When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)(paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu) |
When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)(paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu) |
Here are two other examples I like:
* Daft Punk's 'One More Time', represented visually: https://twitter.com/nehhlmao/status/1363925150958317568
* Pusha T's 'Numbers on the Boards' sampling and reimagining a single measure from an obscure jazz song: https://www.whosampled.com/sample/230451/Pusha-T-Numbers-on-...
> Jonny Greenwood came across it in a used record shop when the band was on tour in the United States recently I think it sold about 7000 copies, which is a lot for a classical recording.
I think it’s more experimentation with musical ideas and happy accidents. Had Johnny not gone into that shop maybe idioteque would sound a lot different today.
Source: I used to write a few dance tracks in a past life
Listening to records, I will instantly know when I hear a ‘sample’. I’ll put the needle back and play it a few times - importantly (hence turntables) - play with the speed and pitch in a lossless way - and eventually record, trim, loop it, and load it into my AKAI sampler or my DAW.
YMMV
[0]https://open.spotify.com/track/7cBQ1zyG6e9Tx4jqNc3vvY?si=hsw...
Very rarely do artists just know that something will work out, but the more they do it the better their skills get at recognizing samples that will work or can be turned into interpolations that work.
Not everyone gets to be DJ Shadow (king of sampling).
It's awesome.
I’m usually the same way. I will say though, I once had what felt to me like a stroke of genius when I realized that a sample from the theme from American Beauty fit perfectly in my cover of NIN’s The Day The World Went Away.
I’d share, but I hate my vocals and I don’t have the original source tracks to make an instrumental mix. But if you listen to the Quiet remix you might be able imagine how it fits.
What an awesome piece of music history.
Back on-topic, being able to pick out a few seconds from a 18-minute, primitive electronic music recording and transform it into something much “catchier” is an impressive musical talent.
It's funny because the isolated sound fades in. It doesn't sound like the pulsating beats that go along with it .
> Here is my very first speech piece, never recorded, done in 1976. The entire piece is made from a male and female speaker uttering the phrase "This music crept by me upon the waters". It's about 22 minutes long.
I have a musical background but I would expect anyone who is at all familiar with the song to pick it out instantly.
Imagine if you were listening to someone speak Russian for 5 minutes, and they uttered a familiar phrase in English somewhere in there.
The English, because it's understandable/familiar to you, would pop out.
If they highly modified the sample (i.e. Daft Punk) it would be hard to pick out.
But this one is pretty straight forward.
As a Radiohead listener, I recognised the sample as soon as I heard it. It was quite a pleasurable experience to hear it in a very different context and to learn about a chapter of electronic music history that I had not previously been aware of.
As a music consumer (not a musician) and without the gift of hindsight, I probably wouldn’t listen to a piece of music – particularly an 18 minute track – attentively enough to notice and think to myself that there’s something potentially special about those few seconds compared to the rest of the 18 minutes of the track. That’s the gift that I admire sampling artists for: the ability to recognise the potential of a seemingly unremarkable snippet of music and transform it into something special.
If they had picked a different sample, they might have made a great song, that would sound completely differently, making us also wonder how they 'picked out that sample'.
All of that said, yes, it was a keen choice, Greenwood is definitely the real deal.
I think, actually, that both of you are right. Everyone hears music differently, and some people may be better at putting together happy accidents, while others are better at hearing things beforehand. Ya know, just like the two of you. :)
These days it's pretty trivial to do the digital equivalent of "jamming with your band mates" when it comes to sampling but in the 90s you had to develop an ear for it because the process of capturing a sample through to cuing it in your tracker was longer and a lot more painful than what we take for granted now. And you often had to create all of your own samples, there weren't web sites you could download these things from like there are today. Even percussion needed to be sampled if you weren't lucky enough to own a drum machine.
One of the reasons I got into circuit bending in the latter end of my exploration in music was because I craved that instantaneousness with electronic music that I had when jamming with my guitar.
As for Kanye, I don't pretend to be an authority on his music but the few tracks of his I have heard haven't exactly been imaginative when it comes to sampling. He has taken tracks that were already good, taken the main riff from them and looped that. So I'd argue the creativity in his music is the lyrical content rather than his use of samples. Whereas you compare him to Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim or Prodigy and you can see that lyrical content is less important but the sampling is really creative, to the extent that the samples they've used are often unrecognisable from their original source.
edit: There's a YouTube video of Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) talking about sampling using his Atari ST and how he'd hunt records for good sounding samples.