If you’re an old man like me, you probably remember the Flying Saucer Records started by Dickie Goodman back in the 50s with his double sided hit “The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2.” That one recording kicked off a whole craze of novelty records where essentially what the artist did was mix in spoken word with snippets of other artists songs. And yes, before you ask, he was sued for copyright infringement. But his artistry was the early use of sampling, though most people wouldn’t think of it in that manner.
Sampling has become a big thing in today’s music. It has also been the hot topic of many a debate as to whether or not it should be allowed without having to get permission from artists for every little sample that you use. I mean where do we draw the line? If we literally take one note from John Doe’s XYZ recording and run it through phase shifters, flangers, filters and delays, making it virtually unrecognizable, do we need to ask that artist’s permission to use that sample?
Personally, I don’t do any sampling of my own. I only use samples that come with the products that I purchase, such as all the string samples that come with my EWQL Hollywood Strings. But wait a minute. What about those samples? They WERE played by REAL musicians. Were they compensated? I don’t mean were they paid to play their instruments. I mean were they given royalties? After all, without their contributions we wouldn’t have half the music that we have today. You’d have a ton of people, like myself, who couldn’t afford to hire a real orchestra.
A lot of what passes for okay today we kind of take for granted. But the truth is, in a different world, we might not be so fortunate. The days of having to create all your own sounds are over. We don’t have to take out our Prophet 5 and tweak all those knobs until we finally got something that we liked. Now all we have to do is look for a sample collection online, buy it, pull up the preset of the sound we want and start playing. Sure saves a lot of time. And if you think these synths today are easy to program, think again.
One of the synthesizers that I have, and one of my favorites, it the Synthmaster 2.6. The sounds you can get out of this thing are nothing short of amazing. But in all honesty, it is a royal pain in the backside to program. Sure, I can do it. After using synthesizers for over 35 years I can get some decent sounds out of it. But at what price? The price is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to program ONE sound.
In the meantime, I could just buy one of those soundbanks for a few bucks (which is what I did) and have hundreds of presets at my disposal. Granted, a lot of them sound the same in this package that I got (it’s actually multiple collections) but there is still enough variety that I don’t have to ever turn knobs and pull sliders to get the sounds that I want. Saves me tons of time. And that’s the key to all this prepackaged stuff…it saves time.
And that’s what sampling does. It saves time and it saves money. I mean can you imagine what the cost of an orchestra would be for just one hour of recording time? I don’t even want to think of it. Without sampling, my entire orchestral category on my site wouldn’t exist. Actually, this site itself wouldn’t exist. I would have one category, electronic music since I don’t even own a real piano.
We take a lot of things for granted in this business of music. Imagine if some of it were taken away from us. That’s why I’m all for sampling but I am also all for making sure these people are properly compensated. What’s proper compensation? That’s another can of worms. I have no idea. I’ll leave that to smarter minds than the one that’s taking up space in my noggin.
As far as the technology of sampling goes, man, we have sure come a long way since the first Flying Saucer record. I think some of the charm of that record is how cheesy it sounded. But today, we have sampling nailed to a science. We can manipulate samples every which way to Sunday. And we can do it so much easier than it was done back in the stone ages. The software available is nothing short of amazing.
But there is also a learning curve too. I personally have never created my own samples. I’ve tried, but it always comes out sounding like garbage. I mean think about all the things you have to do in order to get a sample just right. The recording has to be crystal clean to begin with. That means recording with high end stuff. You can’t use a $10 mic and expect to get a good sample. I mean if you’re going for cheap sounding, yeah. But if you want your grand piano to sound good, you better spend some big bucks on equipment.
Then, after you record the instrument, you have to make sure that your start and end points of the sample are done properly. Clipped samples are horrible sounding. If you make the length too short, what you get is a ghastly mess. And then there’s the number of samples that you’re going to take. How far are you going to stretch those notes? If you sample middle C on the piano, are you going to use that middle C for D and E or just D, or maybe just C? There are people who will actually use that middle C for a whole octave. Can you imagine how bad that piano is going to sound?
Like I said, we take a lot for granted and we shouldn’t. we should be grateful for everything that we have to work with in music.
Even flying saucers.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagwenheim