April 25, 2023 • 52 mins
In the world of music, sampling is somewhere between an art and a science. In this week's special two-part episode, Ben, Noel and Max explore the strange, fascinating evolution of sampling, from the early days of cutting physical tape to the dawn of hiphop and more. (Spoiler, we also spend some time talking about our recent Monster Jam adventure.)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:28):
Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning
in Skirt Skirt. Before we do anything, I think we're
gonna have to. We're gonna have to talk about the
events of this weekend, maybe with a pat on our
collective backs for not gonna shout out our super producer
Super I was getting there for Superproducer Max for Go Brown.
(00:50):
They called me Ben Guys. We had an adventure pretty recently.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Of epic proportions. Yes, we went to mostag It was
we chose very specifically. We could have gone on Saturday
Saturday Saturday, but that wouldn't have been the same as
Sunday Sunday Sunday. So that's what we did. We went
to Monster Jam at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. I'm not
sure about you, fellas, but I'd never been to a
(01:18):
motor speedway of any variety before, so it was really
a whole new experience for me. And brought the kid
along too, who had a sensory overload explosion of a time.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah. I had grown up a little closer to that area,
spent the formative years there, so I had been to
the Motor Speedway before, most recently a number of years ago,
when good friend of the show Ramsey, and I went
to see Burt Reynolds at an exhibition of all the
stunts from Cannonball Run. But the scale of the Motor
(01:51):
Speedway is egregious. It's the most American sized thing you
could imagine. And I think we were all prize when
we were recording our previous episode on the Origin of
Monster Trucks to learn that Monster Jam was in fact
not only still a thing, but coming to our fair
metropolis of Atlanta that very weekend. So we decided that
(02:17):
we would get together and go on a little bit
of day trip of a day trip, and I just
had such a lovely time with you guys. Great.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, we had a little bit of lunch beforehand one
of our favorite local spots, shout outs on Manuals.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Manuals, that's the.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Way to the Jimmy Carter's favorite restaurant, the Peanut Man.
A lot of politicians over the years have made that
kind of their home. I think Barack Obama posted up
there for like some sort of events at one point.
You're right, I remember hearing that they checked the light bulbs. Yes,
they checked. They didn't just check them, they replaced them.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
That's right. That's right, because apparently apparently security is way
tighter at manuals when the president and shows up versus
the you know, the podcasters getting brunch. But I wanted
to ask you guys before we get into this week's
two part episode, which we're all very excited about. What
was something that really surprised you about Monster Jam.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Well, I was definitely surprised to see, I believe Ben
you pointed out or heard maybe while I was off
getting an overpriced slushy in a creepy skull stein that
the original Grave Digger made an appearance and won the day,
by the wayay, which prompted some people to say it
was rigged.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah, so surprised.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, I was surprised to see that because I guess
I wasn't expecting you know, it wasn't expecting that. But
there were T shirts obviously very much a draw. I
was just surprised, as I think you were, Ben, by
the diversity of the crowd. It was all kinds of
folks that were there to enjoy Monster Jam.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, I was. I was surprised by that. A bit.
We also realized pretty quickly that this was the biggest
event in that town, you know, as Max said, a
few counties wide probably. And another thing that surprised me
that I hadn't really thought of seeing a monster jam
as an adult was that a lot of the trucks
(04:15):
break constantly and it doesn't really affect their score.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Rights, right, yeah, and they've got like cruise to come,
you know, roll up on the roll up on them
and then help them out.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Also, there was a loader I guess you'd call it.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
That was you know, what was a caterpillar I guess
is the big company that makes those kind of back
ho things. But it was a custom job. Where the
front part of it, which I'm affectionately referring to as
the bucket, I think that's actually right, but I'm just
I'm not quite sure. Let us know what you think
out their ridiculous historians, anyone working in construction. But it
looked like a dinosaur head kind of. And then on
the back the little part that I guess is usually
(04:53):
like a little pick kind of for like, you know,
stabilizing the thing. It looked like a a dinosaur's tail
and it would flip the trucks back over when they
maybe miscalculated on some sort of maneuver and landed, you know,
upside down or on their side.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah yeah, that happens pretty often. But we saw the backflips.
A couple of those landed successfully. These trucks, which are
already massive, went incredibly high at the air. Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I mean it's just like you know, the Motor Speedway
is basically the part around the edges where the NASCAR races.
You know, they go around in circles, but it's huge,
and it's like, you know, Max pointed out that these
types of arenas are the biggest of any types of
sporting arena, and it makes sense because for it to
be a meaningful race, it's got to be a decent
amount of space and then the But none of that
(05:44):
is used for the Monster Truck Rally.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I guess we'll call.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It only the part in the middle, which is maybe
where like a rock band might play. And they obviously
had to do a lot of work basically excavating it, right,
I mean, all of these hills and ramps and stuff.
