If you clicked on this blog post, I'm assuming you already know what sampling is, and if so, you can skip the rest of this paragraph. But, really quick for the folks in the back: Sampling is when you make music using pieces of recordings of other people's songs. Those recordings are usually music, but they can be audio from movies, or whatever. Samples can be super short, like when people sample single drum hits then re-arrange them into new patterns. Or mix and match them with other drum samples or electronic sounds, to create new drum tracks. Those short pieces are ususally called 'one-shots'. They could also be entire drum loops, like is the case with the 'Amen Break' or the drum break from James Brown's 'Funky Drummer'. Samples can be longer melodic sections or chord progressions looped up too. A lot of Kanye's earlier stuff was made like this, for example, him and Twista on 'Overnight Celebrity', which was sampled from 'Cause I Love You' by Lenny Williams. It's basically some of the best parts of the original song sped up. Then you have the type of Sampling that pretty much uses the entire song, which is the case with Vaporwave, where it's pretty much some 80's song slowed down. There will usually be a little looping going on with sampling, even with Vaporwave, but it's usually minimal. Oh, and kind of an honorable mention is what people commonly refer to as 'Loops'. They are technically samples but have been created for the sole purpose of people using them in production of new songs. They aren't pieces of existing songs and you can pay a one-time fee to use them instead of having to clear them from the holder of a song's master recording, but I'll get more into what that means in a bit.

So yeah, with that out of the way, let me start of by saying that I AM NOT anti-sampling. I love the art of it and it's one of the things that made me fall in love with music production in the first place. A lot of people try to dismiss it as being 'cheating', 'stealing', or 'easy', but would they say the same thing about visual collage? IDK, they probably would but I think that's dumb. Sampling is an entirely different art form than traditionally playing instruments. Like, would you say a DJ is 'stealing' the music they play in their mixes? In my opinion, Sampling is somewhere between composing and DJing. If you sampled something, you obviously can't take credit for writing the music, but there's something to be said for your interpretation of the expression that comes out of it. It's actually pretty hard to pull off. Sampling is one of those things that looks super easy... until you actually go and try it yourself. If you haven't, go ahead. I dare you.

One of the biggest critisisms of Sampling is that, even if what you create from them isn't an exact copy, it is considered a 'derivative work' based on someone else's creative hard work, and if you're using that to profit, you should pay them. I mostly agree with that statement. Now, I don't think you should be barred from sampling all together if you don't pay, but if you are making money off of the piece and it has blatantly recognizable pieces of someone else's artwork, they should be compensated. This gets a little tricky though because its the owner of the master recording who gets to say yes or no. You might think thats always the Artist, but many times its the record label that the artist recorded under, and lets just say that record labels can be a bit greedy sometimes.

There are artists that made hit records from sampled songs and never saw one red cent of profit from it. One famous example is A Tribe Called Quest's 'Can I Kick It'. They didn't properly clear the sample (get permission and decide on how much to pay the original artist), so the original artist, Lou Reed, ended up with 100% of the publishing. I still feel like Tribe's song is a great work of art and it sucks that they don't get credit at least for the actually RAPPING, which is the focus of the song, but hey... Music Business. Some artists like Daft Punk and DJ Premier do a great job of obfuscating the samples they use to the point where its nearly impossible to tell where some of them are from. I don't know if they cleared each one but I've always thought that form of sampling is the most artful and difficult to pull off.

Lemme go back to talking about 'Loops' for a second. I'm not against the concept of these, and honestly, I actually tried using them a few years ago when I was trying to sell beats again. It's really great that musicians and producers can use loop making as a new form of income and to, even if indirectly, collaborate with other musicians and producers. They're also much easier to use than samples taken from original songs because usually, they're gonna tell you exactly what the BPM (Beats Per Minute, or tempo) is, what key its in, etc. Also the instrument part you need is gonna be isolated so you don't have to worry about doing any eq acrobatics to try and filter out the parts you don't want. So it's really easy to make something that sounds clean and professional if you can't play any instruments or don't have access to certain types of musicians or recording setups. But one of the big downsides is that, your samples are EVERYBODY's samples now. It's a lot harder to have an original sound because all producers have access to the same loops. One thing about sampling is that part of the whole thing used to be actually finding the samples, or 'crate digging'. You literally could not find new and rare samples unless you physically went to a record store and bought old music. You'd also have to actually listen to a lot of old music because not all of it makes a good sample. There might be an entire record where only 3 seconds of it is actually usuable. But I think having actually LISTEN like that is one of the things that helped build up an ear for what is possible musically and what really sounds good.

