Sampling

[The NZA]

 

this came up a bit in the DJ Shadow thread, and even tho Loreli's sadly absent at the moment, i wanted to continue on it.

 

Sampling's a big element of genres like hip-hop, and there's a few schools of thought on it. i for one appreciate DJ Shadow's approach, what he does is subtle and really esoteric, its hard for me to place the source a lot of times. The RZA is one of my favorite producers, whose known to take a short segment from a classic R&B track and make it work elsewhere. I honestly didnt even catch some of his sampling until i heard DJ Riz' "Live from Brooklyn (parts 1 & 2)", which if you ever get a chance, theyre like 15 minute segments of playing about 5-10 seconds of the original soul/R&B/etc track that youve likely heard in a hip-hop or current R&B song. youll be amazed how much more shit's been bitten off that you didnt know. Like half of my favorite Ice Cube tracks are almost note-for-note.

 

Still, the more common practice - and the one most look down upon, as i understand it - is doing something akin to what Diddy does (and sometimes Kanye) where you just speed up the tempo, but basically leave the entire beat unchanged otherwise. It works for clubbangers and such, but to me, it reeks of a lack of effort. Ill post an example:

 

Curtis Mayfield's classic "Move on up"

 

 

Kanye West's "Touch the Sky"

 

 

a more common example would be with Diddy and Police/Sting beats that most people are familiar with.

 

Anyway, sampling's an important element, and i dont want people thinking its something to view negatively; if you can take something old and make something new of it, by all means: Motown alone had a tremendous amount of amazing beats to work with. I just wanted a place to discuss the distinctions (and my thoughts) here.

 

ps as ever, wiki has a better page on the practice than i just made, if you're interested.

 

"A lot of people still don't recognize the sampler as a musical instrument. I can see why. A lot of rap hits over the years used the sampler more like a Xerox machine. If you take four whole bars that are identifiable, you're just biting that shit. But I've always been into using the sampler more like a painter's palette than a Xerox. Then again, I might use it as a Xerox if I find rare beats that nobody had in their crates yet. If I find a certain sample that's just incredible—like the one on 'Liquid Swords'—I have to zap that! That was from an old Willie Mitchell song that I was pretty sure most people didn't have. But on every album I try to make sure that I only have 20 to 25 percent [of that kind of] sampling. Everything else is going to be me putting together a synthesis of sounds. You listen to a song like "Knowledge God" by Raekwon: it took at least five to seven different records chopped up to make one two-bar phrase. That's how I usually work." —RZA, The Wu-Tang Manual, 2004

 

"When I sample something, it's because there's something ingenious about it. And if it isn't the group as a whole, it's that song. Or, even if it isn't the song as a whole, it's a genius moment, or an accident or something that makes it just utterly unique to the other trillions of hours of records that I've plowed through" —DJ Shadow, 33 1/3 Volume 24: DJ Shadow's Endtroducing..., 2005

[the division of joy]

http://rapidshare.com/files/86767985/DJ_Shadow_-_Entroducing.rar.html

 

Pass: NasT

 

For anyone who hasn't heard it, its a fantastic example of sampling.