With the jazz boom during the early part of the 20th century, many musicians would ‘sample’ sections from other players’ pieces when performing live. However, you can quite easily argue that the concept of sampling predates the pioneering golden era of the ’80s.
When discussing sampling in music, you probably immediately think of hip-hop. This can sometimes result in a completely unrecognisable sample, leading to something that’s truly new!
While some will honour the original sample more closely, many producers will tweak and mould it even further by altering the pitch, tempo and other sonic characteristics too. Samples are then usually looped, sliced, spliced and manipulated. For example, Disclosure’s well known track ‘When a Fire Starts to Burn’ features a sample taken from a motivational speaking clip! It’s not just songs that get sampled either spoken lines from film, TV and online videos appear often too. Other popular sections to sample include vocals and basslines. Some producers will lift an entire chorus from another song others might just take a drum beat and slice it up (taking just the kick drum and snare, for example) to suit their own musical needs. The amount of sound that’s ‘sampled’ varies wildly from project to project. Thankfully, this rule was changed in 2014. There was once a time when the Grammys would not consider recognising any song that used a sample for the prestigious ‘Song of the Year’ award. Some ill-informed musicians have described it as blatant, shameless plagiarism, but this is an ignorant view point to take. Sampling in music involves taking a section of audio from another source – in this instance, an existing song – and then reworking it into the creation of a new track.
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