Music Sampling - Yay or Nay?

[Hypnotikid]

I do it and I wuv it, but it really depends on your style.

If you are a remixer or a DJ, then sampling goes perfect with it. However, if you are a person who likes to compose original stuff, then you prolly will stay as far away from sampling as possible because you want pure originality rather then just having it as an "original remix"

I'm all for sampling. It brings added flava to the track, so long as the original artist is ok with you borrowing from their work.

[Nutritious]

i dont think we can just take for granted that sample-based music inherently lacks creativity. the whole premise is that musical recordings (ie. commodified music) can yield interesting musical results when they are treated simply as sound objects. sounds are not ideas, but the results of ideas.

I actually agree with you and I like how you specify using them as sound objects. I should probably clarify that by "heavily sampling", I was referring to examples of taking an existing song and adding a drum beat or perhaps vocals.

[spellmynamewithabang]

If you ignore that it's Kanye, it's not THAT bad.

I don't understand why you'd ever make such ridiculous removals of anything; if a thing is good, it's good, right?

"If you ignore that it's milk, this milk isn't bad."

I think it's pretty silly to do that! If you like a thing, you should say you like it, even if you're not a super fan of the person who made it or the thing in general. Doing otherwise is kind of willfully close-minded; maybe you might like milk after all, and you never knew! Forcing yourself to think "well it's only ok in This One Case" is pretty misguided, but that is my opinion.

It's quite similar to people who look at a Chris Ware book and say "this is so literary it shouldn't be called comics" because they have an ingrained view of comics being lesser forms of art and writing, I think. It's still comics! It has always been comics.

anyway more on topic sampling is almost always a viable artistic tool, except when it's not. the difference is a common sense thing, really, like the difference between erotic art and out-and-out pornography

those are my thoughts

[DetectiveTuesday]

Sampling is awesome. It doesn't matter to me if the sample is recognizable or not, as long as it's used with some integrity to make a good sounding piece. So many great hip-hop tracks had recognizable samples, but the final products didn't sound any less fresh as a result. Even more could be said about songs with samples that are creatively chopped up into something new, at least on the production side of things.

Then there are of course those who sample really great pieces and ruin them with mediocre everything else, and in those instances I'm inclined to object to their whole game.

As a hip-hop producer, the very first songs I made were sample-based (though looking back 7 years ago, I'd rather say I simply layed drum patterns over full blown mp3s than made songs with much original or creative structure, haha ). I personally don't sample or even arrange much now because I've been much more interested in composing original pieces note-by-note, but I do go back to sampling from time to time. It really is a fruitful realm of production, only limited to one's inspiration by music, and I intend to explore it more thoroughly in the future. Good thing I got this Maschine

I'm just gonna go ahead and leave this here as I was just listening to it in the car before I got here http://kingboom.bandcamp.com/track/heist-montage . Now that's how you chop shit up!

[sci]

uh oh I just found my topic Y'ALL ON MY TURF YA HEAR

SAMPLING IS GOD

so,

For me, it's a question of "why did you sample it?"

that is the most important question.

why sample?

it's a lot about recontextualization. (like what DaMonz was saying)

take an old 20s swing song, chop, loop, layer, and suddenly you have

do all the

, end up with a kick-ass bigbeat tune

but there's also another point: sounds are very particular and very familiar. You could listen to a million covers of the same song, but none of them will sound exactly like the original.

it's simply not replicatable.

however, what is replicatable: as soon as you hear that song, whatever it is, for the first time in years (even decades), you get a sudden chill down your spine. you're thrown back into another era, if just for 3 minutes.

SOUNDS are nostalgic. chords and melodies are nostalgic too, but not nearly as much as the EXACT SOUND, dirt dust defects reencodes and all.

if you want to harness that feeling, then sampling is the way to go. It's not the only way, but good luck trying to recreate that feeling without sampling.

(if you haven't guessed by now, I sample. a lot.)

last year I submitted a remix comprised heavily of samples.

http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02559/

emphasis on heavily.

listen to it, and see what you can spot.

this isn't a complete list, but if you're a 20-something who's never played Earthbound and are wondering why you felt nostalgic listening to that track, here's some of the stuff I sampled: the bass synth from Danny Phantom's intro, chords and vocals from Jonny Bravo's intro, a chord from the intro to Angry Beavers, Bill Nye the Science guy talking, a drum loop from Doug, The Beatle's Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, and several jingles and logotypes I don't remember off the top of my head...

