Did Yes Invent Sampling?

And I'm not talking about 90125. My question is about their 1973 triple live LP Yessongs — which opens with a recording of Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite" by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa, released on RCA Red Seal in 1970. Was this the first example of a band using someone else's recording as part of their own release? (And side note: did RCA make more off licensing that excerpt to a very commercially successful live record on another label than they did from their own release, which probably did typical classical-music numbers?)

My guess was the Beatles or Mothers of Invention, but evidently no.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-first-song-to-use-sampling/

The first Buchanan and Goodman “Flying Saucer” record came out in ‘56

I was going to talk about musique concrete but that article seems to suggest it doesn't count for some reason? So yeah, I'd go with Buchanan & Goodman.

Forgot all about them--agree.

This Elvis live album from 72 - and others, I'm sure - opens with Also Sprach Zarathustra:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Recorded_at_Madison_Square_Garden

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-first-song-to-use-sampling/

― clemenza, Tuesday, August 15, 2023 10:01 AM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

are you sure this was written by a human being

Also in 1972, Neil Young put "Let's Go Away for Awhile" by the Beach Boys on Journey Through the Past, though maybe that has deniability as a soundtrack album rather than his own record per se.

I guess a distinction should be made here between recordings interpolated into a new song, and recordings simply slapped down on a new record as is (unless you consider the Yes crowd noise an important addition to the Stravinsky recording).

also, did the flying saucer type releases pay any kind of royalties to the source material?

are you sure this was written by a human being

I'm sorry, Dave, I don't understand the question.

King Crimson sampling their first record on "The Devil's Triangle" must've blown some minds at the time. even when I first heard it I couldn't help but think "wow that's odd"

The Who Sell Out (1967) had quite a few, all uncredited -- "the highly successful sound of Wonderful Radio London," "more music, more music, more music," whatever the big-band thing is between "Premier Drums" and "Odorono"...

Buchanan & Goodman - The Flying Saucer (1956)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkOMmjLoz-M

should have read the whole thread, let this be a lesson for me

There are Pierre Schaeffer tape cutups as early as 1948 but don't know if they were formally released in any way (if anyone has a decent Schaeffer recording chronology then please let me know!)

Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's Symphonie pour un homme seul premiered in 1950 and (as far as I can tell) was first released as a recording in 1957.

a 1944 piece by egyptian-born electronic composer halim el-dabh processing the sounds of streets of a cairo-street exorcism -- the expression of zaar -- is the earliest work i'm aware of that jigsaws or quilts recorded performance sound with other sound into a work that isn't intended straightforwardly to reproduce and mirror the original performance, but acts as a distinct piece

el-dabh used a wire recorder rather than "tape"

I still wanna know who the first person was that actually got paid for being sampled

I guess a distinction should be made here between recordings interpolated into a new song and recordings simply slapped down on a new record as is

Halfway hits the nail on the head here, I think. If we accept the Mellotron as the first widely-used* electronic "sampler", as the word is now understood, then the first person to record with a sampler was Graham Bond, beginning in 1965. Per Wikipedia, the first hit song to feature a Mellotron was his "Baby Can It Be True".

* The Mellotron was of course "inspired" by the Chamberlin, but as far as I know the latter didn't make it onto a record until long after the former.

in answer to sleeve: it's bound to be more complicated than this, but in the US copyright only applied to sound recording after 1971

the international treaty on the same was 1961 but i think it protects record companies more than performers

ooh that's interesting, so Yes is still a contender for this? I hope so.

yes i am also rooting for them :)

*carl dahlhaus voice, very germanic and intense*: it all depends on how you define the term "WORK OF MUSIC"

Tape looping was a method first introduced in the 1940s, with French composer Pierre Schaeffer often given due credit for his pioneering musique concrète. These experimental compositions were created by splicing up tape recordings and rearranging them into a sonic collage.

fwiw Schaeffer didn't use tape till 1951, he used records and turntables before that.

