Samples, Samplers

In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion of one sound recording, the sample, 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. more...

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Sampling is also possible with tape loops or with vinyl records on a phonograph.

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, Mike Oldfield 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 hip hop and R&B, but are becoming more common in other music, as well.

History

Early precedents

In the late 1920s, child actor Sally Hamlin's Victor records of poetry and recitations contained musical fade-ins from other records in Victor's back catalogue. Records were made in a single take in those days, and these fade-ins had to be executed on the fly, during the performance, by an expert audio engineer.

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

In the 1950s, 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.

In 1966, minimalist composer Steve Reich created Come Out, a piece comprised of tape loops culled from a recording of a young man arrested in the infamous Harlem riots. The manipulated use of recorded speech as a repetitive rhythmic element qualifies the piece as an early precedent of sampling and a precursor to the hip-hop genre.

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

In the Spring of 1968 in Jamaica, Lee "Scratch" Perry sampled a baby's cry for his hit song "People Funny Boy" which is also considered the first Reggae song.

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.

In 1970, Miles Davis in A Tribute to Jack Johnson sampled his own earlier recording In a Silent Way from 1969. The samples were overlaid and interspersed with Sonny Sharrock's heavily distorted guitar.

Read more at Wikipedia.org