Is sampling cheating? (no of course it isn't)

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

Apologies in advance for this one. So here’s a thing right, and this ipurely personal, that I am/have been trying to resolve for about 20 years now.

As a preface, I’d say that sample based music is what shifted me over from being a guitar teenager to an electronic music nerd. Specifically, I saw DJ shadow open for Radiohead in Aberdeen and the next day went and bought endtroducing and then a few weeks later an SP-202. I’ve had loads of samplers over the years since, the 202, yamaha SU700, an akia s2000 for 6 horrible months an SP404, a Digitakt, an Octatrack, a few months with a 404mk2 that made me remember how much I loved the DT/OT.

I can never get away from feeling like I’m somehow ‘cheating’ by making things on just the Elektron Samplers. I strongly suspect it’s from being a full on modular person for decades across the Nord G2 and then eueroack and would insist and take a pride in building every sound from scratch. Despite this, getting a single box out and then just spending hours massaging samples together and resampling them and all that stuff is one of the things that brings me the most personal enjoyment although I never bother to structure or record anything, I’ve just got piles of sequences made up of whatever samples I was feeling at the time, I love nothing more than just sitting down with either the OT or DT on my lap, some headphones on. I tend to treat a lot of my studio stuff as independant things and not one cohesive whole (eg I do guitar and pedals drone sometimes but I’ve never once considered sampling that, similarly I’m not one for making/recording samples from my modular - I just make modular pieces with no guitar or elektron parts).

It’s definitely a silly mental hurdle though, and what’s strange is that I can and do enjoy listening to old mo wax stuff and hip hop all the time and it never rubs me wrong, I think when I’m trying to do it myself, I can see and feel every join and see where all the stitches and things are and it just makes me feel a bit [insert something here]

I think by typing this into the void I’m attempting to externalise this and maybe make myself get over whatever my hump with it is?

NB: When I say ‘samples’ I’m really meaning indivdual drum samples and little loops/flips of things I’ve sampled off youtube etc, not really the premade ‘here’s a load of loops of bits of a full song that definitely fit together’ commercial sample loops.

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#2

I can totally relate

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#3

Ok first, the answer is maybe. It depends on your perspective, is it cheating to compose with other peoples compositions? eeehhh, have you listened to the radio? do you know how much of that shit sounds like other shit and the shit that influenced it is something even older? They aren’t using the same recordings, and if they did they’ve paid for it so maybe “is sampling without paying for clearance stealing?” is a more cut and dry (yet still not) topic… but cheating? hmm. maybe.

however, the way you feel about it is probably what matters. It bothers you, you can do something about it. After you’ve done your sampling, figure out what you can play with your guitar, and then replay the sample as a guitar part or another instrument, I’m all about that. it makes me feel better about what I’m composing, if you can call it that. sampling my own synths feels great also.

for provenance, I grew up 5 minutes from the record store on the cover of entroducing and first heard and got knocked back a notch by it in the 90’s around when I was getting into hip hop, also coming from rock bands mostly. I get it, but give yourself a break man.

is there an original person in this world who isn’t lying about where their originality originates from?

:thinking:

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#4

One must remember that modern technology makes possible a level of artifice (said without negative connotation) that goes far beyond traditional instruments. You don’t need to be an omnipotent one man band, every tone springing from your mind like the world from the bull god’s nuts. I feel like prerecording things is built in to the spirit of electronic music, which has some overlap with opera and cinema, in that it’s about creating the illusion of corporeal transcendence.

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#5

When I say ‘cheating’ that’s sort of the closest I can come to simplifying it, I’m not at all bothered about a listener thinking it’s a rip off of someone else because it never manages to reach that stage and I think it’s just because somehow my brain has decided it’s less valid or honest an endeavour than my other musical outputs/projects.

I think I’ve wanted to make a proper mo wax style project since about 98 and I just need to try and push myself into actually doing it. I have zero real concept or notion of thinking/caring about external listeners because I’m quite prolific but also have almost zero audience, the things that I do are always things I’ve had to do because it’s the creative energy that’s burning out of me at that moment rather than trying to make anything like a thing that people are going to listen to.

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#6

It’s whatever ryan was talking about the other day, imposter syndrome. Except it’s localized in the sense of “is sampling a legitimate form of composition” so I would say with an elektron sampler, a composition can easily be a composition composed of samples. Is it taking the easy way? not always. sometimes if I just played the guitar part directly it would be easier than the preparation and cutting of the sample and sometimes tuning it etc. It’s not always the easy way so if the easy way is what it means to cheat then I say no.

Is it disingenuous as a composer to compose without instruments? is a sampler an instrument? you answered that yourself with your allegory about dj shadow, would you tell him “you’re cheating”? Or are you only telling yourself? your output or your expectations aside, what’s the crux of the concern? that you aren’t doing the work? sounds to me like you’re doing work.

honestly, even without an elektron sampler, I have to default to the belief that if you are using it to reinterpret sounds into other sounds, it is composition, it just may not be as flexible as an octatrack using an sp202. but I happily use my 202 to make my expensive samplers sound dirty so what do I know.

