Sampling (music)

In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion of one sound recording 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 as in digital sampling. Sampling is also possible with tape loops or with vinyl records on a phonograph.

History

Early Precedents

In the 1940's, some musique concrète composers utilized portions of other recordings to create new compositions.

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In the 1950's, 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.

Related Topics:
Bill Buchanan - Dickie Goodman - Spaceships from another planet

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1968 saw "Revolution 9" from The Beatles' The White Album, composed partly of portions of orchestral recordings.

Related Topics:
Revolution 9 - The Beatles - The White Album

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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.

Related Topics:
Charlie Haden - Che - Gramophone record - Spanish Civil War

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Modern Sampling

Modern sampling in popular music, however, 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. 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.

Related Topics:
Popular music - 1960s - Jamaica - DJ - Dub - Reggae - 1970s - Kool DJ Herc - Hip hop

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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".

Related Topics:
Disco - Funk - New York

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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.

Related Topics:
The Sugarhill Gang - Chic - Rapper's Delight - Bernard Edwards - Nile Rodgers

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The first record to use an actual sampler is Cuba Gooding Sr.'s "Happiness Is

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Just Around The Bend". It just sampled their own voices.

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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.

Related Topics:
Ultimate Breaks & Beats - Doug E. Fresh - Cold Crush Brothers - Fearless Four - Kraftwerk - Public Enemy

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The Emulator was the sampler of choice until Emu's SP12 came out in 1985,

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which when tied with the Beats and Breaks compilations, shows how loops became

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the vernacular for Hip-Hop production. Then the SP1200 was released in

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1988 and solidified it well into the 90's.

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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.

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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.

Related Topics:
1980s - The Temptations - Psychedelic Shack - 45 - I Can't Get Next to You - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - 1981 - Brian Eno - David Byrne

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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.

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