Sampling (music)

• 1. Introduction

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  Sampling is the practice of lifting a portion of one sound recording and weaving it into another. It can be a fraction of a second or several bars of music. It can carry rhythm, melody, speech, or pure noise. The result might be layered, stretched, slowed down, or looped until it becomes something entirely new. What began as an experimental idea in the 1940s now sits at the center of hip-hop, electronic music, and pop. The questions worth asking are: where did this idea come from, who built the tools that made it ubiquitous, and why has it sparked some of the bitterest legal battles in the history of recorded music? The answer to the last question lies partly in a single 1991 lawsuit whose effects, one writer observed in 2018, were comparable to banning a musical instrument.

• 2. Before the Machine

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  Pierre Schaeffer, a French composer, laid the groundwork for sampling in the 1940s. He recorded everyday sounds to tape, then spliced and manipulated those recordings to create what he called musique concrete. His source material ranged from locomotive engines to kitchen utensils to the sounds of the human body. He developed the Phonogene, a device that played tape loops at twelve different pitches triggered by a keyboard. That single invention contains the seed of every sampler that followed.

  Schaeffer was not alone for long. Pierre Henry, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Edgar Varese, and Iannis Xenakis all experimented with the form. In Britain, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop brought musique concrete to a mass audience by using its techniques to score television programs, including Doctor Who in the early 1960s.

  Meanwhile, in Jamaica, dub reggae producers such as King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry were using recordings of reggae rhythms to create riddim tracks for deejays to perform over. Jamaican immigrants carried those techniques to American hip-hop in the 1970s. The German experimental musician Holger Czukay of the band Can was splicing tape recordings into his own compositions before digital sampling existed. By the time the first digital sampler appeared, the cultural machinery was already running.

• 3. Building the Tool

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  The Guardian described the Chamberlin as the first sampler, designed by the American engineer Harry Chamberlin in the 1940s. It used a keyboard to trigger a series of tape decks, each holding eight seconds of sound. Similar technology reached a wider audience through the Mellotron in the 1960s. Then, in 1969, the English engineer Peter Zinovieff built the EMS Musys, the first digital sampler.

  The word "sample" itself came from two Australians. Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel coined the term to describe a feature of their Fairlight CMI synthesizer, launched in 1979. While developing the Fairlight, Vogel recorded roughly a second of piano performance from a radio broadcast and realized he could imitate a piano by playing it back at different pitches. The result sounded more convincingly like a piano than anything a synthesizer could generate at the time. The Fairlight was limited compared to what came later; it could record only a few seconds of sound and offered control over pitch and envelope. Nevertheless, the sampling function became its most popular feature.

  Competition followed. The E-mu Emulator and the Akai S950 emerged as early rivals. Drum machines such as the Oberheim DMX and the Linn LM-1 incorporated samples of real drum kits rather than generating synthetic percussion. In 1988, Akai released the first MPC sampler, which let users assign samples to rubber pads and trigger them independently. Korg, Roland, and Casio all released competing machines. The Akai MPC's designer, Roger Linn, had anticipated that users would sample short sounds such as individual notes or drum hits. Users had different ideas. As Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever, put it, musicians "didn't just want the sound of John Bonham's kick drum, they wanted to loop and repeat the whole of 'When the Levee Breaks'." Linn described the unexpected creative leap as "a very pleasant surprise."

• 4. Hip-Hop's Foundation

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  Sampling is one of the foundations of hip-hop, and the relationship began before affordable technology made it easy. Before samplers, DJs used turntables to isolate and loop drum breaks from records while MCs rapped over them. Compilation albums such as Ultimate Breaks and Beats gathered tracks with drum breaks and solos intended specifically for sampling by DJs and producers.

  In 1986, the tracks "South Bronx", "Eric B. is President", and "It's a Demo" all sampled James Brown's funk and soul recordings, particularly a drum break from his 1970 track "Funky Drummer". That cluster of releases helped push sampling from a DJ technique into a compositional method. The Guardian journalist David McNamee described early hip-hop's relationship to the funk and soul canon by writing that "two record decks and your dad's old funk collection was once the working-class black answer to punk."

