With the vast quantity of recorded music, now in an ever more accelerated pace of expansion with the music sharing sites such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and technology (logic, ableton, pro tools) in place to quickly download, move, and tamper with audio files, the question arises, is there any point to creating new sounds or composing new pieces, of utilizing analog sources to create familiar sounds and songs of all too familiar character? The catalog of recorded material is already so great that it would take thousands of lifetimes to listen to it in its entirety, but perhaps even more exciting or intimidating are the countless ways in which to alter and create entirely new purely from this great catalog.
While the radical idea of all modern music being entirely created from past records hasn’t taken hold, sampling in fact entered into the mainstream years ago and has remained there today. For example the music of artists like Kendrick Lamar includes samples, and his new album is on the billboard top 200. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the music on the billboard 200 includes samples, as samples are ingrained into the way a lot of pop music (primarily black music) is produced. While the process and utilization of sampling has changed, its popularity has remained constant in changing populations for roughly 40 years.
This idea to create music purely or partially from previously recorded material began in the late 1940s with a man named Pierre Schaeffer. He spliced together and looped different tapes together to create music. Schaeffer’s believed that classical music began as an abstraction that was later produced as audible music. He strove to start with “concrete” sounds and late abstract them into music. This began the term “musique concrete”.
This process of tape loop sampling was taken up by a wide range of artists from minimalists like Terry Riley to people like John Cage to jamaican dub producers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. All of whom utilized tape recordings in their own unique and preconditioned musical language.
In the 1960s a new process of sampling emerged, this was digital sampling. The most notable early samplers were the Mellotron, the Fairlight CMI, and later the Akai MPCs. The digital samplers took pre recorded sounds into an interface which could be played with ease; the musician could play and sample he or she want to with the push of a button. The earliest innovators with this new technology were bands like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Big Audio Dynamite.https://www.dawsons.co.uk/blog/the-sampler-a-history-in-5-landmarks
Sampling however became most widespread and popular not in synth based pop music but in hip hop. In fact, sampling has been engrained in hip hop from the beginning, hip hop has a history not of analog or digital instruments, but of utilizing turntables and samplers to create music from pre-recorded sounds. The beats in popular hip hop from the 70s to around the mid 200s centered around break beatsl; beats taken from isolated drum sections of funk songs and looped. For example, the isolated drum beat from the James Brown song “Funky Drummer” has been sampled countless times in both hip hop and jamaican drum and bass and jungle music.
Not only were break beats sampled though, hip hop producers looking for melody and harmony as well as good bass lines turned to whatever they had in their record collection in order to create good music derived from a patchwork of previously recorded material.
Today sampling is more fluid and there are mountains sampling software. Altering the sample is also very easy- there is software for it. At this point one finds that as a composer it’s equally acceptable to be fluent in the language of theory as it is to be fluent in the language of the sample.
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/albumsbands-who-use-lots-of-samples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)