THE SONG WOULD BE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WITHOUT THESE SAMPLES

this brings me to...

is a perfect example what is NOT okay. The whole song is more or less identical to

No new or original content is being used with the samples in Robot Rock. It's a rehash.

in the case of Daft Punk, they tend to lean more towards "invoke nostalgia" than "recontextualize".

also,

lol, I was joking with Black Panther that basically the only sampling that I can't stand or even defend is stuff like this:

um x cuse me the entire genre of chicago footwork would like to have a word with you

I actually don't have much to say here (mostly because it's past 1 am and I've gotten tired now) but that song in particular isn't so great, so here have a good song instead:

(technically this is chicago footwork and the previous song is baltimore house, but they're all fairly closely related. check out booty house too,

)

so...

do I think there's a limit?

...yes.

that would probably be in vaporwave.

for those not familiar, here's how you make vaporwave:

take a few bars from an 80s song, pitch down, (if needed) stretch so the bpm is well under 100, add reverb, loop.

that's it.

now the results are pretty neat, don't get me wrong. but I think it's a little weird to claim the result as your own.

there's also many many genres in

, where your track is only as good as your kick.

it's basically a capital offense to sample someone else's kick in your track

but in my book, as long as you use your kick in a completely different context, you're fine.

[timaeus222]

I don't understand why you'd ever make such ridiculous removals of anything; if a thing is good, it's good, right?

"If you ignore that it's milk, this milk isn't bad."

I think it's pretty silly to do that! If you like a thing, you should say you like it, even if you're not a super fan of the person who made it or the thing in general. Doing otherwise is kind of willfully close-minded; maybe you might like milk after all, and you never knew! Forcing yourself to think "well it's only ok in This One Case" is pretty misguided, but that is my opinion.

I think I need to give you a helping hand here. What Gario said was he doesn't like Kanye West's music subjectively, but it is objectively "not THAT bad". What you said about milk happens to be a weak analogy, because from your (kinda vague) wording, it seems like you're saying "if you pretend this isn't milk, this milk won't taste bad, even though you don't like drinking milk", rather than "if you ignore the fact that this is milk, this drink actually doesn't look old and unrefrigerated, and the color doesn't make it unappetizing". The first one is entirely subjective, but the second one distinguishes between subjective and objective.

Edited July 26, 2013 by timaeus222

[Radiowar]

do I think there's a limit?

...yes.

that would probably be in vaporwave.

for those not familiar, here's how you make vaporwave:

take a few bars from an 80s song, pitch down, (if needed) stretch so the bpm is well under 100, add reverb, loop.

that's it.

now the results are pretty neat, don't get me wrong. but I think it's a little weird to claim the result as your own

hmm but i think "vaporwave" is a lot like the present-day version of the thomas bangalter example i posted earlier, which is to say it would not be fair to impose mainstream pop music standards of "creativity" or "talent" or "ownership". i recently got pretty into spring breakers, a film which makes use of extremely abstracted images and sounds from things which might otherwise be thought of as depraved or soulless. i think if you listen to someone like INTERNET CLUB and look at their angelfire page, theres a similar thing at work, a kind of "trash art". im not sure who came up with the name vaporwave, but there are similar implications in the name, the idea of taking musical and visual source material from things which were either intended as superfluous or background, or were thought of as technologically primitive or shallow.

which is to say all these electronic music styles, vaporwave, house, techno, hip-hop, etc., they all operate with their own language, that sampling in footwork is different from sampling in trip-hop, and contrary to the perception of all sampling is like i'll just take 2 bars of an mp3 and copy and paste it over and over, theres actually a depth of technique there.

[Damashii!!]

@sci: ayyy, man. I do like some bmore stuff, and similar to the techniques with vaporware, I thoroughly enjoy screwed and chopped remixes even though I know that it literally is just a massively slowed down version of a song with a few stutters here and there.

That Spongebob example actually is quite the ear worm and I like it just a little bit, I just meant that sampling in that manner (ie., taking an Oxy Clean commercial and going "Oxy Clean will make your laundry fresh, fresh, fresh , fr-fr-fr-fr-fresh," for the entire song) tends to be really lazy and cheesy imo; but obviously, since I like screwed and Chopped stuff (which is, admittedly, extremely lazy) I won't lie that it's mostly a matter of preference.

and you pretty much hit it right on the money what I was trying to say. I enjoy sampling (And listening to sample-heavy tracks) mostly for the sake of nostalgia as well as inspiration to go research what the arrangers sampled; my appreciation for different artists I never would've heard before expanded practically by 100% after discovering producers like Nujabes or Fantastic Plastic Machine, and similar to how listening to a Buckethead solo might lead newcomers to Paul Gilbert or a Dave Brubeck piece might persuade others to check out composers like Bela Bartok or Gershwin, I think there's nothing wrong with sampling that encourages music appreciation (or sampling that just sounds damn good and makes the listener feel better or pumped, etc. in general).

so yeah, main thing I'm saying is that 'sampling' in general isn't bad just like wobble bass or metal growls aren't 'bad' in general either; it's all how it's executed.

