On ‘Rhymin & Stealin’ he used the SP–12 to soup up the track’s drums, putting extra weight to the John Bonham samples he’d lifted from Led Zeppelin’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’. In the summer of 1986, Rick Rubin was overseeing the sessions for the Beastie Boys’ debut album. When samplers like the SP–12 appeared, they began to democratise the practice of sampling breakbeats and drum sounds. A couple of years earlier, Marley Marl had stumbled upon the concept of sampling drum sounds by accident, a technique he would develop on early records with MC Shan. By 1986 hip-hop was evolving from a perceived fad to a fully-fledged musical revolution and the SP series would play a huge part in shaping the sound of New York rap. The timing of the SP–12’s arrival on the market was perfect. When you consider that CD-quality is 44.1 kHz at 16 bit, it’s easy to imagine the “dusty” character that came to characterize the SP–12. Conceived as a successor to E-Mu Systems’ Drumulator, a sample-based drum machine originally intended to rival Roger Linn’s iconic LM–1, the SP–12 (Sampling Percussion at 12 bits) included 24 preset drum samples and allowed users to record their own sounds at a crunchy 27.5 kHz sampling rate. One of the first samplers to truly change the face of modern music was E-Mu Systems’ SP–12, which was released in 1985. What follows is a look at some of the most influential samplers of the past 30 years and the role they played in leaving an indelible mark on contemporary music. It resides somewhere in the circuit boards and behind the faceplates, and is unlikely to ever be found in the more logical world of the contemporary digital audio workstation. There’s an intangible, hard-to-define quality to hardware samplers that software simply cannot replicate. They’re tactile and can behave in unpredictable ways. To those who grew up with them, or have come to love them, hardware samplers simply sound different from software. Hardware samplers became the backbone of electronic music, from hip-hop to dance, for two decades until the development of cheap, effective software sampling (and its availability on the internet) rendered them outdated. The once expensive technology slowly became more affordable, and in the 1980s young dreamers found ways to subvert the machines’ intended use, engaging in what’s often referred to today as ‘creative misuse’. Over the past 35 years, samplers have shaped the sound of modern music from the underground to the mainstream. But a technical afterthought was all it took to sow the seeds of an entirely new way of thinking about and making music. The Fairlight CMI is widely credited as the first sampler, though its sampling capabilities were merely an addition to the machine’s central function, synthesis. The Mellotron proved particularly popular and its warbling keyboard-controlled tape loops can be heard in recordings by The Beatles, King Crimson, and Tangerine Dream the storied BBC Radiophonic Workshop also found a use for it as a sound-effects generator.Īs synthesisers rose to prominence at the end of the 1970s, tape-based machines began to die off and soon enough the first real samplers appeared: machines with the capability to digitally record and play back sounds. Influential as it was, in the following decades it was improved upon by other tape-based instruments such as the Mellotron, the Birotron and Mattel’s Optigan. Developed by Harry Chamberlin, it was intended to be a keyboard that could play back any sound. In the late 1940s, the Chamberlin became the first tape-based playback instrument. Tape recording and manipulation also gave us the first sampling machines – prototypes for what was to come. Musique concrète’s experimental practices and use of common sounds placed it firmly outside the realms of what was accepted and understood as ‘real music’ at the time, a situation not unlike that which would befall modern sampling decades later. Using recording tape, Pierre Schaeffer and others experimented with recorded sounds by manipulating them via splicing, speeding and reversing. The practice of sampling in music dates back to the 1940s and the early days of musique concrète. More than any other medium, music has normalised the idea of sampling in our daily lives thanks to music, sampling has become just another tool in the modern creative arsenal, and it has seeped into our collective unconscious. We live in the age of the sample. The practice of sampling informs what we consume every day, and its roots can be traced back to music. How did it come to this, you ask? Laurent Fintoni delves in 30 years of sampler history to bring you its evolution. The sampler has become one of the most crucial instruments in 21st century songwriting. Make Music is FACT’s new section devoted to making music anywhere, whether you’re a seasoned producer or a total novice, using an arsenal of analog gear or just your iPhone.
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