The Amen Break, Sampling and Copyright
Apr 8, 2010 Uncategorized
Posted by
irfon
My friend Sean pointed me toward this video today, which I think (despite a recent deluge of media about the Amen break) is fascinating and well worth watching:
I did most of my “growing up” in the 80s. That decade took me from 8 years old up to 18 years old. In that time, I also discovered music in a really earnest way, both as a listener and as a participant. And for me, music as a participant was all about sampling. Friends of mine had other electronic instruments. James had a Roland U-20 synthesizer and an electric guitar. Devin had a guitar and some pedals. Gus had his voice, and some tools we made for treating that. Rick had an Ensoniq Mirage for a while, but he also had one of the old Casio phase-distortion synths. I’m not sure which. A CS-80? I was all about the samplers. I started with a Korg DSS-1, and I actually did use its seemingly ridiculous sampling capability. I soon thereafter moved to an E-Mu EMAX and later an EMAX II. Unlike people’s conception of samplers, I usually didn’t sample beats, phrases, hooks or any of that. I mostly created sounds out of tiny raw elements, little chunks here and there, usually sped up or slowed down so drastically as to be unrecognizable (but still technically illegal).
Now, I do use more synthesizers than samplers. I have Kontakt at my fingertips — easily the most powerful sampler that I’ve ever used (one of the most powerful anybody’s ever used). And yet, I use it mostly to drive reproductions of orchestral and ethnic instruments. Part of the reason for that is time and breadth of interest, as well as a change in workflow when I changed back to software. Part is that I’ve become more interested in synthesis, especially analog synthesis of late.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that part of it is the complicated morass of legality surrounding sampling. And that’s something that has resulted not only in me changing how I work, but in me feeling much more isolated and insular in my work. My work when I was heavily sampler-based was always deeply rooted in the culture, in touching base with other works that had inspired or interested me, in taking bits and pieces of my world and rearranging them to create something that reflected what I saw of it. Now, that’s very hard to do, at least without worrying about getting sued, and the internet makes even safety through obscurity difficult.
The increasing commodification and control of our culture does, as the author of the short piece says, restrict us and stifle our involvement with the culture. And I think it’s affected the degree of relevancy and meaning in my own work. (Not that I’m doing much of it these days.)
That’s one of the reasons that I release everything under Creative Commons. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be sampled, but I’d love it if I were, even if the person went on to make money from it. But more importantly, I think it’s important to there being a culture at all that people are allowed to participate in as anything other than paying consumers.
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