Key Tracks of the Sampling Era

People funny boy by lee perry, for being the first ever tune to use a sample. 1968 I think, has a tape loop of a baby crying, invented a whole new rythmn that just happened to become reggae. Not as guy in SOS this month claimed in 1971.

Take for instance 'ardkore and jungle using spead up funk breaks, you cannot make live druums or drum machines sound like that because o f compressing effect of the speeding up process. Also allows you to do things like reverse a drum pattern. Not the first but a good example is the breakdown near the end of Polynomial C by Aphex Twin where the rythmn goes into reverse and sounds like the track is being sucked back to the begining.

Beat Juggling, elementary sampling again using funk breaks to create hip hop as a genre.

anyway think of it less as stealing more as recycling, No one would ever know of Mike Viner and the incredible bongo band without hip hop adopting the break as an anthem.

I'll try and come up with dome more classic example but that should start you off

See 'ardkore heroes thread for 'ardcore recommendations.

2 old perenials : 'Endtroducing' by DJ Shadow and '3 Feet High and Rising' by De La Soul. Both are excellent.

Stetsasonic, one of the very few "hip hop bands" with drums, bass, etc., explaining the sample in "All That Jazz":

Tell the truth, James Brown was old
Til Eric and Rak' came out with 'I Got Soul'
Rap brings back old R&B, and if we had not
People could have forgot

Public Enemy sampling James Brown, making a saxophone sound like a whistling kettle.

Charlie Mingus sample on 'Theme From Turnpike ' by dEUS on In a barr the sea. Not only is it a great tune built up round this one fat bass sample, possibly played in a way no one else could, but also used to be part of their stage show that as soon as the support went off they'd start this sample running and thenh band member got set up they'd play their part over the top

It's "in a bar under the sea". This is not the first time dEUS has sampled: they also used Beefheart sample on their first CD (and EP). They also tend to sample lyrics:, for example "I skipped the part about love" from a REM song.

"3 Feet High and Rising." Melodic uses of samples = thumbs up!

Actually an interesting one is also Dr Dre's 'The Next Episode' which samples a David Axelrod riff, but chops it up and rearranges it. Axelrod himself said in a recent interview that when he heard the song he wished he'd put it that way around when he wrote it in the first place. It was really refreshing to see a musician taking a constructive approach to having been sampled, but then when your records have been sampled as many times as his have, I guess you'd get philosophical.

Well, I'm a person who "knows virtually nothing of hip-hop or dance music", yet there are plenty of examples of sampling in my record collection and quite frankly it can be good fun identifying where samples have been taken from. *All* of the Big Audio Dynamite/BAD2/Big Audio albums and the early work of St Etienne are chock-full of samples from films tv etc. "stealing music" is just one aspect of it...I'd say "borrowing" anyway, as plenty of borrowing hs gone on since time immemorial....many great composers "borrowed" from folk tunes of their day and I can't help wondering whether it is only the permenance of recorded sound which has made people think in terms of stealing.

The fact that I am not a musician might be a factor here, but I'm sick and tired of all the legal repercussions associated with sampling, e.g. Monaco's "I Got A Feeling" being pulled from release because of an uncleared sample on the b-side.

Leave it to me to give my usual smarty-pants answer (probably full as usual with inacurracies). One doesn't know where to start, since it depends on how you define "sampling." Everyone knows the classical greats stole--I mean, sampled--each other and Anonymous all the time; Marinetti and the Futurists used 78 rpm records, I think, inside some of their sound machines; the introduction of tape-recording enabled the French and Germans, especially, of the postwar era to sample all that was recordable around them--and then we come to the novelty "interview" 45s of Dicky Betts (I think), which utilized brief snippets of top tunes as the punch lines at the end of a series of set-up jokes. But my nomination for the first true use of sampling (non-keyboard- based) and maybe the best excuse to impress your hesitant friends would go to the "Ask Not What You Can Do Waltz" and "Cuban Missile Crisis Mambo" featuring the voice of John F. Kennedy on a 1963 lp--if anyone's really interested, I'll come back with the title and specifics. The songs were built around samples of actual JFK speeches (a key consideration), to hilarious effect; JFK intones a line or two at a time and a gleeful chorus answers antiphonally. It was the one JFK tribute record the president supposedly liked.

But if you're going to be pickier about things, I'd go for Graeme Revell's "The Insect Musicians," whose exotic melodies and rhythms are built entirely from the sampled sound of the six- legged critters of our great and glorious world.

Emergency Broadcast Network should be mentioned. Most-played track includes George Bush the Elder repeatedly mentioning "we will rock you". Their shows were UNBELIEVABLE, usually at dance clubs, included a mechanized revolving "podium" from which they'd trigger video loops, MIDI tracks, audio samples, dressed in blue suits and rep ties.

"The Next Episode" doesn't actually sample "The Edge" (which is by David McCallum but written and produced by Axelrod) - Dre generally recreates tracks now rather than sampling them. I wouldn't really agree with Axelrod about it being better, just a different effect. It's not really that innovative. Bob James has some interesting things to say about "Nautilus" and "Take Me To The Mardi Gras" being sampled all the time and also about why he stopped the Souls Of Mischief using a sample on the original version of "Cabfare" (which they've since released anyway).

Sound sample of "The Edge" here.

greg, i'd be interested to hear what bob james has to say about the sampling of mardi gras (and nautilus). could you summarize?

X.Y.Z. - that guy that did those cut-in records wasn't Dicky Betts (= guy from the Allman Bros Band!) but his name eludes me too...nope, can't remember. (& i can't be fkd doing a google search, this computer's running too slow)

The "Flying Saucer" cut-up guys are Buchanan & Goodman.

thanx, that was buggin the hell out of me.

Uh, cut-in, not cut-up.

Thanks for an answer that was bugging me, too. As for the JFK speeches, they really were "cut up," not "cut in," so I think they should count, at least historically.