I was suggesting Schaeffer because his tape collages include clips of music played on radio.
An early example of the same but in a recognisable song format (ish) would be Silver Apples' "Program" from 1968

Saying musique concrete doesn't count because it isn't a song is a bit silly.

when did schaeffer's collages start to include clips of radio music? his initial position (in fact half the reason it's called "musique concrete" iirc) is that it should *not* be reorganising extant music bcz this would act as a distraction frm the true goal = working with (= analysing categorising and composing with) raw sound (he saw himself as continuing russolo's project)

my v dim memory of this from researching olden-times darmstadt theory-beef many years ago is the concreters didn't start including clips of extant music until after the US tape-composers nudged them more in that direction: cage in imaginary landscapes 5 (1952); then richard maxfield and terry riley and james tenney (late 50s / early 60s)

happy to be reminded i am old and forgetful these days but

the klang-atom for boulez was the note, for stockhausen it was the sinewave and for schaeffer it was 3 78s of a day at the gare du nord

The first Buchanan and Goodman “Flying Saucer” record came out in ‘56

― sean paul akerman (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, August 15, 2023 11:10 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

From Andrew Hickey's Patreon bonus episode on "The Flying Saucer":

Nothing like this had ever been done before -- there had, apparently, been a single other record, decades earlier, that had included samples of other records, but that had been as part of a comedy sketch with people turning the dial of the radio and hearing different songs -- it had been diegetic music that they were listening to. This was something else, and something for which the music industry wasn't prepared.

The track became a massive hit, but also a massive legal headache. The record company cut deals with the licensing agencies responsible for the songs sampled, which meant that they ended up paying a massive seventeen cents in songwriting royalties per eighty-nine-cent record sold (by comparison it was not unknown for songwriting royalties to be as low as a cent a record). And that should have been enough to cover them, at a time when there were no federal copyrights on sound recordings, but they were sued nonetheless by Imperial Records, Chess Records, and artists Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis.

The lawsuit was ruled in Buchanan and Goodman's favour, as the record was clearly parody by the standards of 1950s copyright law, and they celebrated with a followup single, "Buchanan and Goodman on Trial", which followed the same formula as "The Flying Saucer", and was a minor hit

excellent

Also in 1972, Neil Young put "Let's Go Away for Awhile" by the Beach Boys on _Journey Through the Past_, though maybe that has deniability as a soundtrack album rather than his own record per se.

when did schaeffer's collages start to include clips of radio music? his initial position (in fact half the reason it's called "musique concrete" iirc) is that it should *not* be reorganising extant music bcz this would act as a distraction frm the true goal = working with (= analysing categorising and composing with) raw sound (he saw himself as continuing russolo's project)

my v dim memory of this from researching olden-times darmstadt theory-beef many years ago is the concreters didn't start including clips of extant music until after the US tape-composers nudged them more in that direction: cage in imaginary landscapes 5 (1952); then richard maxfield and terry riley and james tenney (late 50s / early 60s)

I tried reading Schaeffer's "In Search of a Concrete Music" but gave up about halfway through, so I should know this, but I don't think Schaeffer ever used clips of radio music.

I've got a boxset of his complete recordings sitting about two feet away from me, I should give it a listen to check!

https://willmckinley.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/leonard-nimoy.jpeg

the problem with musique concrete is

1. When was it composed?
2. When was it put together?
3. When was it performed?
4. When was it released on record?
5. Are (2) (3) and (4) actually the same or are they different realisations of the same composition?

i fucking love Halim El-Dabh

👍🏽

The music at the end of this Idle Race track from 1968 is definitely not by the Idle Race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB17N0SEQcY

actually it was Charles Ives ...

perhaps Milton Parker will return to give a definitive answer

should have read the whole thread, let this be a lesson for me

You were just sampling previous answers.

Faust sampled The Beatles “All you need is love” in 1971. https://www.whosampled.com/sample/43510/Faust-Why-Don%27t-You-Eat-Carrots-The-Beatles-All-You-Need-Is-Love/

What, no Fahey mention yet?
He was sampling in '67 and '68 on Requia & Voice of The Turtle, and he was doing interesting studio stuff on Days Have Gone By too but I can't honestly say if he is sampling other folks music on that album, off the top of my head. I can't remember the pieces being sampled on Requia off the top of my head (classical music iirc?) but on Voice of The Turtle the tracks "Bean Vine Bues" and "Little Train That Couldn't" are just him playing along with the Nap Hayes & Matthew Prater record "Something Doing" (1928, Okeh). Also on some or all(?) issues of that record, the track "Bottleneck Blues" is not fahey at all but Sylvester Weaver & Walter Beasley.