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#7

Oh it is entirely my own very internal, very specific hang, the best example is probably that every now and then, I’ll get the Syntakt out and spend a few hours building a dubby techno thing from the ground up, there’s almost always a point where I feel like it’s cooked, open up overbridge and record it. Tonight I thought about how I’ve not used the Digitakt for a little while and spent the hours chopping and sequencing and generally having a nice old time but at the end, I just don’t seem to have that same motivation for making it a fixed thing by recording it. I just don’t know why and wonder if it’s because I’ve got some sort of weird catholic guilt about it all being stuff I’ve got from places rather than painstakingly built from scratch. It’s dumb.

I think the overall vibe of the thread is basically me thinking "I should actually try to commit to recording some ‘finished’ tracks on the DT’ and that if I say it publicly I might read this back and actually do it.

(Absolutely zero judgement or anything on anyone else’s workflow, I don’t think/worry about where other people’s sounds are coming from, just whether they are cool or not - is this just the sonic equivalent of if someone makes you a meal/cup of tea, it’s always much nicer than if you make it yourself because you know all the ingredients and are much more aware of ‘how the sausage gets made’.)?

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#8

^ eg. I’ve went right off eating brownies lately because I went through a spell of making them and all I can think about now is how it’s basically just a bag of sugar and a block of butter.

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#9

Or sampling might not be for you. You can enjoy something without actually liking the act of it.

You might like a well manicured green lawn, doesn’t mean you want to get out the mower and have a go at trimming it yourself.

Also just for what it’s worth, you can use the digitakt for sound design - whether it be single cycle waveforms, or taking a crap sound and sculpting it into a better sound, the machine is fully capable of doing more than sampling motown. If you aren’t connecting with it though, it may not be the machine for you, maybe its more for you than an sp404, but perhaps your personal brand of masochism requires a worse sound and turning it into a better sound to feel vindicated as a creative. I don’t know, that part I can’t answer for you.

maybe there’s a hint of “I own gear I’m not using this is a waste” but you don’t want to get rid of it. I can’t tell you that either. What I can tell you is that the digitakt is fully capable of doing/making more than basic cut paste and playback.

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#10

Is sampling cheating? No, it is champling.

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#11

it’s not cheating at all in any way

every artistic endeavor is a collaboration with the countless people involved in every facet of the history of your medium

i can’t tell you how much recording my own samples really opened up the dt for me though, especially with the slice machine- even a simple arp from a synth has been invigorating to cut up

it might help to watch some youtube tutorials on how to sequence some nice hip-hop patterns to program and then make your own loops to sample / resample / resample again - it’s super easy to do on the dt and helps alleviate the self-imposed symptoms of imposter syndrome

everyone on this forum is super supportive too- let us help you abolish the cop in your mind

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#12

That’s what happened to me: after all my endeavors with sampling I realized I just didn’t enjoy it. There’s nothing wrong with others using samples, I just don’t enjoy both sampling and maintaining a sample library.

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#13

Sampling is all about capturing and musically recontextualising energy. It’s a never ending source of amazement and inspiration and I consider to it be actual magic.

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#14

Deep.

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#15

Ill just leave this here

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On a more serious note : one sample can be a world of sound by mangling it into oblivion. It then basically stops being a sample and is more a pure sound source.

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Sample Packs - Yay or nay?
#16

That’s it. There are many different kinds of sampling. On the one hand, there are the people who sample whole hooks, drum breaks, or vocal parts. On the other hand, there is musique concrète. I made a whole album just with youtube samples that I manipulated beyond recognition. It became a very personal album with a wide range of sounds, and I could never have done it without the wonderful technique of sampling.

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#17

I like this discussion as I’ve spent some time thinking about this as well lately. To add to the great things already said:

I don’t feel like sampling is cheating, I feel like its a way of making music thats somewhere in between composing music in the traditional sense, and being a dj, piecing together other peoples songs to make a great set which sets a vibe or tells a story.

For me, sampling is interacting with existing sound (which has its own history, values and references attached to it) to make something new. Combining these different histories and references into something which has its own feel is amazing to me. I love how RZA managed to turn a combination of kung-fu, cartoon, funk, and soul samples into something that sounds so unique and fresh that people now associate that sound with Wu-Tang and New York in the early 90’s.

Seeing sampling this way made me:

  1. Completely fall in love with making samplebased music again.
  2. Realize why I really dislike using readymade loop-packs. Loop packs have no soul/history, and using them does feel like cheating/being lazy to me.
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#18
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#19

Use what ever tools are at your disposal to create what’s in your head.

There will always be a snobbery around sampling, just as there is about using synths and drum machines instead or ‘real’ instruments.

Utilising technology and developments in music production is totally fine in my eyes and it’s how the music progresses and expands

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#20

It’s totally cheating, as is sequencing… but who cares!? It’s the appropriation and use of these capabilities that’s important now.
How to be musically individual/unique is way harder as a result. But again, that depends on your expectations, so who cares really!??

First off, yes, by all means finish tracks (and establish the earliest point of them being ‘finished’ if you can…), but don’t get too tied to the fact that it’s the Digitakt/sampling that’s making the tracks happen. They’re all just tools… it’s the music that’s important.

It doesn’t matter what tool you’re working on, the more music you make/finish, the more your own voice will appear… if you do 5 tracks and live with them, you’ll hear a thread.
You do another 5 tracks, that will follow over and the thread will be tighter.
Then do another 5. Etc, etc.

At some point you’ll use other devices, but the vibe/thread will still be there.

The trick is to keep making music, not using gear.

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