As part of our session on sampling, we briefly touched on the history of sampling. Sampling is a huge area of technical skills, with people developing new sampling techniques and equipment everyday, but at times even an area of legal and philosophical argument. I would personally be inclined to say that out of all the techniques we’ve covered during the Designing Sound Unit, this one potentially has had the biggest impact globally. While there’s no denying that the synthesiser and all of its variations have undoubtedly changed the world forever, I’m still yet to see a fraction of the debate had over synthesisers that has been had over sampling.  

By the mid 1980s samplers were starting to enter mainstream use, as the cost of samplers went down and their technical quality improving. Hip Hop artists benefited massively from this as they were now able to loop and record the drum breaks from old soul and funk records that DJ’s used to scratch and loop by hand, Hip Hop pioneered sampling from other records and the tradition quickly spread to other forms of music like house. By the early 90s sampling was starting to become a standard practice in music production, particularly in dance music and Hip-Hop with entire genres such as Breakbeat and Jungle in the UK developing where sampling was at the very heart of the music.  

However not everyone saw this development in music, creativity and culture as a good thing, particularly lawyers and their older musician clients. As sample based music grew, so did its controversies, the main one being the issue of using a sample without permission from the original artist. Many artists claim that sampling is the equivalent to theft and argue that there is nothing creative or original about sampling, as you are using another artist’s work. There are countless examples of famous lawsuits where an artist has taken another artist to court over sampling. It would be fair to argue that a large number of these lawsuits were never about protecting work in the name of artistry or creativity, but more so to insure that nobody is able to make money off something you have made but you.  

Rather unfortunately the countless high profile lawsuits have seemed to tarnish sampling. It feels as if there is a general attitude that sampling is merely just taking someone else’s work to almost try and make your own work better. I personally feel it is a shame that sampling has achieved, or more accurately, been given this reputation given its roots. Sampling is not, or should not, be something done to cut corners creatively. It is about taking something pre existing and having the creative intuition and technical skills to approach it from a different angle and to create something new.