On Sampling – Part 1

There are two forms of sampling going on today besides, of course, the high art of sampling your mother’s cookies. One is where a recording artist will take a sample or section of a previously recorded song and use it as a lick or a groove and then build another song or particular feel around it. One finds that done a lot in R&B, Hip Hop and Rap. This is not the sampling that I’m going to write about.

But I wanted to make the distinction, because people often get the two confused. Actually, there seems to be a lot of confusion over the word today and I’d like to take a shot at clearing some of that up. Also it’s just a fascinating new technology and art form that I think all music lovers should understand and appreciate.

I say, with slight tongue in cheek, that it was started by the musician’s union – or perhaps better to say that it came as a result of the greed of the union. Simply put, it just became far too expensive to record music. A first time out R&B album would usually be budgeted at $150,000 and much of that would go to the musicians and the high priced studios.

Then studio prices and the cost of buying equipment came down dramatically because of the great gains in digital technology. You can now record a professional CD at home on a home computer with infinitely smaller budgets than say seven years ago.

But the prices of musicians kept going up. We all had to eat in that inflating world, but, as usual, greed took over.

As an example, to add a live section of strings to one song could cost you $25,000 for a 3 hour session. This made the act of putting strings on a song prohibitive to all but the rich.

So man began to invent. Necessity breeds invention, and in the case of recorded music, there was a great necessity.

First, the art of synthesis tried to emulate the sounds of the orchestra – the brass, the woodwinds, the strings and percussion – but was only truly successful in a few cases. Synthesis was pretty good at emulating brass, but when it came to strings, well, the sounds were pretty rinky-dink, pretty dismal.

For strings, in particular, synthesis was just not sophisticated enough to capture the rich overtones of the string section.  The two to four oscillators of a synthesizer had a hard time creating the tangle of humanly produced vibratos of a 30 piece string section. When 30 individuals play together, each has a different tone coming from a different instrument.  This tangle of humanity produces a magical sound that is most pleasing to the rest of us humans.

Violins, violas, cellos and double basses are non fretted instruments so the absolute accuracy of each player wavers in such a way as to create a note that could be A440 in pitch for some but also A439 for others and still A441 for still others. This alone creates a rich mash of sound that is actually more pleasing to the ear in its imperfection than if all the players played exactly A440 with perfectly matched vibratos. The latter would produce a too pristine and almost boringly ‘perfect’ sound.

All the string players try to play on pitch with perfectly matched vibratos, but in their failure to do so, because they are human, comes the beauty of the sound.

We like our orchestras to be human, not electronic. And so we were bored with the stiffness of the perfect electronic sound of synthesis. It just didn’t sound “real” or, in fact, imperfect or human enough. It lost its humanness in its perfection.

Again, necessity breeds invention. Sampling was born. At first it was just a baby, like most things.

The difference between the two: Basically, sampling is the act of recording the actual sound of the real instrument.  Synthesis is the act of building sound electronically from its component parts and trying to emulate the sound of an instrument by altering the frequencies of that sound and adjusting the electronic parameters of that sound to sound “like” something.

In the beginning, sampling was severely limited by the computer because of limited hard drive space, ram, and processing power. So only short, quick bursts of sound could be captured and stored. Thus the drum machine was born.

As computer technology advanced, hard drives became bigger, ram advanced from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes and processing power did the same, the art of sampling also advanced to the high art form that exists today.

The word “electronic”, which certainly was a proper descriptive in the early days of synthesis, became the protest cry of music enthusiasts everywhere as we struggled through the early days of synthesis development. All those who cried out were right to cry out “electronic!”in the beginning. Many are still crying out today, but now I cry back, “You are now simply ill-informed. Stop your crying out and start to listen again.”

For the art of sampling has come of age.

Tomorrow I’ll get into how this 21st century art form is created. Stick around. You’ll be amazed.

Feel free to read the next 2 parts of this series:
On Sampling – Part 2 and On Sampling – Part 3.

And for more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link, please visit Watchfire Music.