres or emotional associations, in the spirit of
musique concrete. Some common
examples include sirens and klaxons, locomotive whistles, gunshots,
natural sounds such as whale song, and cooing babies. It is common
in theatrical
sound design to use this
type of sampling to store sound effects that can then be triggered
from a musical keyboard or other software. This is very useful for
high precision or nonlinear requirements.
Sample Clearance Services
Similar to companies that obtain mechanical licenses for licensees
who wish to use musical compositions to make new sound recordings,
sample clearance services obtain licenses to clear the rights
involved with using a sample. Clearance services can obtain sample
license offers on behalf of independent artists and producers who
utilize samples in their "new works," or on behalf of record labels
who plan to distribute their "new works." "New work" refers to the
new musical composition and sound recording which utilizes a sample
from another work. Note that a music sample contains two separate
copyrighted works. One is the original sound recording, and the
other is the underlying musical composition.
Sample clearance companies can be a very cost effective way to
clear samples, because it costs much more to hire an entertainment
attorney to perform similar services. However, it is important to
know that a sample clearance service is no replacement for a
competent entertainment attorney with the additional ability to
provide legal advice. Clearance services cannot perform this
function unless run by an attorney.
Remember that sample clearance is a very important part of making
an album containing samples a legally viable product. "Without
proper clearance, the owners of the original work you sampled can
sue for large sums of money or prevent distribution of your album."
It is important to recognize that "one sample may consist of 2
clearances (ie one master clearance & one publishing
clearance)." Often, sample clearance services are run by people
with extensive experience in the music publishing industry or
business affairs departments at record labels. Their prior
experiences allow them to efficiently navigate the system, locate
the rights holders and obtain proper sample license offers.
However, an entertainment attorney is a must when tackling deeper
issues involving legal advice that creators of "new works" may have
never anticipated.
See also
Sampling in other contexts
- Appropriation - (Visual
arts) often refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation
of new work.
- Collage - a work of visual arts made
from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new
whole.
- Cut-up technique - an aleatory
literary technique or genre in which a writing is cut up at random
and rearranged to create a new text.
- Found footage - a method of
compiling films partly or entirely of footage which has not been
created by the filmmaker.
- Papier collé - a painting
technique and type of collage.
- Assemblage - a method
for creating texts by explicitly using existing texts.
Footnotes
- McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd
- 2Live Crew
-
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/campbell.html
- Grand
Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc.,
780 F. Supp.
182 (S.D.N.Y.
1991),
- Superswell.com: "Horror Stories of
Sampling"
- (Archived by WebCite at
http://www.webcitation.org/5h1Fm1b0I)
- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1504982
Metall Auf Metall (Kraftwerk, et al. v. Moses Pelham, et al.)
Decision of the German Federal Supreme Court No. I ZR 112/06 Dated
November 20, 2008, at 56 Journal of the Copyright Society 1017
(2009)
- The Art of Sampling
- Text from http://www.clearyoursample.com
- Text from information section of website -
http://sampleclearance.com/index2.html
Sources
- Schloss, Joseph G. (2004). Making Beats: The Art of
Sample-Based Hip Hop. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan
University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6696-9.
- Katz, Mark. "Music in 1s and 0s: The Art and Politics of
Digital Sampling." In Capturing Sound: How Technology has
Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004), 137-57. ISBN 0-520-24380-3
- McKenna, Tyrone B. (2000) "Where Digital Music Technology and
Law Collide - Contemporary Issues of Digital Sampling,
Appropriation and Copyright Law" Journal of Information, Law &
Technology. Available online at:
-
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2000_1/mckenna/?textOnly=true
- http://www.musiclawupdates.com/index_main.htm Challis, B (2003)
The Song Remains The Same - A Review of the Legalities of Music
Sampling
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