The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'sampling'

2011/4/1

The New York Times has an article on Clyde Stubblefield, one of the most influential drummers of the recorded-music age, largely by virtue of him having drummed for James Brown, and particularly on a B-side titled Funky Drummer, whose drum break became one of the most sampled loops ever:

Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Mr. Stubblefield was first inspired by the industrial rhythms of the factories and trains around him, and he got his start playing with regional bands. One day in 1965 Brown saw him at a club in Macon, Ga., and hired him on the spot. Through 1971 Mr. Stubblefield was one of Brown’s principal drummers, and on songs like “Cold Sweat” and “Mother Popcorn” he perfected a light-touch style filled with the off-kilter syncopations sometimes called ghost notes.
The technology and conventions of sampling — isolating a musical snippet from one recording and reusing it for another — also kept him from greater recognition. “Funky Drummer” didn’t appear on an album until 1986, when it was on “In the Jungle Groove,” a Brown collection that was heavily picked over by the new generation of sampler-producers.
...and the rest was history, with the entire hip-hop world, and then everybody from Madonna to Kenny G who wanted to grab some of that streetwise cool for themselves, sampling the Funky Drummer break to ubiquity. Soon the record labels and collection agencies got wind of this and started making demands for royalties (at one time, PolyGram apparently had four people working full-time, listening to new releases for uncleared James Brown samples). Unfortunately for Stubblefield, musical copyright law puts little weight on rhythm in ascribing authorship, and consequently he has received little in the way of royalties.

Stubblefield didn't stop with the Funky Drummer; a lifelong career musician, he has been playing in bands and on records ever since (fellow Madison, Wisconsin resident Butch Vig got him in on 1990s alternative band Garbage's first record, on the grounds that it'd be nuts to use a sample when the actual drummer lives nearby). Unfortunately, now his health is declining and, like many American musicians, he has no health insurance (in the US, unless you're either wealthy or a full-time employee, health insurance is generally unaffordable). To make money, Stubblefield has recorded a set of sampled drum loops, which may be licensed for 15% of any commercial sales, and also has a special edition of the sampling documentary Copyright Criminals. Or, if you want to throw him a few bucks, you can do so here.

(via MeFi) clyde stubblefield funk funky drummer hip-hop music sampling 0

2004/9/9

A US federal appeals court has ruled that all samples must be paid for, regardless whether or not they're recognisable, thus cementing the basis of the permission culture, where everything is intellectual property which must be licensed. Welcome to the Digital Millennium; make sure you've paid your way

The ruling says artists must pay for not only large samples of another artist's work, but also snippets -- smaller notes, chords and beats that are not the artist's original composition -- which had previously been legal, according to The Associated Press
"If you cannot pirate the whole sound recording, can you 'lift' or 'sample' something less than the whole? Our answer to that question is in the negative."

Thank God they're protecting valuable intellectual property from lawless piracy, otherwise capitalism as we know it would collapse and we'd enter a new dark age.

copyright galambosianism music sampling 7

2004/6/8

Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee on how copyright law changed hip-hop; or the impact that the increasingly greedy demands of owners of samples had on the evolution of hip-hop:

The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout--meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound--for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.
We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can't really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.
Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different sounds?
Chuck D: Exactly. There's only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood's "I Want'a Do Something Freaky to You" and revamped it in his own way but basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It's easier to sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire collage element is out the window.

commercialisation copyfight copyright culture galambosianism hip-hop music sampling 0

2003/5/7

The Graun looks at why everyone from anarcho-feral bootleg/mashup collectives to apolitical dance-music producers is sampling George W. Bush:

He added: "He speaks at the perfect speed for drum'n'bass - about 181 beats per minute. In the past I've had nightmares getting various singers to fit with the beats, but everything he [Bush] said was on the beat."
But this sampling can have unintended consequences, as electroclash producer DJ Ali Falsafi, aka Foundation, discovered after sampling Bush saying"I believe in punishment". He used the soundbite because he thought "it sounded like every authoritarian figure you've ever encountered", but the record immediately become a favourite at fetish nights Kash Point and Nagnagnag in London and Hellfire in Sydney.

culture dance music electronica george w. bush music sampling 0

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