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Music and Wav Sample Overview
Get Free WAV Samples on MSN Messenger! In music, wav sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer. Sampling is also possible with tape loops or with vinyl records on a phonograph.
Often "samples" consist of one part of a song, such as a break, used in another, for instance the use of the drum introduction from Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" in songs by the Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Mike Oldfield, Rob Dougan and Erasure, and the guitar riffs from Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" in Tone-Loc's "Funky Cold Medina". "Samples" in this sense occur often in Industrial music, often using spoken words from movies and TV shows, as well as electronic music (which developed out of the musique concrète style, based almost entirely on samples and sample-like parts), hip hop, developed from DJs repeating the breaks from songs (Schloss 2004, p.36), and Contemporary R&B, but are becoming more common in other music as well, such as by Slipknot's sample player Craig Jones.
In 2005, music blog Library of Vinyl Experience compiled sample frequency data obtained from the sample database The Sample FAQ. The goal was to determine what year was ”The Funkiest Year Ever“ by counting the number of times samples from a particular year were used in hip hop songs. The bulk of the samples used in hip hop were from the years 1970-1975, the most being 872 different songs from 1973, making it ”The Funkiest Year Ever“. Some of 1973s most sampled songs include; The Incredible Bongo Band’s ”Apache“, which was sampled 45 times, Barry White’s ”I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Babe“, which was sampled 33 times, Kool and the Gang’s ”Jungle Boogie“, which was sampled 45 times, and Honeycut's ”Impeach the President“, which was sampled 115 times.
Music samples can be a valuable addition to articles about bands, musical styles, and genres. They can illustrate the particular instruments or musical elements in a song in a way that a text description cannot. However, usage of such samples needs to comply with copyright law. The limitations on length and quality described here apply only to fair use samples; free content samples are not subject to these limitations.
Legal issues Wav Sampling
Wav sampling has been an area of contention from a legal perspective. Early sampling artists simply used portions of other artists' recordings, without permission; once rap and other music incorporating samples began to make significant money the original artists began to take legal action, claiming copyright infringement. Some sampling artists fought back, claiming their samples were fair use (a legal doctrine in the USA that is not universal). International sampling is governed by agreements such as the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act.
Early Wav Sampling Cases
Sampling existing (copyrighted) recordings using manipulation with tape recorders goes back at least as far as 1961, when James Tenney created Collage #1 ("Blue Suede") from samples of Elvis Presley's recording of the song "Blue Suede Shoes." The Beatles also used the technique on a number of popular recordings in the mid' '60s, including "Yellow Submarine" and "I am the Walrus." However, sampling did not truly take off in popular music until the early eighties when pioneering hip hop producers, such as Marley Marl, started to produce Rap records using sampled breaks rather than drum machines or live studio bands, which had until then been the norm. The first rap single to feature sampling was "Rapper's Delight" by Sugar Hill Gang on their own independent Sugar Hill Label in 1979. They used the guitar riff from the song "Good Times" by the disco group Chic.
Early examples of this practice include the West Street Mob's - Break Dance (Electric Boogie) (1983) (which used the "Apache" break by the Incredible Bongo Bong Band), Brother D and the Collective Effort's "How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise" (1984) (which sampled the beat and bass line from Cheryl Lynn's 1978 hit "Got to be Real") and UTFO's "Roxanne Roxanne" (1984). Bill Holt's Dreamies (1974)is often cited as one of the earliest examples of sampling in popular music. Another early example of sampling was Big Audio Dynamite and their 1985 album This Is Big Audio Dynamite and the single E=MC² which Mick Jones (the bands main creative force, formerly of The Clash) sampled snippets of audio from various films including works by Nicolas Roeg which make up the Roeg homage E=MC².
One of the first major legal cases regarding sampling was with UK dance act M/A/R/R/S "Pump Up the Volume". As the record reached the UK top ten, producers Stock Aitken Waterman obtained an injunction against the record due to the unauthorized use of a sample from their hit single "Roadblock". The dispute was settled out of court, with the injunction being lifted in return for an undertaking that overseas releases would not contain the "Roadblock" audio sample, and the disc went on to top the UK singles chart. Ironically, the sample in question had been so distorted as to be virtually unrecognizable, and SAW didn't realize their record had been used until they heard co-producer Dave Dorrell mention it in a radio interview.
2 Live Crew, a hip-hop group not unfamiliar with controversy, was often in the spotlight for their ‘obscene’ and sexually explicit lyrics. They sparked many debates about censorship in the music industry. However, it was their 1989 album As Clean as They Wanna Be (a re-tooling of As Nasty As They Wanna Be) that began the prolonged legal debate over music sampling. The album contained a track entitled ”Pretty Woman,“ based off of the well known Roy Orbison song of the same name. 2 Live Crew’s version sampled the guitar, bass, and drums from the original, without permission. While the opening lines are the same, the two songs split ways immediately following.
