The History Of Sampling
First of all; what actually is sampling? Sampling is where you use a portion of a sound recording and manipulate it to create the sound that you want. The common way to sample something is to take part of an already recorded song and use different techniques, such as slowing it down or speeding it up, pitching it up or down, filtering it, along with a variety of other effects, to create a loop that can be layered, or left alone if you like, to create a whole new instrumental.
The Origins Of Sampling & Music Concrete
So, where did sampling come from? In the 1940s a man by the name of Pierre Schaeffer joined Jacques Copeau and his pupils in the foundation of the Studio d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion nationale, a Resistance movement in French Radio, which was responsible for the first broadcasts liberated in Paris. It was here that Schaeffer discovered he could experiment with creative radiophonic techniques. In 1948 Schaeffer began to keep a set of journals describing his attempt to create a "symphony of noises" - they were eventually published 4 years later under the name 'A la recherche d’une musique concrète' which translates to 'In Search Of Concrete Music'. According to another sound scientist, Brian Kane, Schaeffer was driven by a compositional desire to construct music from concrete objects - no matter how unsatisfactory the initial results - and a theoretical inclination to find vocabulary, solfège, or method upon which to ground such music.
By the end of the late 40s, Schaeffer's compositional work was getting attention and was publicly known as 'musique concrète'. Very much like how sampling is regarded now, he himself described musique concrète as something that isn't musically or traditionally correct, but this didn't stop composers experimenting with the sound. Schaffer stated: "When I proposed the term 'musique concrète,' I intended … to point out an opposition with the way musical work usually goes. Instead of notating musical ideas on paper with the symbols of solfege and entrusting their realization to well-known instruments, the question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing". In 1956, the first completely electronic film soundtrack was produced, composed by married couple Bebe and Louis Barron and used for the science-fiction film 'Forbidden Planet'. Although people had been toying with the idea for a little while now, it was the BBC Radiophonic Workshop that brought musique concrète to a mainstream audience, by using the techniques to create soundtracks for shows - like Doctor Who. The original workshop was located in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios on Delaware Road in London, but was closed in March 1998.
Pierre Shaeffer
Forbidden Planet Poster
The Invention Of The Sampler
Developed by an English engineer named Harry Chamberlin in the 1940s; the 'Chamberlin' has been described as the first sampler in music. The Chamberlin used a keyboard to trigger a variety of tape decks, each containing 8 seconds of sound. Around 20 years later, in 1963, the Mellotron was introduced, which is an evolved version of the Chamberlin, with a couple of new features, but could be mass-produced more efficiently. A few years later, in 1969, the EMS (Electronic Music Studios), based in London and ran by an English engineer called Peter Zinovieff, developed the worlds first digital sampler.
Although the first DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) had been invented a couple of years beforehand, in 1979 a digital audio company called Fairlight invented the first DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) that contained a built-in digital sampler, it was called the FairLight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument). This is actually where the term 'sample' comes from; 2 developers of the DAW, Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel, coined the term to describe a feature in the program. While FairLight CMI was in development, Vogel recorded a one second piece from a piano performance from a radio broadcast and realised he could imitate the sound of piano by playing the recording at different pitches. Although the idea of reusing recordings wasn't a new one, the FairLights design and built-in sequencer simplified the sampling process. At the time a lot of people used synthesized piano sounds, which, after the FairLight invention, were inferior to the sound of a real piano sample played at different pitches. Of course; the FairLight wasn't the most advanced piece of equipment in terms of what was to come in the future - it only allowed control over pitch and envelope and could only record a few seconds of sound. Nevertheless, the sampling function rapidly became its most popular feature.
As with many new inventions; the FairLight inspired other people to create competition such as: the E-mu Emulator and the Akai S950. There were drum machines, like the Oberheim DMX and Linn LM-1, however they used samples of drum kits and percussion rather than generating sounds from circuits. Early samplers didn't have enough memory to store many seconds of sound so samples could only be a few seconds in length. Of course; this increased with improved memory.
The Chamberlin
The Mellotron
E-Mu Emulator
Akai S950
The Akai MPC & The Rise Of Sampling In Hip-Hop
Akai MPC60
In 1988, the first MPC sampler was released by Akai. It gave people the opportunity to trigger samples independently on pads, much like playing a keyboard. This was followed by even more competition; including new samplers coming from big companies such as Korg, Roland and Casio. The designer of the MPC, Roger Linn, had thought that users of the sampler would sample short sounds, such as individual notes or drum hits, to use as building blocks for compositions, but people decided to use longer samples as well. In the words of Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever, musicians "didn't just want the sound of John Bonham's kick drum, they wanted to loop and repeat the whole of 'When the Levee Breaks'." Linn said: "It was a very pleasant surprise. After 60 years of recording, there are so many pre-recorded examples to sample from. Why reinvent the wheel?"
