This PBS Independent Lens documentary on sampling culture is a good one, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Their resources and links page includes my Biz Markie blog post. Thanks Beautiful Decay for posting the videos.
Posts Tagged ‘james brown’
Copyright Criminals
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Resequencing the Funky Drummer’s DNA
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample. It’s much easier to chop samples with computers than with hardware samplers and turntables.
To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling and resequencing the slices, changing the key, adding effects and doing further transformation.
Here’s the Funky Drummer loop as seen in Recycle. Click through to see it bigger.
Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively.
Bitter Sweet Symphony
Monday, November 23rd, 2009One of the biggest copyright failures of copyright law ever is the The Verve song “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”
The distinctive string sample comes from an orchestral arrangement of “The Last Time” by The Rolling Stones.
Doesn’t sound much like the Verve, does it? The two bands do share a taste in the I – flat VII – IV chord progression. But here’s the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s version, the sample will jump right out at you twenty-five seconds in.
Clap your hands, stomp your feet
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009The most-sampled album in history is probably James Brown’s compilation In The Jungle Groove. It includes the original “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer” but there are some contenders.
The compilation is named for a breakdown section that appears in “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” James Brown quiets the band down to handclaps, footstomps and congas played by Johnny Griggs. (more…)
Take it to the bridge!
Thursday, May 28th, 2009Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most popular music is. The loop is the basic compositional unit of nearly every song you could dance to.
Loops are easy to remember, but it’s tedious to write the same passage over and over. You can save yourself a lot of laborious writing by using repeat markers. They’re like the GOTO instruction in BASIC. Here are the first four bars of “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock.
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The natural history of the Funky Drummer break
Monday, May 25th, 2009The most-sampled recording in history is probably “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs. Like many James Brown songs of the time, “The Funky Drummer” doesn’t have verses or choruses as in a normal pop song. It’s an open-ended one-chord jazz-funk groove, with extended solos by James Brown on organ and Maceo Parker on tenor sax. Four and a half minutes into the recording, James Brown tells the band: “Fellas, one more time I want to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got going here.” He tells drummer Clyde Stubblefield, “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got… Don’t turn it loose, ’cause it’s a mother.” That last word will turn out to be prophetic.
Here’s a loop of Clyde Stubblefield’s drum break:
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