The only people who call it cheap and easy are the people who don't understand it. Like Navie said, for every art form there's the cheap and easy version, and there's also the profound and high skill version. A critic on the outside looking in would most likely be ignorant to the higher levels of the art form
Wasn't hip-hop a genre that started out as the poor mans music? As in, they didn't have expensive equipment, a studio or instruments? Still, they managed to express themselves and used sampling as a bypass. These days, that isn't the case anymore, and you can make quality music for basically free. So, calling the entire genre lazy would be incredibly unjustified. Still, the argument doesn't really hold up these days when it comes to justifying modern artists.
False. Hip Hop already existed before sampling technology. That would also be like saying pop or rock wouldn't exist without sampling since it also utilizes it.
I think something else you havent mentioned is recontextualizing and genre shifting. When i hear DJ Premier's "NY state of mind part 2" it sounds so dark, gritty, and undeniably "new york" But when you listen to the part from the song that was sampled, it sounds like a happy and upbeat little fairy tale song. Its fascinating!
Yeah. You can also say that some samples can be made easily, but when the song has several samples from absolutely different songs it can be difficult to make it sound good altogether. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing.... or the already mentioned NY state of mind as an example, there's just pieces, that would never be together, but producers can merge different eras and genres. Burial's Archangel for instance, R'n'B singer, ambient music from Japanese game and some British dub step drums. And that's beautiful
Putting different samples together and making it sound like a live recording is what I enjoy most about sampling. It's like creating a new life from segments that weren't made to fit together. It definitely isn't as easy as just looping a single sample and calling it a day 😂
As someone who plays 5 instruments I think I can honestly say that sampling is a very creative way to make new music. Yes….it can be lazy in the WRONG hands but enough creative legends who took it to the next level.
Yeah, the same can be with "instrumental" music, the bass or drums also can be lazy. It's not about the way how to make music, It's about the ones who make it
Sampling also re-birth a lot of forgotten artist careers at the same time introduced new fans . Our parents had some of these artists in their music collection or we learned about them through the sample clearance. It's a fun practice and can be very creative.
People who don't think sampling is an artform probably never really sampled. You can literally take chops from multiple genres of music and make them all fit like they're all supposed to be together.
I think it comes from two different schools. One is the casual listener who recognizes the original sample and think someone just ran it into a machine to remove the vocals. 2. The others are more elitist mindsets whose bread and butter is live instrumentation who looks down on sampling.
@prof3ssor178 It was pretty common in the early days of sampling. Bomb Squad sound was using a bunch of samples to where it became a more unique thing. Early Dre was similar to Bomb Squad productions. That style became more difficult to do because of legal issues though so it kind of went out around the early 90s.
While I am fully sample-based producer with 0 use of any form of midi whatsoever one thing I hate about sampling is how non-challenging it feels sometimes. I avoid both looping and chopping extensively multiple different samples for the very sake of it, that is, to avoid looping. So usually I trash vast majority of my beats ideas and only release those where I feel I flipped things the way where I feel both challenged/accomplished and where I haven't lost essence of the sample that I initially liked in the first place. Then there are cases I may even loop something plain and simple but I may find an idea of looping it classy because no one else would have thought it could have worked, or no one else would dig things like that for sampling. In those cases I look at sampling more as in terms of how deep one is going to dig - which to me sometimes defines the art of sampling even more than very layering, chopping and processing itself. Respect to you, Navie D, what you are committing to beatmaking world is an unironic gift.
Why do you limit yourself?? Get some midi controllers and go nuts. Even if you only want to use samples you will be way more free creatively and have more fun.
without the original artist we couldn’t make our art, so i pay my respect and homage to them too (depending on what you sample). their compositions helps us create ours
I think an important thing that people seem to forget is how sampling made music production accessible to so many especially those at the genesis of hip hop. With no traditional music training these “kids” were able to develop a sound and a movement with just their parents vinyls and a beat machine. Not everyone has the musical chops (pun intended) as a Quincy Jones or access to world class orchestras and studios like Abbey Road, yet with so many constraints somehow sampling opened up a wide door of possibilities.
How I view sampling is like making collage art, you take different pieces from different mediums like magazines, brochures etc. and curating it to make a bigger picture, people might find it lazy. Yes you can compile the same exact pictures but no one can recreate the same 1 of 1 collage piece in terms of the angles it is being sticked, the crinkles of certain paper. At the end of the day, it’s all about being tasteful. Ps. sampling is also like a puzzle to me, breaking down sections of a song i like or am interested in, finding its original song which I might have never find before letting me enjoy the best of all music making it diverse in my music catalog
@@RetardsWithSwag That's a good analogy. Also, people reuse chord progressions, drum patterns, themes, etc. all the time in music. With mass exposure today, it's near impossible for any idea to be truly original. Music is no different. Plus, I'ma add if someone doesn't like sampling, stay in their lane of other musics.
