In the 1980s digital sampling machines like the E-mu Emulator and AKAI S950 allowed producers to go even further by chopping up bits of audio and rearranging them. Initially, sampling took the form of finding a specific spot on a record called the “break” that was only drums and percussion and looping it. Hip-hop pioneers took it to the next level. Sampling continued to develop through the second half of the 20th century with the Mellotron, a tape-based sampling keyboard you might recognize from The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and the Fairlight CMI, an early digital sampling synth promoted heavily by Peter Gabriel, among others. Hip-hop artists made it something you can dance to. The Musique Concrète people used it to make avant-garde art music pieces. This idea of chunks of recorded sound as raw materials that you can rearrange or manipulate to create a new thing is core to what sampling in hip-hop is all about - and what drove RJ to it. Recorded audio all of a sudden became the fodder for new works. In particular, there was a movement in the 1940s pioneered by a French artist named Pierre Schaeffer called Musique Concrète that treated recorded sound as the raw material for new compositions. Jazz musicians similarly made “quoting” other musicians a core part of their performance, playing others’ licks or motifs during solos, as homage or even a type of inside joke.Īs RJ mentions, sampling with recorded audio began with recording audio onto tape and then cutting and splicing it together to manipulate it. You can hear Haydn’s piece here starting right away, and listen to the main theme from Mozart’s piece below starting at 1:24: 25 in G major” but in a different context. 37 in G major” contains an exact copy of Michael Haydn’s previous “Symphony No. Classical composers often did something similar by borrowing an exact copy of a part from a previous composer, something now called interpolation. Sampling has been around since the beginning of recorded music, and arguably even before then. Samplers can also do many other things, like edit audio, reverse it, add expression or velocity values to it, filter it, manipulate it, and arrange it - but it’s amazing how much you can do just with those two initial parameters. In its modern form, that mostly takes the form of putting snippets of audio into devices, like the Akai MPC or a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Ableton Live or Logic Pro, and then manipulating them in some way to give them a new context.Īs RJ points out in the video above and throughout his course, in their simplest form, modern samplers allow you to adjust the length of your sample, how much of it you use, and the timing, which can change the pitch. Sampling is the act of taking a piece of audio or sound and using it in a new composition.
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+ This video is presented courtesy of RJD2’s brand new course on Soundfly, RJD2: From Samples to Songs.
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