(xp) And "Satisfaction"

Also in the 60’s dub reggae producers like Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby were making riddim tracks which were sort of made with the purpose to be sampled.

It's true, in reggae, you find backing tracks being re-used time and time again - which is a kind of sampling... or is it? Also King Tubby never produced backing tracks of his own, he used pre-exisiting tracks, and not in the 60s either.

no one's mentioned "wipe out!" so here it is

this is the halim el-dabh piece btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_kbNSdRvgo

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/gTQAAOSwbT1kigI3/s-l1600.jpg

a vintage wire recorder

My favourite early sampling record: Jack Parnell and His Rhythm's White Suit Samba (1951), produced by George Martin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUvded8mqw

The main sequenced 'gurgle glub gurgle' sound effect was created by Mary Habberfield for Ealing film The Man in the White Suit. And was created by mixing together the sounds of blowing into a glass tube with clanking glass and metal pipes and a few other things. https://pinkforyouractualpterodactyl.com/2022/07/21/the-guggle-glub-gurgle-a-sound-effect-by-mary-habberfield/

George essentially 'sampled' the sound effect as the centre of the Parnell track. Quasi-musique concrete pop in 1951 (!)

The first work I'm aware of with any ties to sampling or musique concrete etc is Walter Ruttmann's Weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3cEAMh3eng

I have this^^^ on a tiny 3" CD which I can never find lol

I guess the rock vogue for sound collages in the late 1960s is really where sampling takes off in popular music or a popular music context. There's plenty of pop records with striking non-musical sound effects throughout the 1950s and 60s (I'm even working on precisely a list of them as I speak), and really that's something that goes back to the dawn of the 20th century if not earlier, but I'm thinking in 1967-70 alone you have: Revolution 9, the later Beatles Christmas records, the Mothers, My World Fell Down, The Buckinghams' Susan, Russell Morris' The Real Thing, Canaxis 5, Red Crayola, White Noise, Monkees' Head, Eric Burdon's Sky Pilot, Avant Slant, Friendsound, Joe Byrd/USoA, Medium Is the Massage, Rock and Other Four Letter Words, Gulliver's Travels*, Vanilla Fudge's The Beat Goes On, Lovin' Spoonful's War Games, Creedence's Rude Awakening #2 and 45 Revolutions Per Minute, Crazy People's Bedlam, and (a personal favourite) Musketeer Gripweed and the Third Troop's How I Won the War. I mean this is a pretty obvious point to make but I still wanted to make it as e.g. John Fahey has been mentioned.

*Gulliver's Travels - strange obscurity in some sense 'by' Andrew Loog Oldham - seems like the most potent example: a lot of if is built from other records, usually stuff by Immediate acts such as the Small Faces.

sampling was invented by tchaikovsky in 1880 when he interpolated fragments of the marseillaise into the 1812 overture

also cannons!

cannonic

Amazing contributions to thread, westbury. Going to share your thread on sound effects records as I feel like it makes sense with the wider conversation here, hope that's okay.

Novelty songs (mostly 50s or 60s) centred on a sound effect

Perfectly okay! I actually have a bunch of things to add to that thread which I'll do now.

thread delivers

It's true, in reggae, you find backing tracks being re-used time and time again - which is a kind of sampling... or is it? Also King Tubby never produced backing tracks of his own, he used pre-exisiting tracks, and not in the 60s either.

― Monthly Python (Tom D.)

Yeah didn’t expand sorry, he didn’t make the backing tracks but sort of “sampled?” them and added sounds and effects… so sort of a remix but made from samples?

He 100% was doing production in the 60’s tho

Is using an existing part of a track and adding new sounds and vocals not sampling?

