"Samples" were kind of like musical memes in the 1980s. What made for a good sample had a lot more to do with convenience and luck. The sounds that were picked for drum samples had more to do with how useful they were - the dynamic range, how isolated the drums are, how easy they were to mix.
The other famous drum sample - the "Funky Drummer" as drummed by Clyde Stubblefield for James Brown, Stubblefield didn't think the particular drum pattern he used was particularly noteworthy. In that case, James Brown's production choices were actually more key - his signature sound revolved around really crisp drums that he insisted needed to be clear on AM Radio and Jukeboxes. Which is what made it so useful for sampling.
I saw a video about popular/influential/most-used samples the other week[0] and it mentioned James Brown becoming aware of sampling (I guess mid-late 90s?) and specifically making sure that anything he thought might be sample-able was "clean" from that point on.
[0] GFL finding anything in YouTube history / search these days hence no link. Wasn't from Synthet, I don't think.
You said it wasn't from Synthet, but they did release a video ~2 weeks ago which talked about exactly that. Super interesting, whether it's the correct video or not!
> You said it wasn't from Synthet, but they did release a video ~2 weeks ago which talked about exactly that.
Good grief, I thought it might be that video but somehow completely blanked on it when I double-checked and decided it wasn't. Thanks for actually checking usefully!
(Synthet videos are almost always worth a watch even if you can't remember them a couple of weeks later. Old age, innit.)
Maybe, but the amen break has a very specific je ne sais quoi that makes it way more useful and pleasant as a sample than almost any other sample. There's just so many situations in the kind of music I make where the amen is like the only loop that fits. Funky drummer might come in second.
It could just be its cultural weight has me hypnotized. But maybe its just that good
I’ve produced music through much of 2010-2020, I wasn’t there in the 1980-2010s but it wasn’t uncommon see discussion online about different samples or things like this. Never really seen any mention something like this unquantified “je ne sais quoi” or at least don’t really recall
My take is, it was the first of its kind to widely circulate exhibiting desirable quantities for sampling, a combination of good enough and path dependency. After a certain level of saturation/entrenchment it carried an aesthetic compared to readily available samples (maybe this is what you meant).
Whenever I couldn’t find a breakbeat sample (or wanted some starting point at least) I’d default to it. When I did music production it was very easy to get your hands on a loop but obviously that’s much later.
I mean, look at any house or hip-hop track, sampling's like the most fundamental part of both genres.
The track you've mentioned is the prime example of the blend of those two genres. Before the term Eurodance caught on, this track would be referred to as hip-house (as in hip-hop + house). Chicago and the broader NY area did it first, but it was a Belgian track that first topped the US charts (Technotronic's Pump Up The Jam).
That's why one of the super simple improvements I'd make to music copyright law, if I had to choose one thing rather than a massive overhaul, is for sampling to also be subject to the compulsory mechanical royalty system.
So any artist could sample something, do some paperwork, and send of a fraction of royalties. Rather than the current system where you need explicit permission from the recording artist and have no recourse if they say no.
So many music genres exist because of sampling, and the shit legal precedents set in recent decades ruined an amazing thing.
Your proposal makes complete sense and would allow artists the creative freedom to use samples in unusual and novel ways that the original artist might never have envisioned – or agreed to.
I’m a big fan of the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) and when the artist says “no”, I’m always reminded of this funny, surreal story about the KLF physically destroying their music: http://klf.de/home/the-abba-incident/
Completely agree with you, but good music always finds its way around copyright, you just can't find it on streaming services.
For example, if the sample's small enough to not be recognisable by algorithms, they often end up on Soundcloud with a free download via Hypeddit. Some even get away with charging money for their track with non-cleared samples via Bandcamp. Because those types of bedroom producers are almost always clueless about copyright, they often cite fair use in the description and choose a Creative Commons licence, which is not how anything works. Even some B-list celebrities that damn well know what they're doing still decide to do that when they fail to clear a sample. Soundcloud would be completely irrelevant if they did a good-enough job at enforcing copyright, so they do the bare minimum labels require of them to keep running, but that definitely kills their odds of ever competing with the likes of Spotify.
Then there's a whole "gray area" of online record pools where the audio preview and download links are hidden behind a $25/month or so paywall, so record labels can't scan it directly to even know about the infringement. Usually just listing the names of available tracks in HTML is enough to get them de-indexed from Google, but they rely on word-of-mouth anyway.
And, of course, even if all of that were to stop, you can never prevent a bunch of DJs and producers DMing each other tracks, hottest of which always end up getting shared too widely at some point and uploaded to Soulseek or something.
Meanwhile, streaming services are being flooded by unethically-trained, AI-generated music, which is actually incredibly easy to detect if streaming services actually gave enough of a fuck to do so. There is one that gives a fuck rather publicly (Deezer) and according to them, it's ~34% of everything uploaded as of a few months ago, may have passed 40% as of now.
The other famous drum sample - the "Funky Drummer" as drummed by Clyde Stubblefield for James Brown, Stubblefield didn't think the particular drum pattern he used was particularly noteworthy. In that case, James Brown's production choices were actually more key - his signature sound revolved around really crisp drums that he insisted needed to be clear on AM Radio and Jukeboxes. Which is what made it so useful for sampling.