Wav Sampling 1990's
In the early 1990s, Vanilla Ice came under criticism for the unauthorised use of a sample from the Queen/David Bowie hit "Under Pressure". Vanilla Ice's case rested on the addition of one grace note not present in the original. No lawsuit was filed, but it is conjectured that Vanilla Ice agreed to pay Queen and Bowie if they agreed not to sue.
More dramatically, Biz Markie's album I Need a Haircut was withdrawn in 1992 following a US federal court ruling, [9] that his use of a sample from Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" was willful infringement. This case had a powerful effect on the record industry, with record companies becoming very much concerned with the legalities of sampling, and demanding that artists make full declarations of all samples used in their work. On the other hand, the ruling also made it more attractive to artists and record labels to allow others to sample their work, knowing that they would be paid—often handsomely—for their contribution.
A notable case in the early 1990s involved the dispute between the group Negativland and Casey Kasem over the band's use of un-aired vocal snippets from Kasem's radio program America's Top 40 on the Negativland single "U2".
Cases have still emerged since then involving uncleared samples. In the late 1990s, The Verve was forced to pay 100% of their royalties from their hit "Bitter Sweet Symphony" for the use of an unlicensed wav sample from an orchestral cover version of The Rolling Stones' hit "The Last Time". The Rolling Stones' catalogue is one of the most litigiously protected in the world of popular music—to some extent the case mirrored the legal difficulties encountered by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine when they quoted from the song "Ruby Tuesday" in their song "After the Watershed" some years earlier. In both cases, the issue at stake was not the use of the recording, but the use of the song itself—the section from "The Last Time" used by the Verve was not even part of the original composition, but because it derived from a cover version of it, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were still entitled to royalties and credit on the derivative work. This illustrates an important legal point: even if a sample is used legally, it may open the artist up to other problems.
Wav Samples 2000's
In the summer of 2001, Mariah Carey released her first single from Glitter entitled "Loverboy" which featured a sample of "Mary Jane" by Rick James. No less than a month afterwards, Jennifer Lopez released "I'm Real" with the same "Mary Jane" sample, Mariah quickly discarded it and replaced it with "Candy" by Cameo. The controversy here is that it is rumoured that Tommy Matolla, Carey's ex-husband, gave specific instruction to Lopez's producer to make the two songs as identical as possible. No one is sure if this is true, or why, possibly after Carey's departure from Columbia to Virgin, but only the parties involved know for sure. In 2001, Armen Boladian and his company Bridgeport Music Inc. filed over 500 copyright infringement suits against 800 artists using samples from George Clinton's catalogue. Public Enemy recorded a track entitled "Psycho of Greed" (2002) for their album Revolverlution that contained a continuous looping sample from The Beatles' track "Tomorrow Never Knows". However, the clearance fee demanded by Capitol Records and the surviving Beatles was so high that the group decided to pull the track from the album. Danger Mouse with the release of The Grey Album in 2004, which is a remix of The Beatles' 'White Album' and rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album has been embroiled in a similar situation with the record label EMI issuing cease and desist orders over uncleared Beatles samples. On March 19, 2006, a judge ordered that sales of The Notorious B.I.G.'s album Ready to Die be halted because the title track sampled a 1992 song by the Ohio Players, "Singing in the Morning", without permission.
Wav Sample Legal issues in practice
The most recent significant copyright case involving sampling held that even sampling three notes could constitute copyright infringement. Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films, 410 F.3d 792 (6th Cir. 2005). This case was roundly criticised by many in the music industry, including the RIAA.
There has been a second important US case on music sampling involving the Beastie Boys who sampled the sound recording of a flute track by James Newton in their song "Pass the Mic". The Beastie Boys properly obtained a license to use the sound recording but did not clear the use of the song (the composition on which the recording is based including any music and lyrics). In Newton v. Diamond and Others 349 F.3d 591 (9th Cir. 2003) the US Appeals Court held that the use of the looped sample of a flute did not constitute copyright infringement as the core of the song itself had not been used. It seems that the position in law now is that with use of the sound recording any use without permission will constitute an infringement; however with the composition there must be some substantial use—the 'heart' of the song itself must be at least recognizable. This extends to both the music and the lyrics; a June 2006 case involving Ludacris and Kanye West held that their use of the phrases "like that" and "straight like that" which had been used on an earlier hip-hop track by another artist was not infringing use.
The New Orleans based company, Cash Money Records and former rapper Juvenile were taken to court by local performer DJ Jubilee (signed to Take Fo' Record Label) for using chants from his song titled Back That Ass Up. Both artist had used the same chant in each song, but Juvenile won the case because of the title's name change to Back That Azz Up, which sold 2 million copies. Because of the name change, Jubilee lacked evidence that Juvenile had stolen from him, and Jubilee could not earn Juvenile's income from his song.
Today, most mainstream acts obtain prior authorization to use wav samples, a process known as "clearing" (gaining permission to use the sample and, usually, paying an up-front fee and/or a cut of the royalties to the original artist). Independent bands, lacking the funds and legal assistance to clear samples, are at a disadvantage. Recently, a movement—started mainly by Lawrence Lessig — of free culture has prompted many audio works to be licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows for legal sampling of the work provided the resulting work(s) are licensed under the same terms.
