Oldest instance of sampling?
hemol
2,578 Posts
I'm doing a bit of research for a paper, and I'm trying to figure out the oldest instances of sampling--outside of hip-hop--that employ the same methods of re-contextualization that hip-hop sampling does; sampled drums are used as drums, sampled vocals as vocals, et cetera. I know Musique Concrete was working with samples way before hip-hop, and the Beatles did some stuff, but they didn't flip the samples--more just stuck them in.The oldest things I can think of are Holger Czukay's Movies (1979 or 1980?), Jon Hassell's Dream Theory in Malaya (1980), and Eno and Byrne's Bush of Ghosts (1980).Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
But wiki has all the answers in life...
"Early precedents
In the 1940s, some musique concr??te composers utilized portions of other recordings to create new compositions.
In the 1950s, Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman released a song, "The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 and 2)", which featured samples of various then-popular songs, all taken out of context from their original material and used as answers to a wacky reporter's question about spaceships from another planet. Goodman would later make a career out of similar "break-in" or "snippet" records, including such recordings as "Mister Jaws" and "Energy Crisis '74," and is today considered one of the fathers of pop music sampling.
In 1966, minimalist composer Steve Reich created Come Out, a piece comprised of tape loops culled from a recording of a young man arrested in the infamous Harlem riots. The manipulated use of recorded speech as a repetitive rhythmic element qualifies the piece as an early precedent of sampling and a precursor to the hip-hop genre.
1968 saw "Revolution 9" from The Beatles' The White Album, composed partly of portions of orchestral recordings.
An interesting early use sampling was on Charlie Haden's 1969 release, Liberation Music Orchestra: A few of the album's numbers (such as "Song For Che") feature fragments of Gramophone recordings of songs from the Spanish Civil War, but integrated as part of a new song.
In 1970, Miles Davis in A Tribute to Jack Johnson sampled his own earlier recording In a Silent Way from 1969. The samples were overlaid and interspersed with Sonny Sharrock's heavily distorted guitar.
An often cited pioneering influence in the art of sampling is the 1974 pop experiment Dreamies by Bill Holt. Prior to electronic samplers, Holt cut and pasted individual recording tape fragments to insert TV news snippets into his composition."
wiki freakin rules. i have it set to my homepage.
wikipedia is often misleading...and for the record professors HATE it when you use it as a research source.
Shadow didn't disocver shit
I had it too, then switched to this.
Yeah, but such is life. Even the most accurate of facts can turn out to be wrong.
But wiki can be a good tool to help you get started.
if you're writing any form of a reseach paper for a college course you should see if your school library can give you a remote link to lexisnexis/infotrack or something similar. there are good music-related databases as well. things that come up in google/wikipedia simply aren't verifiable.
The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" consists of a drum loop, which gives it a live feel. You can hear the transformation of the song through bootlegs, where it starts out as a band song and ends up consisting of nothing but pre-recorded sounds, apart from John's vocal track.
The Mellotron is considered to be one of the first modern sampling instruments, as it is a keyboard instrument which uses tape loops. When triggered, you hear the sound that's on the tape. While The Beatles have been credited for playing it in "Strawberry Fields Forever", they were not the first, nor were they the best at it. For that, you can listen to King Crimson's In The Court Of The Crimson King. However, like the sitar, the Mellotron become synonymous with the "psychedelic 60's".
Jimi Hendrix played around with it and used pre-recorded tapes in Electric Ladyland, specifically in "And The Gods Made Love" and "moon turn the tides, gently gently away", although he did the same thing on Axis: Bold As Love on "EXP", and of course the slowed down voics heard on Are You Experienced? in "Third Stone From The Sun".
Tape manipulation was one of the first ways to take a sound that was recorded and turning it into something else, which paved the way for what we know as sampling. A record was meant to archive a live performance, and a record was a quick solution to not being able to go to a concert. Magnetic tape changed all that, as one was able to perform over and over until the song was right. Or, as depicted in many movies (such as "La Bamba"), the producer and/or engineer was able to create a full song from multiple takes. Some were obvious, some not so. Take a listen to Lee Dorsey's "A Lover Was Born" as an example of a bad edit.
