Background

It is almost impossible to talk about Hip-Hop without also talking about sampling. The two are as synonymous as an MC and mic. A perfect example of how connected sampling is to Hip-Hop is Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”. Released in 1979, “Rapper’s Delight” is considered to be the first Hip-Hop release. The entire song is built around breakdown section of Chic’s “Good Times”. This is what is called sampling. Sampling is simply the technique of reusing music or sound as part of a composition or recording.

Sampling goes as far back as the 60’s, where the teqnuqie of sampling recordings with tape recorders became popular with folks like James Tenet, who sampled works from Elvis Presley. Sampling goes way, way back. The technology may have changed, but the principle is the same; Reusing music or sound to create another musical composition or sound.

Often "samples" consist of one part of a song, such as a break used in another, for instance the use of the drum introduction from Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" in songs by the Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Mike Oldfield, Rob Dougan, Coldcut, Depeche Mode and Erasure, and the guitar riffs from Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" in Tone-Loc's "Funky Cold Medina". Hip-Hop developed from DJs repeating the breaks from songs as in Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rappers Delight”, and contemporary R&B, but are becoming more common in other music as well.

Legal Issues

Sampling without the proper permission is illegal, illegal, illegal. The use of anyone else’s song is an instant copyright violation! To further complicate things, since you didn't write the lyrics, nor did you record it, you are actually violating two different copyrights. This can get you in a world of trouble. Trouble that a budding artist can’t possibly deal with. These legal issues could have you scrambling for money from everyone that you know in order to pay lawyers, the artist(s) that you ripped off, court fees, record companies, etc. Whew- I think you get what I am saying.

So, the question is; How is sampling done legally and how do cats like Kanye West get away with blatant sampling of known songs? Kanye West’s “Good Life” features bits of Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T (Pretty Young Thing). And if you have heard “P.Y.T and “Good Life”, then you know that I am being nice by saying that Kanye song “features bits” from “P.Y.T”. It is basically slowed down with different drums over it. There are even parts where you can hear Michael Jackson’s vocal.

Permission is the most critical piece of this process. You will have to identify and contact the person or company who holds the copyrights for the piece of work that you are interested in sampling. The publishing company and the recording company normally holds the copyright. Here is the TIP> You must obtain permission from BOTH. One is simply not enough. you can be sued by the other if you don’t. Once you've contacted the copyright holders, you will have to negotiate a fee for using the song. The price for a sampling can be all over the board. It will depend on who you are sampling from (big name artists are more expensive than non-name bands), how long of a sample you will be using (a fraction of a second is minor, but anything more than five seconds is major). Again, these fees will vary depending on the artist.

Creative Art or Thievery?

Here are a few producers on the very heated discussion of sampling. If you still want to sample after reading what’s required legally, then let’s focus on the art of this technique. I personally appreciate sample that is used in a way that sends me on a chase looking through records and CDs in a attempt to find out where it came from originally. Now, of course the artist used the sample legally, so I could just look at the credits, right?

Producers on sampling

"When I sample something, it's because there's something ingenious about it. And if it isn't the group as a whole, it's that song. Or, even if it isn't the song as a whole, it's a genius moment, or an accident or something that makes it just utterly unique to the other trillions of hours of records that I've plowed through" —DJ Shadow, 33⅓ Volume 24: DJ Shadow's Endtroducing..., 2005

"A lot of people still don't recognize the sampler as a musical instrument. I can see why. A lot of rap hits over the years used the sampler more like a Xerox machine. If you take four whole bars that are identifiable, you're just biting that shit. But I've always been into using the sampler more like a painter's palette than a Xerox. Then again, I might use it as a Xerox if I find rare beats that nobody had in their crates yet. If I find a certain sample that's just incredible—like the one on 'Liquid Swords'—I have to zap that! That was from an old Willie Mitchell song that I was pretty sure most people didn't have. But on every album I try to make sure that I only have 20 to 25 percent [of that kind of] sampling. Everything else is going to be me putting together a synthesis of sounds. You listen to a song like "Knowledge God" by Raekwon: it took at least five to seven different records chopped up to make one two-bar phrase. That's how I usually work." —RZA, The Wu-Tang Manual, 2004

"For hip hop, the main thing is to have a good trained ear, to hear the most obscure loop or sound or rhythm inside of a song. If you can hear the obscureness of it, and capture that and loop it at the right tempo you're going to have some nice music man, you're going to have a nice hip hop track." —RZA

"Sampling's not a lazy man's way. We learn a lot from sampling, it's like school for us. When we sample a portion of a song and repeat it over and over we can better understand the matrix of the song." —Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, cited in Black Noise by Tricia Rose, Wesleyan Press 1994, p. 79

"It's a context issue, because not every sample is a huge chunk of a song. We might take a tiny little insignificant sound from a record and then slow it way down and put it deep in the mix with, like, 30 other sounds on top of it. It's not even a recognizable sample at that point. Which is a lot different from taking a huge, obvious piece from some hit song that everyone knows and saying whatever you want to on top of that loop. An example that's often brought up in court when we get sued over sampling is a Biz Markie track where he more or less used a whole Gilbert O'Sullivan song. Because it was such an obvious sample, it's the example lawyers use when trying to prove that sampling is stealing. And that's really frustrating to us as artists who sample, because sampling can be a totally different thing than that." —Beastie Boy.