Producers on Wav Sampling
"Audio Samples have a certain reality. It doesn't just take the sound, it takes the whole way it was recorded. The ambient sounds, the little bits of reverb left off crashes that happened a couple of bars ago. There's a lot of things in the sample, just like when you take a picture—it's got a lot more levels than say, the kick-drum or the drum machine, I think. [...] Looking at a wav sampler the way it was used first—to try and simulate real instruments—you didn't have to get a session guitarist and you could just be like, 'Hey, I can have an orchestra in my track, and I can have a guitar, and it sounds real!' And I think that's the wrong way to use sampling. The right way is to get the guitar, and go, 'Right, that's a guitar. Let's make it into something that a guitar could never possibly be.' You know, take it away from the source and try to make it something else. Might as well just get a bloody guitarist if you want a guitarist. There's plenty of them." - Amon Tobin
"Producers like Organized Noize mix wav samples and live instruments really well, but for me, it almost feels like a cop-out, because I'm a collage artist. It's like, 'Damn, if only I could find this one part. Well, maybe if I just had somebody paint it, and then I'll put it out.' That almost feels like cheating. Lots of times, I have trouble finding bass lines, because it's not very often on a record that there are good open bass lines. Sometimes I wish I could just have somebody come in and do what I want him to do on a bass line. It would be so easy. But what I do just keeps things much more challenging, I guess." - DJ Shadow
"Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and de-contextualizing it." - DJ Shadow
"A lot of people still don't recognize the wav 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
"For hip hop, the main thing is to have a good trained ear, to hear the most obscure loop or sound or rhythm inside of a song. If you can hear the obscureness of it, and capture that and loop it at the right tempo, you're going to have some nice music man, you're going to have a nice hip hop track." - RZA
"Modern recorded music has evolved from focusing principally on musicianship and performance into an auditory collage where no sound is off limits. Sampling is simply another color on our palettes. Whether we're sampling old records, using advanced multi-sampling, or recording sounds ourselves, the final artistic product is paramount and should not be compromised in the face of any corporate legalities." - Sono
"Let’s say I find a loop or something that I want to use—you attach yourself to a particular aspect or emotion that you find in it—part of it is looking for like-minded sounds and part of it is just laying things out in a way that kind of helps accomplish what you want. It’s what you can hear in a particular sound." - RJD2
"It’s pretty much impossible to clear samples now [in 2005]. We had to stay away from samples as much as possible. The ones that we did use were just absolutely integral to the feeling or rhythm of the song. But, back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies and stuff, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70 percent of the song and $50,000. That’s where sampling has gone, and that’s why hip-hop sounds the way it does now." - Beck
Types of samples
Wav Sample Loops
The drums and percussion parts of many modern recordings are really a variety of short samples of beats strung together. Many libraries of such beats exist and are licensed so that the user incorporating the samples can distribute their recording without paying royalties. Such libraries can be loaded into samplers. Though percussion is a typical application of looping, many kinds of samples can be looped. A piece of music may have an ostinato which is created by sampling a phrase played on any kind of instrument. There is software which specializes in creating loops.
Samples of musical instruments
Whereas loops are usually a phrase played on a musical instrument, this type of sample is usually a single note. Music workstations and samplers use samples of musical instruments as the basis of their own sounds, and are capable of playing a sample back at any pitch. Many modern synthesizers and drum machines also use samples as the basis of their sounds.
Most such wav samples are created in professional recording studios using world-class instruments played by accomplished musicians. These are usually developed by the manufacturer of the instrument or by a subcontractor who specializes in creating such samples. There are businesses and individuals who create libraries of samples of musical instruments. Of course, a sampler allows anyone to create such samples.
Possibly the earliest equipment used to sample recorded instrument sounds are the Chamberlin, which was developed in the 1940s, and its more well-known cousin, the Mellotron, marketed in England in the 1960s. Both are tape replay keyboards, in which each key pressed triggers a prerecorded tape loop of a single note.
Musicians can reproduce the same wav samples of break beats like the "Amen" break which was composed, produced and mastered by the Winston Brothers in 1960s. Producers in the early 90's have used the whole 5.66 second sample; but music workstations like the Korg Electribe Series (EM-1, ES-1; EMX-1 and the ESX-1) have used the "Amen" kick, hi hat and snare in their sound wave libraries for free use. Companies like Korg have managed to use these wav samples for pitch, attack and decay and DSP effects to each drum part.
Most sample sets consist of multiple wav samples at different pitches. These are combined into keymaps, that associate each sample with a particular pitch or pitch range. Often, these sample maps may have different layers as well, so that different velocities can trigger a different wav sample.
Wav Samples used in musical instruments sometimes have a looped component. An instrument with indefinite sustain, such as a pipe organ, does not need to be represented by a very long sample because the sustained portion of the timbre is looped. The sampler (or other sample playback instrument) plays the attack and decay portion of the sample followed by the looped sustain portion for as long as the note is held, then plays the release portion of the wav sample. |