There were ethics in the recording studio, and rules to follow. Once the artists started having control, and having more of a role with their own music in the recording studio, then add to that the knowledge of the engineers who were willing to take risks, that changed the way music was recorded. Les Paul's multi-tracking was another dimension, but no longer did a singer have to be in the studio with a full band or orchestra, and no longer did an entire band need to be in the studio at the same time. It was possible for one person to play everything if need be. When someone played with the tape by slowing it down, speeding it up, moving it backwards, or holding the reel as it plays so it would flutter (listen to Eric Clapton's solo "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", or "Here Comes The Sun" for examples of someone messing with the tape machine during the recording), it was only a matter of time before someone was able to combine the various elements and use them.
Quick summary: the mellotron is an early example of an instrument that replayed pre-recorded sounds, useful as it was able to create lush orchestrations without a lush orchestra, a need to eliminate musicians when you were without a Beatles budget. Various synths and keyboards have been known to re-create certain sounds, but it was more about the exploration of sound to create new sounds. In other words, its original intention was not for keyboards to become a horn section, even though that's what they became, especially throughout the 80's.
Dickie Goodman "Mr. Jaws"
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=AB8F72DF086108E6&rcpt
I am guessing this is the first use of "sampling"
I'm sure to alot this is old news, but being both a mellotron and a walkman fan,
behold the Melloman!
And I take everything from Wiki with a grain of salt. It's scary to think that so much information is coming from just google and wiki. Who needs big brother?
Good call I hadn't thought of the mellotron. The point of the paper is not so much to provide an accurate history of sampling, as it is to provide some info that contextualizes a sampling demonstration as part of a historically locatable process.
In regards to the validity of reference sources: there are not many resources for sampling, as I was told by a teacher. Add to that a lot of academics who are writing about hip-hop and sampling do not have any experience with hip-hop or sampling, thus the writing winds up becoming a kind of codified subjectification as the institution of academia sets its standards for what it thinks sampling is.
The mediatization of music (effects and alterations that take place in the recording) is a whole other equally fascinating issue that I would be more than happy to discuss.
Thanks again.
I'm not familiar with the fairlight. What is it?
I was looking more for samples that are decontextualized, then re-contextialized with the same application in a different setting: taking drums form one song to use as drums for another song. The kind of stuff that went on in Musique Concrete, and most tape splicing didn't really involve using a pre-existent outside source within a song, whereas the Eno/Byrne, Hassell, and Czukay stuff (not to mention hip-hop) take many singular pieces and combine them in a structure that creates a recognizable "song". However, the more i htink about the more I'm realizing that I will have to just contextualize sampling altogether. Even before recording existed though you had classical composers recnotextualizing music in their scores (I can't remember the term).
It was the daddy of samplers and cost a fortune. It was serious dough and only real ballers could afford it, apparently they used to sell them out of a showroom ala prestige cars. You should be able to find alot of info on them but here is a quick google...
http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/machines/fairlight/index.html
http://www.hollowsun.com/vintage/fairlight/
http://www.sonicstate.com/synth/fairlight_cmiiii.cfm
Good luck with it, I'd be interested in reading it when you've finished.
Also check out Sound on Sound magazine, their archives go back a long way.
My friend was a session player in the late 70's early 80's and said they used to cost like 10k back then.He also said they were the biggest load of crap and became outdated so quickly. Im pretty sure dudes were using tape long before the fairlight.
For sure, but they were pretty much the benchmark for what we consider a sampler now. Flying in tape is different to orchestrating via samples. I personally wouldn't want to be working on one but they're still used by some for film scoring. This is a great site for info http://www.ghservices.com/gregh/fairligh/
Apparently the maxed out ones were upwards of $100k. That's just crazy...
This was going to be my answer.
Just don't forget Super Fly vs. Shaft.
That's Tatiana Ali?
hey, wow, that's funny! she started on tv early on, huh?
tomorrow never knows - the drums arent a tape loop.. the tape loops were flown in after the track was recorded. there is sampling in the guitar though as the guitar solo from tax man was copied and inserted backwards numerous times throughout the song..
there was an instrument pre mellotron that i cant remember the name of at the moment... its the source of the string sounds on the Flaming Lips "race for the prize" for example...
speaking of mellotrons the optigan is technically another sampling instrument in that it played pre recorded sounds (including drum loops) off discs at the touch of a keyboard.
as for sampling in a rhythmic sense dudes were using one shots quite early in the 70's... morodor for example would record kick drum hits and then cut them using a ruler to the exact measurement to lock them at the tempo of the song..
somebody needs to post that toto interview where they break down the lengths they went too to loop up shit for a backing track.