Here are some great quotes from artists and producers on the role that sampling plays in their music...
"Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about
for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it
and de-contextualizing it." - DJ Shadow
"A lot of people still don't recognize the sampler as a musical
instrument. I can see why. A lot of rap hits over the years used the
sampler more like a Xerox
machine. If you take four whole bars that are identifiable, you're just
biting that shit. But I've always been into using the sampler more like
a painter's palette than a Xerox. Then again, I might use it as a Xerox
if I find rare beats that nobody had in their crates yet... But on every album I try to make sure that I only have 20 to 25 percent
[of that kind of] sampling. Everything else is going to be me putting
together a synthesis of sounds." - RZA, The Wu-Tang Manual
"[Samples have] a certain reality. It doesn't just take the sound, it
takes the whole way it was recorded. The ambient sounds, the little bits
of reverb left off crashes that happened a couple of bars ago. There's a
lot of things in the sample, just like when you take a picture—it's got
a lot more levels than say, the kick-drum or the drum machine, I think. Looking at a sampler the way it was used first—to try and
simulate real instruments—you didn't have to get a session guitarist and
you could just be like, 'Hey, I can have an orchestra in my track, and I
can have a guitar, and it sounds real!' And I think that's the wrong
way to use sampling. The right way is to get the guitar, and go, 'Right,
that's a guitar. Let's make it into something that a guitar could never
possibly be.' You know, take it away from the source and try to make it
something else. Might as well just get a bloody guitarist if you want a
guitarist. There's plenty of them." —Amon Tobin, Pitchfork Magazine
"Let's say I find a loop or something that I want to use—you attach
yourself to a particular aspect or emotion that you find in it—part of
it is looking for like-minded sounds and part of it is just laying
things out in a way that kind of helps accomplish what you want. It's
what you can hear in a particular sound." —RJD2, TheMilkFactory.com
"Sampling's not a lazy man's way. We learn a lot from sampling, it's
like school for us. When we sample a portion of a song and repeat it
over and over we can better understand the matrix of the song." —Daddy-O
of Stetsasonic, Black Noise Magazine
"It's a context issue, because not every sample is a huge chunk of a
song. We might take a tiny little insignificant sound from a record and
then slow it way down and put it deep in the mix with, like, 30 other
sounds on top of it. It's not even a recognizable sample at that point.
Which is a lot different from taking a huge, obvious piece from some hit
song that everyone knows and saying whatever you want to on top of that
loop. An example that's often brought up in court when we get sued over
sampling is a Biz Markie track where he more or less used a whole Gilbert O'Sullivan
song. Because it was such an obvious sample, it's the example lawyers
use when trying to prove that sampling is stealing. And that's really
frustrating to us as artists who sample, because sampling can be a
totally different thing than that." — Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, Wired Magazine
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