Music Sampling History

The first-time sampling appeared was in the genre known as musique concrète. Musique concrète uses an acoustic style of listening, meaning that sound identities can often be intentionally changed or can appear unconnected to their source. It can include sounds taken from recordings of musical instruments, human voice, and the natural environment as well as music created from synthesizers and computer based digital signal processing. Musique concrète was led by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s. He used the newly released tape recorder to create music from different pieces of recordings. The issue with Musique concrète was that it lacked organization and a sense of togetherness because it took pieces from different tracks and

It wasn’t known as stealing but was considered an act of respect and acknowledgment. In the early years of sampling many practitioners used oscillators, filters, mixing desks, and other processing systems that are still used commonly today. In the late 1960s the mellotron, a tape-relay keyboard, was invented. The mellotron was used as a traditional instrument and the sampled tapes were used in place of existing melodies and rhythms rather than making new pieces. Some of the more notable tracks that used this were: “Strawberry Fields Forever” by the Beatles, “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin, and “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. The Mellotron was eventually traded out for more modern synthesizers and samplers. As the 70s and early 80s rolled around we saw a rise of samples in hip hop. Many DJs used live mixing and vinyl manipulation to make their samples. Most samples from the 70s and early 80s were used from funk songs. Sampling became much more common in the 80s when big brands such as Akai and Roland released more cost friendly items to produce digital sampling. When the 90s came about sampling continued to remain a major part of

Los Kumbia Kingz were a Mexican American group who incorporated Hip Hop, R&B, and Reggae with Cumbias (traditional Mexican music). That is exactly what they did with a song by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three. This old hip-hop group released their song, “The Roof is on Fire” in 1984 and Kumbia Kingz released their song, “Fuego” in 2004. Kumbia Kingz added a heavy amount of cumbia music and made the song different compared to Rock Master Scott’s version. The only things similar about Kumbia Kingz’s “Fuego” is the siren in the beginning of the song and the lyrics, “Fuego, Fuego, the roof is on fire. We don’t need no water, let them