Why is sampling held in such high regards?

[IIVI]

Geniuses at work. Choosing random records and flipping them.















One of my favorite youtubers. Some tutorials showing how to flip and clean samples for drill:



I'm sure they'd love someone to tell them what they do is not impressive.

Point is really, most great producers have sampling in their bag of tricks. They can both cook up from scratch and can flip samples whenever they may hear something that they want to build from.

Like Ken Lewis once said: nobody cares how it gets done, they only care if it sounds good. You literally got A.I today making music and generating full on compositions with a single click.

 

[julesocean]

Manipulating sound into something classic can be just as difficult and artful as creating your own sounds to begin with. You still have to make a song, no matter what!

 

[Harry B]

The only people who shyt on sampling are the ones who’ve never tried to make a new song, in a different genre, in a different time from a sample.

The old fukks be like he stole my song, breh go take your Arab song from the 50s and make a club banger from it, that sounds nothing like it, and report bang

 

[TheDarceKnight]

@spliz the fact this thread was made says a lot. Peckerwoods all up in our shyt EVERYWHERE. In person, online, metaverse, whatever is next. fukking literally

Absolutely. You guys are right.

In fact, in many ways sampling can be a lot more difficult than just making music. You're limited by the constraints of what you're working with. You have to know how to collage and how to recycle in creative ways that make sense. 100% of the people that say sampling is easy and uncreative legitimately couldn't re-make even the simplest sample if you sat them in front of an MP or Fruity Loops or whatever. The simplest chops and loops would have them confused. There's a website that's meant to show people how hard sampling is, and it lets you try to recreate 3 beats by Kanye, 9th, and Dilla, and spoiler alert...it's not easy.

Re-create producers' beats from their samples, mapped to your computer keyboard

Great website.

Not to mention...like...everything in hip-hop is sampled. 90% of the producers that say they don't sample are lying, playing a semantic game with how they word it, or they're just incorrect. There's producers that think they aren't sampling when they actually are.

Sampling literally IS hip-hop. The old heads didn't have the money to buy instruments in The Bronx, Harlem, etc, and had to use breaks and shyt like that. It's the foundation of the culture. Saying you like hip hop but not sampling is a straight up oxymoron.

 

[TheDarceKnight]

I don't know about sampling itself being held in high regard. It was more so about what the producer did with the sample vs sampling itself being held in high regard.

Prime example of this is when people started making sample mixes where mixed the original record with the song that sampled the original. That angered a lot of producers because sometimes the chop was so nice the artist that was sampled didn't recognize their own work. They weren't credited, but when people started making these sample mixes, it outed a lot of songs that had samples, but no one knew who or what was being sampled. Of course, it also opened them to lawsuits.

Also....like...you gotta have the EAR to hear it. It's mad fukking easy in hindsight to hear classic samples and be like even if you think it kinds sounds obvious. But everyone on this board would be surprised if they knew how many all time great producers have listened to the same samples and not hears what some of their peers heard. And I don't even mean like Havoc hearing whatever he heard to bend and warp the Shook Ones Part 2 sample into what it is. I mean like, what seems like super obvious loops to us.

Dope producers have skimmed right over really great loops. It's always harder to hear what hasn't been done yet. It's real easy after the fact to hear a sample and be like "Oh yeah, I could've definitely heard that and looped it or chopped it if I knew what I was doing."

But could you, though? Everyone thinks everything is way easier than it really is. Straight up...NOTHING done at a high level is easy to do. Sports. Cooking. Making music. Working out. Fighting. Making art. The list is endless.

 

[TheDarceKnight]

I agree. You have a beat like Jay Z's "aint no nikka' that sounds like just a loop, but it isn't. The sample is impossible to straight loop due to the timing of the musicians so Jaz explained how he chopped it up into 7 pieces and played it out on the MPC

EXACTLY. I think Song Cry took like 60 chops or something like that, but MAD people just assume it's a loop because of how effortless and seamless it sounds.

People on this board exposing themselves hard on this thread

 

[TheDarceKnight]

THIS

RZA sampling 4 seconds of an old Frank Zappa track for "Cold World" got me to check out his music. I dunno about you, but when I hear a dope beat with a sample, I google the shyt out of it until I find out where it's sampled from, and find the original record and try to pick out what part of the track was sampled. It's fun.

what you and @kdslittlebro said. 90's hip-hop got me to really love a lot of old soul, jazz, jazz fusion, and even disco music from the 60's through the 80's. And a lot of Dilla, Madlib, Alchemist, Roc Marci, Khrysis, Nottz, and DOOM beats from 2000 up until now have gotten me to love a lot of foreign music, like Asian Jazz Fusion, Ethiopian Rock, Eastern European Prog, obscure film soundtracks from very hard to find films (often also from other countries), etc. Hell, RZA got me into watching old Kung Fu movies.