Although sampling has influenced many genres of music, the Akai MPC had a huge impact on hip-hop music specifically - it gave artists, who didn't know how to play instruments and didn't have a lot of formal music knowledge, an opportunity to create their own songs with ease. Sampling is one of the main foundations of hip-hop, first emerging in the 1980s. Sampling techniques in hip-hop have been compared to the origins of blues and rock, as they share the similarity of repurposing existing music. It has also been likened to punk music, however it was compared to the politics linked to the genre and not the musical side of it - Guardian journalist David McNamee wrote that it's the "working-class black answer to punk". Prior to digital sampling, DJs used turntables to loop drum breaks from old songs, mostly soul and funk, which MCs would then rap over. There have also been compilation albums released specifically intended for sampling and aimed at DJs and hip-hop producers - a label called Street Beat Records released 25 compilation albums between 1986 and 1991 titled 'Ultimate Breaks and Beats' aimed at producers. As it was becoming extremely accessible, the buzz around sampling was really beginning to be heard, so much that in 1996; Guinness World Records cited DJ Shadow's debut studio album 'Endtroducing.....', which was all produced on an MPC60, as the first album created entirely from samples. The hip-hop album has also reached the top 20 of the UK Albums Chart, peaked at number 37 on the US Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart and has been certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry.
Roger Linn
DJ Shadow
Common Samples
One of the most recognised and famous samples of all time is a 7 second drum break in a track called 'Amen, Brother', released in 1969 by The Winstons; an American funk and soul group based in Washington D.C. It first became popular with American hip-hop producers and then British jungle producers in the early 90s. According to WhoSampled, a user-generated website that boasts a humungous catalogue of samples, 'Amen, Brother' is the most sampled song in history, appearing in more than 5500 songs, as of May 2022. It has been sampled by many big names such as: Oasis, N.W.A and Skrillex - just from this short list, if you're familiar with their music, you can tell that it is an easily usable sample and can be used for many different genres. A few other famous drum breaks that deserve a mention are James Brown's 'Funky Drummer', Lyn Collins' 'Think (About It)' and 'When The Levee Breaks' by Led Zeppelin.
Legal Issues, Ethical Issues and Lawsuits
To legally use a sample, the artist trying to sample a song must acquire legal permission from the copyright holder of the song, which is known as a potentially lengthy, complex and expensive process called 'sample clearance'. If you sample a song without legal permission, you may be breaching the copyright of the original sound recording, composition, lyrics, and performances, such as a guitar riff. If the artist of the original song is not credited you may also be breaching their moral rights. In some cases sampling is protected under American fair use laws, which grant 'limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the rights holder'. The person who owned the copyright for the well-known song 'Amen, Brother', Richard Lewis Spencer, never received any royalties for its wide range of sample usage. Spencer condemned the sampling as plagiarism, but later said he was flattered by it. A journalist named Simon Reynolds compared the situation to "the man who goes to the sperm bank and unknowingly sires hundreds of children".
Many people within the music industry have regarded sampling as theft and uncreative, but that doesn't necessarily stop producers chopping up old records. This belief can be dated back to 1989, when 'The Turtles' sued De La Soul, an American hip-hop trio, for using an uncleared sample on their debut studio album '3 Feet High and Rising'. The Turtles singer ,Mark Volman, even said to the Los Angeles Times: "Sampling is just a longer term for theft. Anybody who can honestly say sampling is some sort of creativity has never done anything creative." Ultimately the case was settled out of court and set a legal precedent that had a chilling effect on sampling in hip-hop. After more lawsuits it became evident that sampling was becoming a rich man's game. When the songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan sued the rapper Biz Markie after Markie sampled O'Sullivan's 'Alone Again (Naturally)' Hank Shocklee, producer of the hip-hop group 'Public Enemy', predicted that it would delay record production, he said: "It's going to affect everyone's process... It's impossible to keep up with every snippet of sound you use." In 2018, The Washington Post wrote: "no court decision has changed the sound of pop music as much as this", likening it to banning a musical instrument. Furthermore; Fact Magazine wrote: "For a bedroom producer, clearing a sample can be nearly impossible, both financially and in terms of administration." Both of these quotes are evidence that that Hank Shoklee's prediction was accurate. Since the O'Sullivan lawsuit, samples on commercial recordings are often taken from either obscure recordings or they get cleared. Not all lawsuits go to the original artists however - in 2000, a jazz flautist, named James Newton, filed a claim against the Beastie Boys' single 'Pass The Mic', released 8 years prior in 1992. The song sampled Newton's composition 'Choir'. The way the Beastie Boys managed to get away with it is because the judge found that the sample was 'de minimis' - a Latin expression meaning 'pertaining to minimal things'. As the sample consisted of 3 notes in 6 seconds, the judge decided it was not enough to claim copyright. Since then; the court has ruled that permission was required for recognizable samples, however modified, unrecognizable samples could still be used without authorization.
The Turtles
De La Soul
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Hank Shoklee
Beastie Boys
What Is Sampling Like Today?
Sampling is now a key part of the music industry, no matter who looks at it as uncreative. Samples are still majorly used in hip-hop, but as well as this; some of the biggest pop artists in the world, like Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift, use samples as well. Think about Lil Nas X's breakthrough song: 'Old Town Road' - this song samples a song by Nine Inch Nails called '34 Ghosts IV' and it kick-started a career. Now he's a household name and it's largely down to the fact that the sample he used is very catchy and easy to remember. In the past decade more songs have been sampled than ever before, second only to the 1970s. DJs and hip-hop producers used to sample drum breaks, but now only 3% of the samples on the Top 100 Albums contain drum breaks. Because of the astonishing music production tools we have access to; it's become a lot more creative to take samples of vocals or other instruments in a song and chop them up. Sampling music has evolved past a point that Harry Chamberlin, Peter Zinovieff and Roger Linn couldn't have predicted when they invented the first samplers, but I believe they'd be more than proud of the movement they started.
Lil Nas X
Nine Inch Nails
Go to Bibliography page for a bibliography on this page.