[sci]

hmm but i think "vaporwave" is a lot like the present-day version of the thomas bangalter example i posted earlier, which is to say it would not be fair to impose mainstream pop music standards of "creativity" or "talent" or "ownership".

in both cases, the original song is sampled in such a way that it's in a different context with the final product.

personally I prefer the results and methods Thomas Bangalter was using

which kind of conjures this point:

which is to say all these electronic music styles, vaporwave, house, techno, hip-hop, etc., they all operate with their own language, that sampling in footwork is different from sampling in trip-hop, and contrary to the perception of all sampling is like i'll just take 2 bars of an mp3 and copy and paste it over and over, theres actually a depth of technique there.

DAMN STRAIGHT

@sci: ayyy, man.

haha sorry if I came off as fuming or something, I am very passionate about this subject!

That Spongebob example actually is quite the ear worm and I like it just a little bit, I just meant that sampling in that manner (ie., taking an Oxy Clean commercial and going "Oxy Clean will make your laundry fresh, fresh, fresh , fr-fr-fr-fr-fresh," for the entire song) tends to be really lazy and cheesy imo; but obviously, since I like screwed and Chopped stuff (which is, admittedly, extremely lazy) I won't lie that it's mostly a matter of preference.

ah yes, the stupid statement dance remix.

I think that's an umbrella term more than a genre as a whole, but I see what you mean.

what you said here mirrors what I have to say on the topic:

main thing I'm saying is that 'sampling' in general isn't bad just like wobble bass or metal growls aren't 'bad' in general either; it's all how it's executed.

generally, 90% of everything in every genre is bad. (this goes for every form of art ever, not just genres of music)

however, 99% of stupid statement dance mixes are bad, in my experience.

I think there's nothing wrong with sampling that encourages music appreciation (or sampling that just sounds damn good and makes the listener feel better or pumped, etc. in general).

I'm pretty sure that if you decide to sample a song, you're appreciating the song.

kind of like how if you're telling your friend about the last movie you saw, you're probably thinking about the last movie you saw.

i think if you listen to someone like INTERNET CLUB and look at their angelfire page, theres a similar thing at work, a kind of "trash art". im not sure who came up with the name vaporwave, but there are similar implications in the name, the idea of taking musical and visual source material from things which were either intended as superfluous or background, or were thought of as technologically primitive or shallow.

i don't have much to say here but: hahaha this reminds me a lot of the aesthetic of seapunk (it's not as much of a sample-heavy genre but...you'll probably see what I mean.)

[DCT]

It's okay to me.

-D

[JH Sounds]

is a perfect example what is NOT okay. The whole song is more or less identical to

No new or original content is being used with the samples in Robot Rock. It's a rehash.

I like how they acknowledge it though. Not only in liner notes, but in things like this:

[SenPi]

a thread about sampling and nobody mentioned The Prodigy? Those guys do some kick ass sampling.

Smack My Bitch Up samples a whole bunch of songs, into a completely new idea. Amazing stuff right there imo.

[Salluz]

There's a part of Dream Theater's song "Honor Thy Father" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VlX6iJEnYSg&t=293) which has a multitude of samples that are comprised to make dialogue. The execution is so clever, expressing the tension of a bitter son and an authoritarian father. That's an example of skillful, clever, and pertinent sampling that is nonmusical. No one can argue with the use of sampling in that way. There's no butchering of the original sources, nor looping of a snippet as a way to build a 'full song'.

Edited August 14, 2013 by Salluz

[Nutritious]

a thread about sampling and nobody mentioned The Prodigy? Those guys do some kick ass sampling.

Smack My Bitch Up samples a whole bunch of songs, into a completely new idea. Amazing stuff right there imo.

Not quite

Personally, I'm only really for it if sampled content used in a creative way to make something new and different from the old. Liam Howlett from The Prodigy was

But yeah, I totally agree with you. I always hold that track as sampling done right.

[SenPi]

Not quite

Oops, missed that I figured it would be mentioned way more though