Also, I know that a lot of sampled artists are really thankful for it. Robert Alred's son said that 9th Wonder generated a lot more interest in his late father's music. There's a lot of music I listen to that I never would have if I hadn't heard it used in many of my favorite hip-hop songs.

 

[TheDarceKnight]

It's making music itself the instrument and should never be discounted for the revelation it was, is and will continue to be.

Yep.

J Dilla's MPC is in the fukking Smithsonian. The MPC (and all other samplers like it) are 100% official musical instruments.

 

[Tetris v2.0]

This literally applies to making a beat from scratch. Moreso actually.

Not necessarily. You can make a beat from scratch but have access to terrabytes of sound packs, EQ'd drum kits, VSTs, pre-mixed synth pads etc.

How many non-sample based producers are tuning and modulating their own synths from scratch? How many layers are they using, are some just pads? Do they program their own arpeggiators or use presets? Where do they get their drums from? Etc.

I don't like how people assume that not-sampling automatically implies more creative input from the producer...

 

[TheDarceKnight]

Not necessarily. You can make a beat from scratch but have access to terrabytes of sound packs, EQ'd drum kits, VSTs, pre-mixed synth pads etc.

How many non-sample based producers are tuning and modulating their own synths from scratch? How many layers are they using, are some just pads? Do they program their own arpeggiators or use presets? Where do they get their drums from? Etc.

I don't like how people assume that not-sampling automatically implies more creative input from the producer...

Perfect reply right here

 

[JustCKing]

Also....like...you gotta have the EAR to hear it. It's mad fukking easy in hindsight to hear classic samples and be like even if you think it kinds sounds obvious. But everyone on this board would be surprised if they knew how many all time great producers have listened to the same samples and not hears what some of their peers heard. And I don't even mean like Havoc hearing whatever he heard to bend and warp the Shook Ones Part 2 sample into what it is. I mean like, what seems like super obvious loops to us.

Dope producers have skimmed right over really great loops. It's always harder to hear what hasn't been done yet. It's real easy after the fact to hear a sample and be like "Oh yeah, I could've definitely heard that and looped it or chopped it if I knew what I was doing."

But could you, though? Everyone thinks everything is way easier than it really is. Straight up...NOTHING done at a high level is easy to do. Sports. Cooking. Making music. Working out. Fighting. Making art. The list is endless.

I think one case of this is "Nautilus". Very popular sample among producers. "Daytona 500" and Jeru's "Mind Spray" both sample it. RZA went back to it on a track from 8 Diagrams where it sounds like he sampled the same part as Premo did on "Mind Spray", but it still sounds different.

 

[FeverPitch2]

I understand that's a corner stone of hip hop but why isn't originality praised? A person creating instead of building upon or at times just adding drums to...

Sampling can be very creative.
You have to have a musically developed ear to make a sample work differently than its original context.
Same with layering samples from different sources.
Jacking does not count.

However, sampling brehs tend to do a lot of chest beating about how musically gifted they are to compensate for their lack of actual music knowledge.
Sampling, while requiring talent, has a much lower degree of difficulty than learning an instrument.
The music theory required to compose pop music isn't actually that difficult.
But most are just afraid to suck as a beginner again, and cling to sampling and programming as their musical security blanket.

 

[boogers]

It’s all arrangement. Taking existing material. Modifying it. Arranging it with other existing material to create something new. It’s called collage art.

I don't know how I overlooked this post when it was originally posted... I ALWAYS THOUGHT THE "SHOOK ONES" BEAT WAS A GUITAR. Holy fukk

I haven’t checked this show out yet but as a producer this is such a beautiful illustration of the art of sampling

This was, hands down, my favorite scene in the entire series so far. Such a dope episode.

 

[Reptile]

Not necessarily. You can make a beat from scratch but have access to terrabytes of sound packs, EQ'd drum kits, VSTs, pre-mixed synth pads etc.

How many non-sample based producers are tuning and modulating their own synths from scratch? How many layers are they using, are some just pads? Do they program their own arpeggiators or use presets? Where do they get their drums from? Etc.

I don't like how people assume that not-sampling automatically implies more creative input from the producer...

I dont like how people assume that non sampling producers are less of craftsman than sample based producers. Literally everything you said can go both ways. You can sample and have access to VSTs and all the other things you mentioned. Theres tons are non sampling producers that check all the boxes. IDK what makes you think arent. Like I said starting from applies more to non sampling. With sampling you have a template.

 

[WhenWeWereKings]

This should be a thread in itself.

This basically your answer. Kanye and Rza got a whole lot of these as well.