  The E-mu SP-1200, released in 1987, became a staple of East Coast producers during the golden age of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It had a ten-second sample length and was prized for its distinctive "gritty" sound. The Akai MPC60 followed, and it was on that machine that DJ Shadow assembled Endtroducing, released in 1996. Guinness World Records cites Endtroducing as the first album created entirely from samples. Its creation demonstrated how far the technique had traveled from Schaeffer's tape loops in a Paris studio.

• 5. The Most Sampled Sounds

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  A seven-second drum break recorded in 1969 for the track "Amen, Brother" became one of the most replicated sounds in recorded music. Known as the Amen break, it spread from American hip-hop into British jungle production in the early 1990s. It has since appeared in thousands of recordings, including songs by rock bands such as Oasis and the theme music for the television series Futurama.

  In 2014, the Smithsonian cited "Change the Beat" (1982) by Fab Five Freddy as the most sampled track in music history. According to WhoSampled, a user-edited catalog of samples, James Brown appears in more than 3,000 tracks, more than any other artist. In 2011, The Independent named Loleatta Holloway as the most sampled female singer, citing her vocals on house and dance records including "Ride on Time" by Black Box in 1989.

  The orchestra hit sound, widely used across hip-hop, originated on the Fairlight CMI as a sample taken from Igor Stravinsky's 1910 orchestral work Firebird Suite. The drum intro from Led Zeppelin's 1971 song "When the Levee Breaks", played by John Bonham, was sampled by artists including the Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and Massive Attack. The Think break came from the 1972 Lyn Collins song "Think (About It)", a track written by James Brown. These sounds migrated across genres, decades, and continents, often without the knowledge of the people who originally performed them.

• 6. The Legal Reckoning

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  In 1989, the Turtles sued the hip-hop group De La Soul for using an unlicensed sample on their album 3 Feet High and Rising. The Turtles singer Mark Volman told the Los Angeles Times: "Sampling is just a longer term for theft. Anybody who can honestly say sampling is some sort of creativity has never done anything creative." The case settled out of court and established a precedent that began to reshape the industry.

  Two years later, in 1991, the songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan sued the rapper Biz Markie after Markie sampled O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" on his album I Need a Haircut. In Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc, the court ruled that sampling without permission infringed copyright. Rather than seek royalties, O'Sullivan forced Markie's label, Warner Bros., to recall the album and remove the offending song. The journalist Dan Charnas argued that conventional copyright law was simply not equipped to handle the cultural practice of sampling. The writer Nelson George, writing in 2005, called it the "most damaging example of anti-hip-hop vindictiveness".

  The legal landscape became more complicated as later rulings pulled in different directions. In the 2005 case Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that a two-second sample from a Funkadelic song used by N.W.A. in their 1990 track "100 Miles and Runnin'" required a license. The ruling's language was blunt: "Get a license or do not sample." But in 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in VMG Salsoul v Ciccone that Madonna did not need a license for a short horn sample in her 1990 song "Vogue", finding that the de minimis standard should apply to sampling as it does to other copyright cases. Judge Susan Graber wrote that she saw no reason for sampling to be treated as a legal exception. The American musician Richard Lewis Spencer, who owned the copyright for the Amen break, never received royalties because the statute of limitations had passed by the time he learned of its widespread use.

• 7. Cost, Culture, and Access

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  After the 1991 Grand Upright ruling, the practice of clearance became unavoidable for commercial releases. Clearance is the process of obtaining legal permission from copyright holders to use a sample. For well-known recordings, the cost can be prohibitive. The Washington Post described the modern use of recognizable samples on major releases as a form of conspicuous consumption, comparable to displaying expensive cars or jewelry.

  The Beastie Boys' 1989 album Paul's Boutique, built almost entirely from samples, was cleared "easily and affordably" at the time. That same clearance process would be significantly more expensive today. For producers without label backing, the barrier is steeper still. As the publication Fact put it, "For a bedroom producer, clearing a sample can be nearly impossible, both financially and in terms of administration."

  DJ Shadow offered a candid assessment of the tensions that licensing creates. He described scenarios in which two rights holders each demanded more than half of a composition's value, a mathematical impossibility. He advocated instead for clearing samples on a musicological basis, proportional to how much of the composition the sample actually comprises. Some labels have tried to simplify the process by pre-clearing their catalogs. The Los Angeles label Now-Again Records cleared songs for Kanye West and Pusha T in a matter of hours. In 2020, the US Library of Congress took a different approach entirely, launching an open-source web application that allows users to sample its library of copyright-free audio directly.