Dub pioneers were also sampling pioneers imho

Or maybe they weren’t idk

my v dim memory of this from researching olden-times darmstadt theory-beef many years ago is the concreters didn't start including clips of extant music until after the US tape-composers nudged them more in that direction: cage in imaginary landscapes 5 (1952); then richard maxfield and terry riley and james tenney (late 50s / early 60s)

on this note, the first Imaginary Landscape in 1939 used turntables playing commercial records that played a single tone. No. 4 in 1951 involves dialling through radio stations. I'm not sure when these were first recorded and released though, if that's significant - I suspect not until at least the late 1950s.

commercial might not be the right word, I don't suppose they were used for much besides lab work.

did yes invent getting up and getting down?

yes, but Public Enemy perfected it

There's an edition of Guinness World Records that calls He's Gonna Step on You Again (1971) the first song to contain a sample because of the Inkiranya drumming (maybe from the same source as Joni's The Jungle Line?) Obv this is wrong but it might still be the first hit song to sample another (musical) record.

Other things which complicate the issue of 'the first x/y to sample': Mellotrons (!!), and (proto-megamix) disco mixer singles like "Calibre Cuts" (that one madly made the lower end of the UK charts). Other than HGSOYA, you could argue Rupie Edwards' Ire Feelings (on dub grounds) and Footsee by Wigan's Chosen Few (a 'remix' of a 1968 song with added FA Cup crowd chants and klaxon break) to be other 70s hits with sampling.

90125 didn't top the UK charts but Paul Young's No Parlez did and there is some sampling - in its finished form - on "Sex" (even James Brown gets a look in iirc). And so did U2's War (the Soldier Girls bit in "Seconds"). And The Final Cut has some radio news excerpts in the backcloth. But enough about 1983 No. 1 albums.

Sorry no real connection between these things I just wanted to keep mentioning stuff.

Gotta mention Simon and Garfunkel "Save the Life of My Child" (1968) which samples their own "Sounds of Silence" along with an outrageously futuristic Moog bassline

Rupie Edwards' Ire Feelings

It's kind of mind blowing that this was a Top 10 hit.

This Maurice Jaubert soundtrack recording features a disc recording (also made by Jaubert) played backwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyE-zP7upU

It's from Zéro de conduite, so 1933.

iirc the film is also reversed at tha point -- it's a dream sequence -- and it's the sound-strip going backwards rather than a disc

(the music was written and performed in the other direction and then reversed; it's like the man from another place in twin peaks when he speaks)

unless it's another scene, i haven't watched it for 20 years

it's the end of this clip, doesn't appear to be backwards, just in slow motion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke3PQVK87mc

seems that you're right that it isn't a record though

yes the film-backwards bit is actually just before that bit and very short -- like the transition from the pillow fight to the procession with the backwards music

i had to look this up, i i had compressed it all in memory

does the King Lear stuff from the radio in I Am The Walrus count?

Just remembered another slightly earlier album that 'samples' another recording as its own track - Mighty Sparrow's Jack Palance at the start of VDP's Discover America.

I really like the way that the guitar part of All Tomorrow's Parties sounds like it lifts part of The Byrds' take on Chimes of Freedom and repeats. Not quite sampling but seems to be applying The idea prior to the technology being available.

Van Dyke Parks also begins Song Cycle with an "alien" recording as a prelude to "Vine Street":

The album opens with a recording of guitarist Steve Young performing "Black Jack Davy", a 17th-century ballad.

not the answer to the question but I heard Spirit's Future Games album from 1977 the other day for the first time and was taken aback by just how much externally-sourced audio material there seemingly is on it, throughout the record

Joni Mitchells The Jungle Line samples field recordings of drummers from Burundi. It's one of the earliest to use a drum sample for the entire song i think

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2_1Jfgo4I

I think in both regards John Kongos beats her to it.

Not to be a dork, but i would say that once the band's drummer comes in the sample becomes background texture. They aren't playing in time with it. I wouldn't be surprised if was added after the song was recorded.

I really like the way that the guitar part of All Tomorrow's Parties sounds like it lifts part of The Byrds' take on Chimes of Freedom and repeats. Not quite sampling but seems to be applying The idea prior to the technology being available.

