Tools of the Trade

 

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In the early 1970's urban block parties became commonplace in New York. The Djs of these parites unknowingly created the roots of Hip-Hop by using two turntables at once and “mixing” the sounds. The dual turntable approach also allowed breaks such as the Funky Drummer break to be cut, extended or looped.

 Here is a modern day turntable set-up, with two turntables, a computer, a mixer and a microphone

Later on, digital samplers made this process much easier for artists, but early digital samplers were like early computers, massive and expensive.

From wikipedia:

“A Sampler is an electronic musical instrument similar in some respects to a synthesizer but, instead of generating sounds, it uses recordings (or "samples") of sounds that are loaded or recorded into it by the user and then played back by means of the sampler program itself, a keyboard, sequencer or other triggering device to perform or compose music.”

The first digital samplers that were affordable to a basic consumer was the Akai S900, which launched in 1985.

Because of the exponential growth of computer processing power, there are now software programs that can do anything a hardware based sampler can do. 

Here are some videos of Artists experimenting with samples