August 21, 2014

When I first started producing, sampling seemed like an enigma. I’d sit and listen to my favorite MCs no longer for their lyrics, but for the music that surrounded them.

The cries of the guitar Southpaw placed behind Tech in “You Never Know”. The way Ant painted a landscape with that flute for Slug to write a story to, only to strike you in the chest when that piano plays for a second time in “The Waitress”. The way Quest and Shahid played with a 3 bar loop instead of the conventional multiple of 2 bar loop on “Electric Relaxation” because a sample brought that out of them. The violence felt in the piano on “N.Y. State of Mind”, which gave Nas the background to arguably one of the most iconic rap songs of all time. How the hell did these guys do this?

As any producer who has sampled can tell you, it actually isn’t all that difficult in a technical sense. You take a song, cut it up in pieces or even just loop a specific part of it, throw some drums on and hey; look! You now have a sample based track. Maybe you’ll use more than one sample, maybe you’ll add your own instrumentation, maybe you’ll chop and screw the heck out of the audio, but the premise stays the same.

So, if it’s technically simple, what makes it so special? Why do so many find these types of tracks so enticing?

To understand the answer, we first have to consider what we are really doing when we sample a finished song.

Stealing.

Yes, it’s thievery. Some argue that all art requires some level of theft, but no, seriously, sampling is as straight as it gets, even if you alter it ridiculously. Why? Because while self composed work may be inspired by other pieces of music, sampling is the act of taking someone else’s art in it’s entirety to be used.

It’s the difference between looking at or thinking about the Mona Lisa while you paint, and telling Leo’s corpse that he can suck it while you tear the canvas from it’s frame to make it into a paper… eh, canvas(?) plane.

And in this case, crime pays, because something very powerful happens when we do this.

We channel the mind, spirit, heart, intention, tone, expertise and much, much more of not only a song, but it’s creators. In one swipe we take more than just a piece of audio, we are taking what we ourselves can not recreate; The very souls of other people’s art.

Maybe that sounded romanticized, but it’s the truth. An indirect example is a great, true blue cover band. They can play songs note for note, tone for tone with amazing accuracy, but at the end of the day, they are just acting. They will never capture what made the original, the original. As a matter of fact, I’d argue that the best cover bands are those that do live versions of sampling, by giving a song their own flavor, sometimes changing the genre or feel of the song entirely.

There is another aspect to sampling that makes it so damn potent. It has to do with two conjunctive factors: creativity and the immense malleability of audio.

Let’s clear up what I mean by malleability first. You see, once we have a recording, whether in digital or analog form, it now has earned itself the ability to be treated as an entirely new instrument. We can do simple things like changing it’s pitch, to very complex things like cutting it into tiny, unrecognizable pieces, then re-arranging, reversing, and running it through as many audio effects as possible. Recorded audio is capable of being altered into things that are simply not possible with solely live instrumentation.

Now the more intuitive thing to understand is the creativity needed to work with the sheer amount of options available when altering a sample. It’s an entirely different and separate mindset in contrast to other facets of creating music. In fact, this type of creativity is needed the moment one decides to sample something. It takes an ear for various factors such as musicality, tone, tempo, and the general capacity for something to be re-imagined via sampling; including the foresight as to what a piece of audio can be turned into, and frankly just being able to tell what would sound good.

It is this capacity for unique aural potential in the right hands, and the channeling of the soul of a piece of music, that make sampling so damn special.

I find sampling to be beautiful in that it is inherently an act of homage to artistry that inspired one so much, they just couldn’t resist the urge to take it and try to make something else just as inspiring with it. Some view it as wrong, some say it shouldn’t be respected, but there’s something no one can deny:

It has a profound ability to impact the listener.

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