Who sings the "Since I left you" bit on the Avalanches song? Where does the piano on that Alicia Keys record come from? And how did that Boney M song get stuck in my head? All is revealed at Who Sampled.
posted by creeky on Dec 1, 2009 - 40 comments

The Works of Swede Mason: "Jeremy Clarkson," "Get in the Back of the Van," "Jungle All The Way," "Bill Wyman's Metal Detector," "Put the Lotion in the Basket, *" "Got The Sucka," "The Gobshite, *" "Squashed Thingy," "Spare Me The Madness," and the pair of tracks based on Neighbors deaths "Coffee And Croissants" and "Todd....Dead." [more inside]
posted by flatluigi on Oct 13, 2009 - 14 comments

How To: Creating 'Smack My Bitch Up"
posted by flatluigi on Sep 21, 2009 - 46 comments

Jason Derulo's song "Watcha Say" which debuted at 54th on the Billboard Hot 100 and is currently 5th on the Itunes Top 100 list prominently samples Imogen Heap's song "Hide and Seek" without giving her credit. Sampling in rap music has a long and controversial history.
posted by kylej on Aug 26, 2009 - 46 comments

Pendle Poucher is a UK based composer, sound designer and lover of funny noises who has written, produced and performed soundtracks for every major UK TV station. He has devised large scale public art projects and written chart-topping dance music. However, what I find most interesting, he is also one of relatively few musicians within the UK who owns a dulcitone. Poucher claims that his Dulcitone 1884 is the world's first multi-sampled dulcitone. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Dec 20, 2008 - 8 comments

What does it all mean? In many ways, today's remix culture kicked off in earnest one weekend in 1983 when two ad men (one a recording engineer) spent a weekend in a studio crafting the first pop record made up entirely of samples in the hopes of winning a $100 remix contest. [more inside]
posted by 2or3whiskeysodas on Nov 9, 2008 - 20 comments

Dionisio González makes photographs of imaginary favelas, Filip Dujardin makes photographs of imaginary buildings.
posted by jack_mo on Nov 9, 2008 - 6 comments

The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio by mathematics educator and author, Michael S. Schneider. Schneider, having already researched and written about the golden ratio extensively, noticed it right away when hearing the the amen break for the first time (amen break previously on the blue). While some composers have been known to intentionally incorporate fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio into their works, perhaps this is just another one of the many instances of the ratio showing up in nature.
posted by p3t3 on Mar 12, 2008 - 27 comments

You may have never heard of it, but you've damn near certain heard it. The Mellotron (FortuneCity link) is a keyboard instrument; each of its keys triggers a tape with a pre-recorded instrument on it. It was effectively the world's first sample player. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Sep 7, 2006 - 38 comments

10 greatest beat-making videos ever* "*Or, you know, today." A Music thing thing.
posted by nthdegx on Aug 23, 2006 - 14 comments

Dreamies. It's 1972, and affable salaryman and good husband Bill Holt quits his good job at 3M to become a musical pioneer from the comfort of his own basement. The resulting album, Dreamies, is notable for its generous and ahead-of-its-time use of sampling/plunderphonics and became a highly sought-after lost classic until its re-release this year. Bill now has his own website, also called Dreamies, where he releases Eye Candy and Politics in liberal doses. Some are hypnotic, some are, for want of a better term, 'relaxing', others are anything but. And all of them are subtly infused with the slightly unsettling taste of Huh?
posted by nylon on Jun 27, 2006 - 8 comments

Can I get an amen? An installation featuring an acetate pressing of a well worded spoken piece about copyright law, creative commons, culture and even advertising from the perspective of the history of the now ubiquitous Amen Break featuring audio samples of songs and artists from the well known to the unusual. Please feel free to use this archive.org mirror of the video indicated on the project description page with the entirety of the audio of the acetate at archive.org. (34MB MP4/Quicktime, majority of video portion consists of various views of the turntable, but the audio is quite good.)
posted by loquacious on Feb 23, 2006 - 13 comments

If you liked the Kleptones and other posts about mashups, you might have caught "raiding the 20th century" in early 2004. Well, DJ Food has completely updated it for 2005 and now clocks in at a full 59 minutes of monster mashup mix madness. Download the mp3 here and enjoy the eclectic sonic landscape.
posted by mathowie on Oct 19, 2005 - 14 comments

Making music entirely from non-musical things: McDonalds Happy Meals, Henry Kissinger, Bread, Salad Tosser, Fluorescent Lamps, the Bible, Hearts, Dot Matrix Printers, Photocopiers, Volkswagen [possibly nsfw], The Postal Service, Blank Tapes, Eiffel Tower, Deportation Orders [scroll down], Cakes, Cucumbers, Furniture [scroll down to #12], Skin, Roads, Underpasses, Frogs, Vinyl Run-Out Grooves, Radios, Natural Geophysical Phenomena, Carly Simon and other stuff.
posted by nylon on Aug 7, 2005 - 16 comments

Jazz, Funk, Soul, Disco joints sampled in House, Hip-hop, and others [via memepool]
posted by cmicali on Jan 24, 2005 - 19 comments

Three Notes and Runnin' has decided to protest the recent court decision that cited N.W.A. with illegally sampling a snippet of Funkadelic's Get Off Your Ass and Jam that had been modified to the point of unrecognizability. So in the tradition of online civil disobedience such as Grey Tuesday, Downhill Battle has issued a challenge to sample-based artists to create 30-second remixes that consist of nothing but the disputed 1.5-second Funkadelic sample.
posted by jonp72 on Sep 24, 2004 - 10 comments

Queen + Hip-Hop Mashups = A Night at the Hip Hopera Better than the Grey Album? Cease and desist in 3, 2, 1...
posted by krunk on Sep 22, 2004 - 32 comments

All samples must now be licenced according to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, including tiny samples that have been modified to the point of being unrecognisable. "We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way." via /dev/null
posted by Jimbob on Sep 9, 2004 - 40 comments

Raiding the 20th Century. On January 18 XFM Radio broadcast a DJ set by Strictly Kev (working under the pseudo-open moniker DJ Food) called Raiding the 20th Century - A History of the Cut Up. The set is completely comprised of music from the later half of, you guess it, the 20th century and makes for a very entertaining and nostalgic listen. File location details inside. [via VirtualTurntable.biz]
posted by botono9 on Jan 25, 2004 - 18 comments

What is sampling? To some, sampling is an art. To others it's a question of permission and legality. With modern technology, movies and tv shows can also become great sources of samples, as seen in the The Top 1035 Sample Sources List.
posted by starscream on Aug 20, 2003 - 20 comments

A hip hop geek's wet dream... I don't know about you, but to find this site made my day. Dozens and dozens of full length songs that your favorite hip hop producers have sampled. If you can convert streaming audio to mp3, the songs are yours!
posted by Slimemonster on Jun 9, 2003 - 22 comments

Recombinant music has been around since the 19th century and now there is an amazing online tool for fans of both the samplers and the sampled.
posted by cadastral on Sep 16, 2002 - 10 comments

I hate posting a link from the much-derided Fark, but as a musician myself, actions like this by the music industry really burn me. Basically Limp Bizkit held a "Nationwide Guitar Audition" to find a new guitarist to replace Wes, and (so the main link says) proceeded to rip off the original, uncopyrighted tryouts from hundreds of guitarists. What do you other musicians think of this? Was it really a ploy?
posted by pheideaux on Feb 3, 2002 - 36 comments

I'm not nearly cool enough to own any of their products, but the Korg site is showing off freaky things like the KAOSSPAD very nicely.
posted by endquote on May 28, 2000 - 1 comment