How To Sample Music - Did You Know?

Have you ever heard a brand new song on the radio and realized that it sounds familiar? It's not really a cover of an old song, but perhaps it used a well-known bass line and repackaged it into a new arrangement -- much like Sean Kingston's 2007 "Beautiful Girls" borrowed from Ben E. King's 1961 classic, "Stand by Me." Another famous example is how Vanilla Ice borrowed the bass line from Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" for his hip hop song, "Ice Ice Baby." 

Or maybe it's more subtle than that. A modern hit song could have taken a 6-second drum sample from a lesser-known, 40-year-old funk recording. Indeed, this is the case for literally thousands of songs, mostly from the hip hop and rap genres, which have borrowed the drum break from 1969's "Amen Brother," a B-side song from a group called the Winstons. Another one of the most sampled pieces is the drum break from James Brown's 1970 song, "Funky Drummer."

This kind of musical borrowing is known as sampling. We should note that the term "sampling" can also refer to the process of turning music into digital data. In this article, we'll be talking about sampling as the process of incorporating a track from a previously recorded song into a brand new song.

But it's usually not just a matter of recording a drum break and simply plopping it into another song. It'll often involve taking a portion of the drum break -- even just a few slaps of the snare drum -- and looping it, or repeating the sampled section over and over to form a "loop." For instance, LL Cool J looped a section of the drums from "Funky Drummer" throughout his 1990 song, "Mama Said Knock You Out." Talented artists can sample more than one song at once. That same LL Cool J song, for instance, also happens to sample several other tracks, including a loop of background vocals from 1967's "Trip to Your Heart" by Sly and the Family Stone. Sampling can also involve creative manipulations, such as changing the speed or pitch of the original sample.

Few deny that it takes talent to sample a classic song effectively and use it in a new, creative way. And the practice has played a major role in shaping the entire genre of hip hop. But sampling has had a longer history and more complex legal implications than many people realize. Read about the process on the next page.

Music Sampling History

The roots of music sampling predate the 1980s, when the hip hop scene first emerged. Some point to the fact that jazz musicians have always borrowed each other’s riffs. But the sampling of recorded music evolved out of sound collage that started decades earlier. Early sound pioneers experimented with the very definition of music. Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, for example, started their own movement of musique concrète when they began collaborating back in the 1940s. Before tape recorders were even around, they used disc cutters to push the boundaries of music by making unique sound collages. And by “sound,” we mean more than just instruments. They also used the sounds of trains and mechanical noises. Soon, other pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen were influenced by Shaeffer. And later, even the Beatles dabbled in musique concrète with their experimental track “Revolution 9” from "The White Album."

In 1961, James Tenney took it one step further by taking an existing popular song and drastically manipulating it. His "Collage #1" took Elvis Presley's recording of "Blue Suede Shoes," clipped out portions, rearranged them and played with the tempo. A more mainstream, but less experimental and avant-garde, example of collage came from Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan in 1956. Their "Flying Saucer" was a playful mashup of rock and roll hits from the era along with a fake news report about aliens landing from outer space. This and other Goodman and Buchanan releases became popular, attracting some of the first copyright lawsuits related to sampling.

It was not until the late 1970s and early 80s that sampling really exploded with hip hop. This began when DJs started interacting with and manipulating the vinyl records they played. At first, it became popular to play and replay the breaks in funk music, simply because crowds loved to dance to these parts. Kool DJ Herc is credited with originating this practice, and others, like DJ Grandmaster Flash, helped perfect the techniques, such as changing turntable speeds and turning the records manually. He joined other rappers to form Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and the group rose to national stardom with the 1980 single, "Freedom," which sampled "Get Up and Dance" by the rock band Freedom.

Hip hop and rap have relied heavily on the practice of sampling ever since, but you'll occasionally find examples of sampling in other genres. But legal issues have largely stifled its widespread use.

Did You Know?

The first sampler, dating from the mid-1960s, was the Mellotron, which used magnetic tape. Eventually, the 80s brought more affordable machines, like the Akai S900. Now, samplers come in the form of hardware and software that allow users to loop, slice and splice recordings.

Copyright Concerns

Early on, hip hop artists could get away with sampling songs without repercussion. The artists generally didn't even seek permission from copyright owners, let alone receive permission. Soon, you could even buy CDs that contained compilations of drum and bass samples, including infamous breaks like the one from "Amen Brother," to create your own remixes. But as the genre grew in popularity and sales, copyright owners began to take notice of artists like Public Enemy, who used sampling heavily.

At first, the costs of a buyout, or the purchase of rights to sample a song, were modest. But these soon grew, and there were also additional fees called rollover rates, which added to the costs depending on how many units were sold. What complicates matters is that artists had to pay two different copyright holders for the same song: the copyright owner of the music (the composition) and the copyright owner of the actual recording. Artists can at least avoid paying the latter by making a new recording of the song. But members of Public Enemy claim that they had to change the group's sound as a result of restrictive copyright rules.

