Today, music sampling has effectively created entire genres. Industrial and Electronic music are entirely dependent on the technology. Where would dance music be without libraries of dance production music and all related resources? But in that land before now, where and how did sampling come about, and what early sounds did it enable?.

There were many experiments going on throughout the 60s by artists like William S Bourroughs and Timothy Leary. However the techniques that informed early sampling were first heard by mainstream audiences in records by Simon and Garfunkel (‘The Sounds of Silence’) and The Beatles (‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘I am the Walrus’).Though it involves essentially the same process, the recordings here featured the artists singing over recordings of themselves to create harmonies and other effects.

But it was in hip-hop that advanced sampling to the artform it is today. Whilst the use of existing tunes and breaks was widespread in 70s proto-Hip-Hop, they weren’t always taken from a prerecorded production music, in some cases, performances actually used a live band performing a cover of a song or element to perform over. Grandmaster Flash was among the Hip-Hop producers of the early 80s bring a much saner and familiar sampling technique to music. Breaks sampled in this period survive into the sound libraries of today’s popular music genres. In turn, they were originally performed by Funk and Soul bands of the late 60s..

Electronica production music owe a lot to ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ by Brian Eno and David Byrne, though the development of Hip-Hop sampling must also be acknowledged. Instead of focusing on vocal performances by putting familiar elements in the instrumental, Eno / Byrne were using samples of Arabic singers, preachers and DJs taken from the radio to create the lead vocal. Sadly, once we’re beyond this period it seems like the history of sampling is a catalogue of lawsuits.

Filed under: Music by Markley
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