Using a sample can also bring it's context into the new song. I think here it can get very artistic... Kanye West's Yeezus album comes to my mind. Using samples to get into deeper layers of a story 😎👍🏼
@@NavieD I can understand that. I like the samples on Yeezus because they often add depth to the songs... more than only audio. Kanye is very good at telling stories with samples. I respect him a lot for that 😎
Navie, As Mio sings in the HTT song from K-On!, Don’t Say Lazy. Your first point. Taking someone’s recording, and using it straight is lazy. Using the newer tools, which you can now buy for an iPad for around $10 is cheap, and only slightly less lazy. But it’s not the lazy that’s the issue. It’s the theft of someone’s property. If I go take your car, reduce it to parts, and then reassemble those parts into a different car that’s going to be a lot of work-not lazy, but it’s still your car, because it’s your car’s parts. If they want to chop something up, make the track for which they want to chop, then chop that up, for that’s then their music, redefined by their skill. It’s not the skill of the chopping that’s the problem, it’s the theft of the item that’s chopped up. Be it a track, or a car, it’s still theft. Then you conflate the use of recording sounds as the same thing as the theft of someones track. One is an example of sound design. Making a recording of your own, and then employing it as you see fit. This is not the same as taking someone else’s recording, and then employing it as you see fit. The difference being one is your recording, and the other is their recording that you liberated. So when you make a video about being lazy, don’t take the easy way out, and pretend that the effort involved in manipulating audio is the issue when it’s actually the theft of the source material that’s the issue. This video is an example of being intellectually lazy. Don't Say Lazy. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZXbKTsJOgIc.html
I think there are levels. Chopping a loop and putting drums behind it is one thing. Chopping parts from all over a song or multiple songs and creating a whole different rhythm with those sounds is completely different and very difficult.
I've been playing guitar and writing songs for over 25 years and recently started producing and using chopped samples. A whole new universe of possibilities now opens up to me and I love it. There are musical ideas that I could never explore without using samples, period.
I understand coming from the metal/punk scene myself, everything has to be your own riffs and we could never imagine someone taking your art and making it theirs. After years of getting into hip hop, I now understand the art of sampling and how it becomes an original
A crucial part of the question is how sampling evolved (in Hip Hop) It came from DJing. Grandmaster Flash (and others) began isolating and looping breaks for MCs. Kurtis Blow the first to digital sample a loop with a rap record, he used a Fairlight. Then Marly Marl started chopping samples with his digital delay units triggered with midi. It’s an extension of DJing (playing records)
I was thinking about this last week and came up with the fact that for something so hard to do, making it sound right is a mix of, magic, good energy and good luck. It took me 17 to feel like a C grade student. Although sounds are processed and mastered before you use them, doesn't mean you'll make magic. Sampling is like going to a junk yard full of thrown away cars we all once used, and taking parts from selected cars to create a dream car. It can take forever or it can happen overnight. The magic is seeing it come out sounding better than anything you've ever heard prior. The gift is the imperfections becoming Perfect 🌟. The pay of is when people love your work and note you for your contribution to the art 🎨 form. The humility you gain from beats that go wrong is the education you gain for future greatness. Its a love love situation. I am a musician first, but Sampling is my other other instrument. Respect to the Investors, Invention and creators of the art form and technology that gave musicians this special gift. ❤
Awesome video! Fun fact: the drop in System Blower samples Serena William's grunt during a tennis match lol. Also, would love to see you break down some of the production ideas of the new Armand Hammer album (or maybe even some previous albums as well!)
Totally agree, some producer can slice and modify a sample like no one else. Sampling is a way to express yourself and can make a huge difference in your beats. Good work Nave D keep it up!
He's cringe af.. Dude literally has about 20 video ideas and just recycles them in different ways with different titles.. I actually cringe a bit when one of his vids pops up in my feed.