Youtube (and streaming in general) changed the game though. Now, anyone can find even the rarest deepest cuts just by going on youtube and searching for '70's soul mix' or whatever. I'm not gonna lie, when that first became a thing, it was kinda dope. But then it got kinda wack because it no longer meant anything to have a sample library. I used to have a hard drive with all my samples that I personally dug for and chopped. This thing was my prized possession At one point. I mean, this hard drive meant everything to me (so of course I used to back it up frequently). But yeah, now that's not even necessary. You can just go to youtube or streaming apps and just chop anything you want whenever you want. On top of that, people make sample packs that you can just download. Sometimes for free, sometimes you gotta pay a bit, but they are readily available. I'm not gonna lament the 'good old days' too much and say everything sucks now, but the magic is definitely kinda diminised for me.

So, Why Don't I Do it Anymore?

Well, if you've ready this far, you probably already kinda see why. But to sum it all up, I just don't think Sampling as an art form means the same thing that it used to for me. Samples are finite. There's only so much old music from a certain era that's available. Unfortunately, yes, the sound does get old. At one point, nobody had ever really heard sped up soul samples with rapping, or the Amen break layered with ethereal synthesizers, but now that's all kinda been done. It isn't new anymore, and everytime you flip another well known sample, it has a bit less of an impact, TO ME. Some of yall may disagree, but I can't shake the feeling that it just doesn't hit the same anymore. There's so much more work needed to try to make something that sounds original with samples that I feel like you might as well put that effort into trying to craft new sounds from first principles. You can create something incredible with samples, and you still aren't guaranteed that you'll be able to clear it. I'm definitely not the first person to think like this. If you listen to a lot of Outkast's production, you'll hear Organized Noize basically doing this. They simply composed music and hired musicians to play it. Crazy concept, I know. It's a win-win for everybody involved because working musicians get work and get compensated, you end up with a completely original recording, and you don't have to pay a dime of whatever you make off the song to any record label.

I think for a long time, a lot of producers thought it's basically impossible to capture that same feel of songs recorded in a specific era. For example, that 70's sound. But honestly, you can get 99% of the way there by just using the same type of instruements, microphones, and other recording gear that was used to make them. And yeah, it's gonna be kinda expensive but not more expensive than giving up 100% of your publishing to someone. A great example of modern musiciains doing that is Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Amy Winehouse worked with them for her album 'Back to Black'. I think Bruno Mars kinda does this with a lot of his songs even though they do have a more modern feel. That's the thing though, you can play with the recordings and make them sound as modern or as vintage or as futuristic as you want. Yeah, I know, everyone always says you can't beat analog, but for one, analog gear and ribbon mics have gotten a lot more affordable recently and software emulations are at the point where I don't think most people can tell the difference. In some cases, they may even say the digital sounds more interesting. You just have to experiment.

So yeah, I wouldn't say that I'll never sample again. But for the time being, I'm putting my focus on creating entirely new recordings. I'm not at the point of hiring musicians yet, but I do plan on doing that sometime soon. For now, I'm just composing everything, playing all the instruments, and doing vocals myself, Prince style. I'm honestly enjoying working within the limitation of what I can do but since I am certainly NOT Prince, there's only so much I can do solo. So yeah, eventually I'd like to compose stuff for giant string and horn sections and all that. But for now, it's just me, my drum set, guitars, and a few synthesizers. Oh, and my own field recordings too.