Public Domain Samples
Soundtrap: Public Domain Samples
Sampling (the use of pre-recorded sounds) is one of the most prevalent techniques in modern music production. Samples are used live and in the studio by artists in most genres and sample based production is something that a producer should have in their tool box.
Learn how to hear, edit, and use samples in your own production.
The History of Sampling: Ethan Hein
Sampling is one of the most significant developments in the past fifty years of popular music. The idea of manipulating existing recordings for musical expression is at the heart of hip-hop, electronic dance music, and related pop styles. Sampling transforms any recorded music or other audio into potential raw material.
Definitions
In casual language, we tend to use the word “sampling” to include quotation and interpolation. Strictly speaking, however, sampling is the manipulation and editing of audio recordings. Before digital audio, musicians sampled recordings by cutting and splicing magnetic tape, or by manipulating turntables. These methods are difficult, however, so outside of experimental and avant-garde compositions, analog samples were unusual. One early example is the drum part in “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees (1977). Drummer Dennis Bryon had to leave the recording session early, so the band created a tape loop of two measures of his drum part from “Night Fever” and recorded the other instruments over it. While they had intended the drum loop to be a temporary track, they liked the sound of it so much that they kept it in the final song.
Sampling exploded with the advent of digital recording and playback in the 1980s. Digital samplers were originally meant to be played like traditional musical instruments. You would load a sound, like a single note or drum hit, and then play it back via a keyboard or a grid of pads. However, rap and dance music producers quickly realized that you could use samplers to capture and loop short musical phrases as well. Samples are not just used for looping full phrases, however. Sound designers manipulate samples to create new synthesized timbres, for example, by looping a few milliseconds and applying various kinds of processing.
Sampling shares some creative DNA with remixing. The difference is that a remix is usually a reworking of an entire existing song, rather than the editing and manipulation of a short loop or a single note. Typically, a remix will still be a recognizable version of the original song, while a sample is usually the basis of an entirely different song. In practice, however, there is significant overlap between long samples and radical remixes.
Sample aesthetics
When you loop a sample, you are not just placing it in a new musical context; you are also juxtaposes the end of the sample with its beginning, creating a musical relationship that was not present in the original. In his book Making Beats: the Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (2000), Joseph Schloss says:
[L]ooping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance (p. 137).
There is a widespread belief among musicians that sampling is lazy, or that it’s stealing. However, this is a misconception. It takes many hours of trial and error to identify good loops. It is even more challenging to combine multiple samples from different sources. Even if you can get their pitch and tempo to align, that does not mean that the melodies, harmonies, timbre and groove will sound good together.
Rap and dance producers do not just loop their samples. They usually do other signal processing as well: filtering, compression, reverb, delay, and so on. In the 1980s and 1990s, sampling aesthetics were shaped by technological limitations. Computer memory was expensive, so samplers saved space by using 12-bit audio, which is conspicuously lower-quality than the 16-bit audio we are used to now. The resulting quantization error gave samples of that era a crunchy timbre with a narrow dynamic range. Producers selected and mixed their samples so that their grunginess became a positive aesthetic: edgy, aggressive, and exciting. Today, DAWs come with bitcrusher plugins so you can intentionally degrade the quality of your digital audio to match that classic sound. Producers also use plugins to add vinyl crackle and surface noise to their pristine all-digital signal chain.
Some iconic samples
The Beatles - "Yellow Submarine" (1966) →
In the second verse, after the line “and the band begins to play”, producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick spliced in a recording of a brass band from EMI’s tape library. You may notice that the tempo and chord progression don’t match precisely!
The Winstons - “Amen Brother” (1969) →
According to WhoSampled.com, the drum break from this song is the most-sampled recording in history, appearing in over six thousand released tracks.
Grandmaster Flash - "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (1981) →
Flash performed this collage of pop, disco, funk and rap records live on three turntables. The speech snippets are from an audio version of The Amazing Adventures of Flash Gordon and “Life Story” by The Hellers. Getting vinyl records synced up like this is extraordinarily difficult!
Pete Rock and CL Smooth - “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” (1992) →
This hip-hop classic centers on a sample from Tom Scott’s saxophone solo from his 1967 recording of “Today” by Jefferson Airplane. There are also samples of the bassline and backing vocals. Pete Rock sampled the drums from the intro of James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” (1968). He did not use the entire drum part; instead, he sampled an individual kick, snare, and hi-hat, and then played them back in a new rhythm using the pads on his Akai MPC.
Slum Village - "Get Dis Money” (1999) →
J Dilla created this track’s surreal ambience using a sample of Herbie Hancock singing a series of chords through a vocoder from his 1978 song “Come Running To Me.” The vocoder chords start on weak beats, which makes it difficult to stay oriented in the meter. Dilla complicates the metrical strangeness further by beginning his sample slightly before the fourth beat of the first measure. He also slows the sample down, thereby lowering its pitch. Herbie’s phrase is eight bars long, but Dilla only samples seven bars of it. To confuse your ear about the meter even more, the bassline doesn’t enter until more than halfway into the first bar, and there is no kick drum on the downbeat of each measure, in violation of iron-clad hip-hop convention. To add to the track’s distinctly woozy groove, Dilla displaces his drum and bass sounds slightly early or late.
Producer Derius “The-Dream” Nash used a GarageBand loop called Vintage Funk Kit 03 for this song’s hard-hitting beat.
Dwele - “Workin’ On It” (2008) →
Songs with samples can themselves be sampled. Dwele’s “Workin’ On It” samples “Workinonit” by J Dilla (2006), which samples “King of the Beats” by Mantronix (1988), which samples “Pump That Bass” by Original Concept (1986), which samples “Close (To The Edit)” by Art of Noise (1984), which samples “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes (1983), which samples Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite: Infernal Dance of All the Subjects of Kastchei.”
Copyright considerations
If you want to sample a copyrighted recording legally, you will need to clear the sample with two different copyright holders: the owner of the underlying composition (the songwriter or their publisher) and the owner of the recording itself (typically the record label.) The copyright holders can charge any fee that they see fit. Note that you need to obtain a clearance even if you are giving away your track for free, and even if you attribute your sample sources. However, you should also be aware that in practice, sampling without permission is like jaywalking: while it is illegal in theory, the prohibition is not enforced very strictly. Copyright holders hardly ever pursue amateurs for unlicensed samples if there is no money at stake.
The situation is very different for royalty-free loops like the ones that are included with your DAW, or that you can download from services like Splice.com. You are allowed to use royalty-free samples in your own tracks without permission, and you can copyright and profit from those tracks. Rihanna did not Apple’s permission to use Vintage Funk Kit 03 in “Umbrella”, and she did not need to share any of the money.
The Kingsway Music Library is a record label that includes a sample license in the cost of each record, so when you buy one of their releases, you are automatically cleared to sample it.
Ethan Hein holds a PhD in Music Education from New York University. He is an adjunct professor of music at NYU, the New School, Montclair State University, and Western Illinois University. As a founding member of the NYU Music Experience Design Lab, Ethan has taken a leadership role in the development of online tools for music learning and expression, most notably the Groove Pizza. Together with Will Kuhn, he is the co-author of Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Creativity, published by Oxford University Press.
Copywrite + Public Domain
Although it is fun to use samples of recorded music using a tool like the Sample Chrome Extension, the resulting material cannot be distributed. One way around this is to use recordings that do not have any copy write protection. A copy write expires 100 years after the recording date. The Library of Congress has an archive of these recordings in the National Jukebox. Information about the composer, recording artists, and recording companies along with links to download MP3s of the recordings are available on this site.
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