All contextual. Sampling can be way more difficult and creative than just playing an instrument imo. It can also be super cheap and easy. That Rick James MC hammer example is great because not only is it just the copy paste method but it was taken from a massive hit that everybody knew from just a few years prior. No "digging" required
I would love to see a video on how the hell you find some of these obscure samples like the sample of a train. Crazy, bruh! I'm a producer (18 years in) and your vids hit for me, bruv! much love
You're goated for supporting this opinion.I could say the same thing about people who don't make their own drum one shots samples. To be fair. I see samples as one of the most powerful audio resources. More powerful than any VST. They're raw materials to craft from. A lot of people think sampling is just chopping and timewarping but that's the surface level. Good video! Also a few people who take sampling to the next extreme: CamelCaseProject, Brakence, Clarence Clarity, etc
I use to hate sampling because I always wanted to make original music and then I tried to learn piano and that shit was crazy and I ended up being way better at sampling than actually using and instrument, although learning some fundamentals on music theory can NEVER go wrong when creating music even with sampling
sounds like you're just admitting sampling is easy(ier than performing actual instruments) lol. transformative sampling is cool. it's basically musical collage-work, compared to painting/drawing. But pitching a ripped piece down a semitone ptting an LPF on it and layering a couple instruments and vocals is pretty boring and uninspired imo. not very transformative, which is the point. but for me, nothing beats making the core of a thing yourself piece by piece.
@@JN-so6wt yea it is much easier that was my point numb nuts and not everyone has daddy as there music teacher so I’m learning this shit straight out the mud but overall I would love to know music theory so I can play “when I was your man” in front of some bad bitches and get some dome
@@kchikweteI was just gonna ask that. Cause one that I use is okay; but it is online & still makes it sound super low quality but I do work with it sometimes
Thank you for this. I am still in the process of learning more and right now i only have bandlab on my phone but all of your videos have been really helpful
I gotta be honest as a kid creating original music was top of the top for me. I also downed folks who sampled. I looked up to Rza,Timbaland,ect and at the time I didnt know they sampled certain things. It pissed me off to know they took from these records but as I got older I began to sample and embrace it. Its nothing like coming up with your own but seems like using samples creates the greatest music.
Why would you get pissed off at the idea of sampling? Music has always taken from other music. To take snippets from a song and turn them into entirely different moods, or feels, or emotions is nothing short of incredible.
As I said I was a kid at the time. My older brother made beats also and it was all original stuff. I also wanted to be the one who created my own sound amd never take from anyone. In the 90s my fav artist used to say dont bite or copy my shit. That saying stuck with me for a long time. So im thinking most the stuff im hearing is original. I found out late that all the stuff i was hearing was sampled so im like damn well maybe I need to start sampling because all the greatest music is sampled.
@@StevieMcC if I had to pick 1 artist it was Method Man but morely loved the Wutang as a whole. They used to talk about people biting. That stuck with me a long time and then when Timbaland came out he was my fav producer and he also said the same about producers biting.
@@StevieMcCbecause most ppl don’t sample properly. Yes sampling is good if u can make it sound unrecognizable or much better. However most new producers just take a sample and mix it a bit and call it fire 🔥
I think the guy is only familiar with songs were like a melody of one song is used as is on the other song. Sampling can be way more difficult to pull of than writing your own melody (as shown on the video). Even when lifting like a melody verbatim, and adding your own bass, drums, etc, I don't see the problem as long as the original creator agreed and is benefiting. I don't think anyone should be embarrassed 😂
My reason for why I started sampling years ago was mostly because of how cost effective it was to make something sound so unique and yet so professional while giving it a sense of nostalgia to past themes on old records. It was like giving new life to either classics or underground treasures I found at record stores. Not to mention I didn't grow up with money, just like many of the hip hop world hasn't either, hence I wasn't able to have a huge studio with a lot of hardware and software, making sampling records an amazing alternative for a professional take on music production.
Original music is by default better than sampling in my opinion. Learning to play instruments and creating melodies from scratch is more impressive than taking melodies, rearranging them and adding drums any day of the week. Originality holds more weight.
Whenever I hear “Kingdom Come,” I think of how Just Blaze had that beat up on his MySpace page for the longest time (and long before Hov snatched it up) and how ill we all thought it was because he flipped that Rick James sample in such a nasty and unexpected way.
@@siddhartacrowley8759 i said that and everybody else who know or understand that Flipping a sample is an Art form because it is, and everybody else who also know or understand that just copying and pasting a loop just add some drum around it is not an art form, because is not !!
The problem to me is really this: Just like most of us would not call a person a good guitarist for knowing how to play smoke on the water riff by deep purple, the same goes for beat makers and other creators. If you use a loop/sample without doing anything to it, then you are at a low level of skill. So to me the whole thing is a skill issue and not if sampling is lazy, cheap and easy.