The general consensus is that these artists didn't sample older recordings to maliciously pass someone else's work off as their own, but to create something new with it. But despite harmless intentions and the value of the art they were creating, in the eyes of many, they were nevertheless profiting off of stolen work. For instance, Clyde Stubblefield, the original "Funky Drummer," still hasn't received compensation for his much-sampled drumming.

Now, copyright owners are more likely to clamp down on unauthorized sampling quickly. In 2004, Danger Mouse sent out promotional copies of his work called "The Grey Album," which was a mashup of the music from the Beatles' "The White Album" and Jay-Z's raps from "The Black Album." EMI, the label that owns the Beatles' recordings, quickly slapped Danger Mouse with a cease and desist order, preventing him from releasing the album commercially. (This didn't stop the album from becoming a huge hit over the Internet, however, as the work spread quickly over P2P networks.)

What bothers many supporters of hip hop sampling is that those suing for damages are usually not the original artists themselves, but the corporations that own the copyrights. One notorious case came in 2005, when Bridgeport, a one-man company that had acquired many copyrights, sued Jay-Z for his use of sampling. The Sixth Circuit court ruled in favor of Bridgeport and warned simply: "Get a license or do not sample" [source: Wu].

But What About Covers Or Remixes?

Glad you asked! Copyright law regarding sampling continues to be not only controversial but complicated. For instance, covering a song is perfectly fine and doesn't require permission from the copyright owner -- as long as you don't modify it (even so much as translating the lyrics into another language).

Robin Thicke accepts the award for Top R&B Song for 'Blurred Lines' during the 2014 Billboard Music Awards. After the heirs of Marvin Gaye made a claim of copyright infringement, Thicke and song co-writer Pharrell Williams sued them, but lost. MICHAEL TRAN/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES

Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" may have changed the music industry forever. If it didn't, it sure scared a lot of artists.

Family members of the late Marvin Gaye publicly accused Thicke and "Blurred Lines" co-writer Pharrell Williams of copying elements of Gaye's 1997 song "Got to Give it Up." Williams and Thicke pre-emptively sued the Gaye estate to get a court declaration that there was no copyright infringement. However, Thicke and Williams lost the case and were ordered to pay the Gaye estate millions.

This, in theory, created a huge problem for musicians. Sure, artists had already been sued over sampling songs — that is, using parts of older songs and repurposing them for new production — and not paying royalties to the original creators, but this suit was different. "Blurred Lines" didn't sample Gaye's original song. Instead it was "influenced" by the 1977 classic, using a similar cowbell progression.

Not only could musicians be sued for unattributed samples; it seemed like they could be sued for making songs that sound like songs that came before them. This demonstrated a dilemma for artists. Was there any song to make without worrying that some obscure (or well-known) artist would accuse you of plagiarizing? And did the case create a fear of using samples that's so risky that sampling music would soon become obsolete?

Not so fast, according to Dawaun Parker, a producer whose credits include songs for 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay Z. "[The Robin Thicke lawsuit] made producers more careful, but we always sort of knew people were getting sued," he says. Artists like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice faced lawsuits in the early '90s for sampling songs without clearing the original work. Parker insists that sampling is as prevalent as ever, with musicians finding ways to skirt the rules in order to use samples without having to face legal ramifications. This is especially true for artists who don't have big record labels behind them to spend the money needed to pay for samples, a cost that can get up to six or seven figures.

"People are sampling as much as they ever did," Parker confirms. "There are new plugins and programs people are using to obscure samples and make them harder to detect." Artists are also being more creative with their sampling in order to make them less distinguishable, he says. While the Kanyes of the world can use entire basslines or vocal samples for hooks, more artists are distorting and splitting up samples to make them less obvious. As a result, often the sampled musicians may not even know their songs are being used.

In another twist, a few enterprising artists are publishing original music on YouTube or SoundCloud for the sole purpose of being sampled. "The goal is to ... have artists use their songs as samples and let them get publishing or even production credits on those songs," says Parker. One such producer is Antman Wonder, who creates full albums of instrumentals that producers such as DJ Premier sample for entirely new songs. It's a win-win as producers have songs readily available for sampling and up-and-coming artists have opportunities to earn publishing credits and make names for themselves. 

As for bigger artists, they're still sampling music and paying the cost. When artists get sampled, most of the money goes to whomever owns the publishing rights to the song, and they divide the earnings with the original musicians and/or songwriters based on how individual contracts and agreements are written. It is up to the record labels using the sample to broker the deal in order to use the music, whether that means offering the original songwriters publishing rights to the new song, paying a flat fee or even giving producer or writing credits to the original creators. Some artists who have owned their publishing or have a say in what happens to their music, have denied artists access to samples, or else have met them in court.

But in the end, the trick is perfecting the ability to hide samples so those court dates never happen.

"Artists are constantly finding ways to work around having samples recognized," Parker concludes. "If technology gets to the point where you can obscure the sample so no one can recognize them, then the game is over."

Interesting..

Not even babies are safe from issues of copyright infringement. An infamous 2007 case involved Universal Music Group sending a cease and desist over a YouTube video of a toddler pushing a cart to 29 seconds of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." The court case was groundbreaking in determining the limits of fair use.