Dropping Off A YouTube Sample

Some thoughts on sampling prompted by this and a brief Twitter exchange with Zone Styx.

Firstly, as far as the YouTube sampling goes, we've done it and been happy with the results - you might realise they're samples but you can't tell what the source is (either YouTube or the film/kitsch 70s US drama etc that the YouTube clips are of) and once played/effected through a sampler they take on a totally new quality in the context of the sounds around them, and they're of a piece with the rest of the sound-picture that they're part of, almost organically so. That's kind of the idea I was referring to in the brief Laika post below, about samples seeming to be coming from the inside out rather than being laid on top - but that's not to say I don't like it when you can hear the 'edges' of samples, that's obviously part of the appeal of samples, these foreign bodies or elements in the mix, rubbing up against everything else, setting off sparks.

There's a spectrum in sampling, at either end of which there's a kind of seamlessness. At one extreme you've got your virtual 'full track' samples, like Kanye West's 'Stronger', where it's seamless because there are virtually no other musical elements in the track other than the original recording. At the opposite extreme, you've got the seamlessness of a sample chosen or treated in such a way that the listener can no longer tell that they're hearing a sample at all. Between these you've got degrees of 'visibility' or 'hearability' of the sample, how gritty it is (vinyl crackle and so on) how much it juts out and creates - ideally pleasurable, or at least hovering near the pleasure/pain boundary - friction. The 'hearability' also relates to how well known the source of the sample is (how many times has the difference between me liking a rap track or not been down to whether I'm overly familiar with the source material for a key sample or not..?)

At the end where samples are no longer recognisable as such (musical instances of this are harder to recall, naturally!) this is still worthwhile for the producer/musician if it adds something new to the palette. While you're working on a sample, it's still a foreign element, it reacts unpredictably to different treatments, its behaviour under various conditions is not something you can entirely control. So it can be pleasurable (and frustrating) to try and tease a sample into a shape where it's useable as an element of your track in a seamless way but you don't get the satisfaction of knowing someone's going to acknowledge and enjoy the cleverness of your steal. On the other hand, if the results sound great, then why worry and, on the plus side, there's definitely no concern about infringement cos you can be damned sure even the original composer won't pick it up.

Specifically on the YouTube thing, I tend to view that as part of the recordability/samplability of pretty much anything around you. With the right means, you can rip something off YouTube, and then turn to your left and hit your desk lamp with a pen and record that and so on. They key thing is how you integrate those elements. In the case of that Drake track, you can hear the YouTube quality of the sample but the recording of the vocal and the beat is far crisper, so you've got a panorama, a perspective, across the different levels of sound quality (and with sampling that can be also be a perspective across different places, times, cultures, registers..). It doesn't have to be that way, mind - there's always someone willing to go all-out cruddy. Whether that succeeds or not is down to their ability to paint in different shades of crud.