Another great fact and video family. Sampling is an actual art and to do it takes a great skill. This will always be the discussion for the world and those who actually do it and do it well gets the credit. Blessings to you family. 💯
It took me 5 months to find a good song to sample. Plus it is gonna be copyrighted. We have to pay it and find it and also making that sample into an actual rap beat is hell. So no. It is not cheap, lazy and definetly not easy.
The way I've always seen it is that there are levels to sampling, just as there are levels to melody making. Yes, some sampling is easy, but it's also easy to write a generic chord progression.
As a person that has been sampling for 20 years and is highly advanced at it at this point, the way people downplay the actual skill it takes is pure ignorance... People also seem to not understand how sometimes it's not supposed to be "easy, cheap, or lazy" but to give a certain vibe of the original 💯
It's not the skill or effort of the manipulation that bothers people. It's the initial theft of the source material that's the issue. You are taking someone else's recording without their authorization¸ as a society we call that theft, and if you can't see that then there's a point of ignorance for which you need some pure education.
@@chokocat9064 Naw what you just said is the bitter boomer outlook of this without even taking computers, DAWs, or quite frankly the last 40 years music evolution into consideration.. If an artist is talented and produces their own music all the time but decides to add a famous vocal or riff to the hook of their song because it's something that personally inspires them as an artist.. would you still be this type of way and call it "theft" without understanding them?.. The artist clearly isn't stealing anything considering we all know where the vocal or riff came from and the fact he perhaps got that sample to sound like an entirely different piece of music while referencing the original with actually more effort and time spent than even the initial riff took to play should be appreciated.. Fact is not only do I and many others sample but also play many different instruments.. it's not like anyone that does this is just a talentless thief that just lazily copies & pastes entire pieces of music and says they played it.. And much of the time I personally sample sounds that aren't even in a song to begin with, which isn't theft in the slightest especially when you engineer the sound yourself instead of some present on your little guitar pedal haha.. I mean isn't it called theft when stealing so many of those riffs that other guitar players made up and have used over the years?.. /s If you think you can just rip off every guitar player that came before you and it not be considered theft then you need some "pure education" son ... See.. we can play that same game too, so ya might wanna know what you're talking about before you try to downplay an actual musical skill set that can be just as advanced or basic as any other musical instrument and compared in exactly the same way 💯
People who samples songs always credit the original song, otherwise there would be lawsuits happening everyday if they didnt, also underground hip hop exists as well.
@@Nardz024 So it's a boomer concept that stealing something is morally wrong? You are okay with the theft aspect because they are engaging the creative process. Couldn't they also engage the creative process without the theft? Is the theft actually required by these people to be creative? Are they truly so creatively bankrupt that they cannot create without first stealing someone's property? Your argument appears to be that because society has okayed using a guitar rift then it's okay to steal a whole section of someone's recording. But isn't it true that people have lost court battles for taking other people's melodies? And isn't a riff a melody? So clearly even your premiss isn't supported causing the rest of your assertion to fail. Remember your entire argument must find a way to legitimize theft. Without this initial step the rest of the argument fails, and name calling isn't a proper way to win an argument. It simply illustrates that you don't have a foundation on which to make your claim. This works for children, and man-childs, but it's not going to convince me, or a court, that theft is okay.
@@morreddie717 I replied to you previously, but it looks like it was deleted. I included a link to a rather famous person that recently was taken to court for not crediting the the stolen property. And like you suggested this does happen all the time, because there's a lot of thieves out there. To your second assertion, The first rap record came out it 1970, the first sampler came out in 1979. The style came out way before the technology, so it isn't base on the technology.
Maby its a little easier start making music by sampling as opposed to playing a piano. Just like its probably easier to take a picture than it is to paint a picture. However the painting does not invalidate the picture as an art form as they both bring something unique and valuable to world. What the photographer is to the painter is what the producer is to the instrumentalist.
People who make arguments against ACTUAL sampling (not just looping and adding drums) are usually “music snobs” or can’t sample because it’s not easy and they thought it’d be. In other words: 🧂
@@Nova_Afterglow It's upsetting to see transforming artwork with intent, which is art, compared to a machine which doesn't have any intent at all doing the same on a larger scale without any credit, no skill, no thoughts just data and math. and trying to use an explanation of why one is ethical and artistic for the other
@@lucidattf navi literally shows the difference between the cheap ai art, and the transformative. beyond that tho, he logically shows the link between what ppl like you say about ai art, and what ppl say about sampling. it is very interesting to me how someone can agree with the points he makes on sampling, but disagree when it comes to ai art. you can choose to see ALL ai art as non-transformative and simply ripping off artists in other mediums, or you can see that there are those who are using the tools of ai to create something that is in fact VERY transformative. if you chose the former, you cant get mad when ppl call you lazy and cheap for sampling.
Sampling is not for losers. Otherwise, Kanye West wouldn’t be where he is today that I am convince gosh I just hear so many people sample and they don’t use these techniques that you explain bro that’s why I have a different outlook on it. Oops, I lied again hey, you know lying is an art form, right? Lmao 😜
One of my favourite ones is Busdriver's Imaginary places, which is sampled from Bachs Badinerie in B minor. Its absolutely insane how something like was turned into a fire beat.
Been talking about this for decades. One of the prime examples that often gets overlooked is scratching; and to take it one step further, scratch music. An entire song can be created using live scratching, where one DJ creates the drums, one plays the bass, one plays the melody, one plays the solo, etc. This can be done live and with the smallest of sound bits being manipulated in real time. Not only does this type of music employ all three elements you speak of in your video (chopping, flipping single notes, flipping contexts), but it also carries the additional requirement of years of musical ability to play it live. Moreover, scratching often manipulates the sound so heavily that the resulting sound is something that CANNOT be created through another medium. The skill barrier is so high that most DJs are never able to create music in this manner. Most of the techniques were created by DJs who had no formal training or blueprint. They created it all by themselves. It would be FAR easier to play traditional music. At the end of the day, its very hard to take people who criticize sample music seriously because 99% of them are playing some tired blues lick on their guitar that we've all heard 1000 times before. They are snobbish about sampling because they are insecure in their own abilities. They have created nothing new, yet they want to criticize an entirely new form of music that sounds vastly different from the music that came before it.
Sampling is intricate, complex and tedious. It requires patience, creativity and the right sample to coexist with all the other elements in a production.
This is a great take on a polarizing topic. I’m a DJ and have been producing music for 20 years… shout out to Akai. The fact that you showed the difference between just looping a track like MC Hammer and how Blaze flipped the same track is the perfect example of why us Hip Hop heads understand this is an art form that should not be taken lightly. Everyone that says sampling is lazy cannot do what just blaze or Primo or alchemist or Pete rock or myself, DJ Y-Not can do. Great vid!!!!
Thanks to Navie D for actually bringing up this topic. Sampling when done right is just like creating new melodies from the same twelve notes we have in music theory, and that is not lazy at all. It's the "cut a piece of music and add drums to it" approach that annoys people.
That one Steve Albini interview at the start of the video is very illustrative of why rock ended up stagnating. An inability to incorporate new production techniques and songwriting mechanisms based on new technology, always dismissing new genres or styles of music as "fake" or "lazy", really gets under my skin.
Yeah sampling as we know it came about because poor black kids in the inner cities couldn’t afford most instruments and didn’t have access to traditional music education. I’m sure it was easy for Albini to learn guitar and start bands in his white flight Chicago suburb.
I always said sampling is one of those things that can go in either direction. 9 out of ten times, it's transformative and is awesome. I've got a friend who makes beats as a hobby, and we made a beat together. I didn't know how to work equipment, but I picked out sounds and helped make patterns. Electric drum pads are no joke, and in the right hands can make incredible things. He gifted the beat to me for my 20th birthday. We were talking about different burgers and so he dubbed it "Burgers Beat".
As someone who started learning to make electronic music roughly a year ago I have been and probably always will be pro-sampling. I don't know a whole lot about hip-hop , but i know it isn't the only genre that makes heavy use of sampling. In fact many early hip-hop tracks would go on to become a source of vocal and breakbeat samples for rave music.
That goes for people who think of sampling as just looping. While some tracks are indeed just that, there are others that make great use of various techniques, drum programming, live playing in drum parts, sound engineering, arranging, and even using live instrumentation over the sample. Also maniulating the loops, rearranging melodies, mixing different loops into different tracks, some sampled tracks can end up getting involved.
some producers this applies yes, but most are very creative which can’t be distinguished, besides i like hearing throwback samples. just shows recognition of the original song how great it was 😅
As soon as the super freak sample played i knew kingdom come was gonna be mentioned. imo one of the best sample uses ever and my favourite off the album.
I would say the sampling in the 90’s and early 2000’s is what made it gold. You couldn’t even tell it was sampled because of the chops and flips. Today’s sampling with just 808’s over the instrumental and interpolating choruses is just a slap in the face. Almost like I could’ve did the song more justice, or this song was popular already so let me just flip it and give it a party vibe. It’s missing the soul of what that sample meant to the artist. The last part was about radio producers and artists btw. That’s what I hear when I happen to turn the radio on