Rather like how 'There She Goes Again' is built round a "sample" of The Stones' version of 'Hitch Hike'.

Came here to mention Song Cycle, but I couldn't work out where that "sample" at the start of Vine Street comes from.
He also sampled Mighty Sparrow and a bunch of other Calypsonians for 1972's Discover America.

I don't know if "Vine Street" is a sample, he may have got Steve Young, who he'd apparently been in a band with, to record something for the start of the song - the opening line of the song is "That's a tape that we made" after all. The Nilsson version of "Vine Street" has a brief clip of an unreleased Nilsson song, the Harpers Bizarre version has a recording of a b-side from when they were known as the Tikis (complete with the whirring of a tape machine at the start).

Hah, I never grokked onto the context that that little snatch of music is literally "the tape that we made". I'm a doofus sometimes

I thought the hitch hike borrowing was more directly from original source. I thought the band were all pretty schooled in r'n'b and trying to avoid aping it too closely and cliches involved Possibly not Cale whose background was different coming from Wales etc.

does the King Lear stuff from the radio in I Am The Walrus count?

― The Yellow Kid, Wednesday, 16 August 2023 18:45 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was listening to the title track of Traffic's "When the Eagle Flies" and it has recordings of radio broadcasts towards the end of the track and that got me thinking about rock and pop songs that use recordings from radio, TV, film. As usual, the Beatles get lots of credit for "I Am the Walrus" but this Johnny Rivers' track uses recordings of TV commercials six months before "Walrus".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jimaOU0MliQ

... might be radio commercials too, I suppose.

A record label's version of sampling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yH2EpQsYp0

In 1962, Scepter Records took their own release of "Soldier Boy" by the Shirelles, added a whole new singer and melody on the top, and released "Hurry Home to Me (Soldier Boy)" by Valli.

the song's already mentioned on here but the way "Program" by Silver Apples throws in random snippets of radio broadcasts including advertisements and polka music reminds me a lot more of stuff like The Orb or Beastie Boys; might be the first song ever to use sampling as we know it today

I feel there's gonna be other slightly earlier contenders in the list I posted upthread. Musketeer Gripweed's "How I Won the War" was a year before Silver Apples.

I'm probably more interested in the way it's still contemporary in 70s examples (and, well, for years yet), because e.g. Hall and Oates' War Baby Son of Zorro and Tom Clay's What the World Needs Now Is Love have TV/radio sound collages but it still feels like a very contemporary thing to do, not a throwback to 1967-68 despite the huge amount of rock from that era that went there.

listening to that now, yeah that's pretty unusual for 1967, but those are all samples from the movie correct? I think what the Silver Apples were doing was different - taking snippets of stuff they liked from the radio and playing around it in a sense, without any real thematic unity

I think the Johnny Rivers track is much more interesting and unusual than the Musketeer Gripweed one - it also predates it. It reminds me of the Nancy Sinatra track that had a backwards guitar solo months before the Beatles did: grizzled Hollywood music hacks stumbling across innovations.

sinatra guitarist was glenn campbell (yes that one) and he was an extremely grizzled 30

Glen Campbell at 33:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Glen_Campbell1969.JPG

I guess he de-grizzled.

I still wonder about the "yeah yeah yeah" bit in the middle of "I am the Walrus" during the radio static bit. Still never been identified

Delia Derbyshire's arrangement of the Doctor Who theme is musique concrete, in the sense that it's made of snippets of tape, but unusually it has a good beat and a tune instead of being e.g. a conceptual portrait of industrial society. The dugga-da-dun bassline was a recording of some piano wire pitched down, the rest of it was test oscillators and white noise generators played on separate tape machines. The sequencing was done by working out the timing with some maths - the tape ran at so many inches per second, so at 120bpm a single bar would be a certain length of tape etc - and then sellotaping together snippets of recorded sound and lengths of blank tape to create rests.

It didn't involve samples of other people's work, but it was at the very least sample-based. I suppose it depends on whether you define sample-based music as any arbitrary audio recording arranged in a musical way or whether it specifically has to be built from bits of other people's records.