That stuff's not always there, you know. They had to
build that stuff with dirt, you know, from scratch. So
that was pretty impressive, just the whole I don't know
(06:07):
the logistics of the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
The production. Yeah, the production. Everybody's got there. So they've
got the they've got like the profile video that plays
for every driver, which those things are I think on purpose,
really funny. And they all have their cool nicknames. All
the trucks are themed. There's like Megaladon, which I think
(06:30):
was your favorite. That was uh with uh what was
his name? La Due? There was le duc Le Duke
was the driver of Megaladon. No, maybe he was the
driver of the now I think he was.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Mildon had a bit of a rough run though. Yeah,
if we were called I think he you know, we were.
We made it a little late and we got there
for the freestyle event, which is like you know, it
sounds like with skateboarding brav where you basically just show
bowed around and do all the flips and maneuvers that
you can hand. And yeah, something went broke down on
old Megaladon. He didn't make it for more than thirty seconds,
(07:05):
but the rules were if you get up to thirty seconds,
you still get scored, and he got a respectable he
got a respectable smort because he did some pretty cool moves.
El Toro did a neat flex where he has the
thing is obviously looked like looks like a bull. He
kind of climbed up to the top of a hill
and then started shooting steam out of his his anthropomorphizing
(07:25):
this truck here nostrils, I guess, headlamp nostrils El Toro Loco.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah. And I went and looked up some of their
other work. I think I might have a new obsession.
I'm not sure I might. I might assume when they
come back now that we know it's such a big production,
both as a show and getting there. Another thing that
they did that I really enjoyed calling out to Max's
(07:52):
KFE wrestling references. They all had snippets, dare we say,
samples of plane as as they're introu That's what this
week's two part episode is all about. Free samples, right,
you know?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, costre oh exactly, little cubes of cheese, all that good.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Slice of pepperoni.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, or if you go to like a super h
smart perhaps a little ramikin plastic rammichin of noodle soup.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Perhaps I love the things that look like a medical
sample sized cup of kimchi, just enough to mess with
your breath, just enough. No, thank you, I'll give that
what it passed.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
No, no, we we just we are talking today about
the history of sampling. Sampling in music, and I mean
the term really it does come from, you know, something
very similar to what we're talking about with food stuffs,
the idea of taking a little snippet and recontextualizing it,
you know, putting it in a new light or a
(08:58):
separate little cup. Let's just say, so, what exactly is sampling.
It is exactly what I said. It's an art. It
is a very controversial thing over time, and we're gonna
talk all about that, but essentially, it is taking something
from a song, whether it be a part that is
highly recognizable or a part that no one would ever
(09:20):
be able to recognize. Out of context, you can transform it.
You can use it as the basis for a tune,
you can use it as a refrain of some kind,
or just some extra little bit of texture. We also
will run into terms like remixes, covers, and interpolations. All
of these things play into the fascinating history of sampling
(09:42):
and our research associate Extraordinary Jeff went above and beyond
on this one.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
We are really good.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
This is definitely gonna be a preemptive two parter because
there's so much history wrapped up in this, so much
cool pop culture. It's just really kind of a whole
thing that we're gonna get into, and I think it's
something that's close to both you and i've been as
music fans and fans of hip hop and music production.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
This is something that's very close to both of us.
Oh yeah, yeah, so say we all you know the
I like they're bringing up samples, remixes, covers, interpolation. They
all kind of orbit around the same concept, but they
apply it in different ways. One thing you noticed, you
noted about the way a sample could be transformed. I
(10:26):
would say there's also something that's pretty common in hip
hop where a sample is sped up or slowed down
to hit the tempo of whatever else the producer has
in the sonic cauldron. I like what I like the most, though,
I gotta confess I love a good sample, But I
am a sucker for a cover. And we're not going
(10:47):
to talk too much about cover songs day, but folks,
I can nearly guarantee you unless you have done some
digging already. I can nearly guarantee you that one of
your top twenty favorite songs in the world, the version
you like is probably a cover totally.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Like I mean, you know, we get this out of
the way because it really isn't exactly part of the
podcast today. But like, for example, of the song without
You by Harry Nilssen, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
I can't leave lieve it is with that.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
The original version of that is by a band called
Bad Finger, who were on Apple Records, was the Beatles label,
and they were like really kind of you know, taken
under the wing of the Beatles, and they had a
couple other hits of their own. But the version of
without You by Bad Finger is so incredibly dull, like
it's you know, the bones of it are there. It's
(11:38):
the same song, but it took Harry Nilssen's kind of
soaring vocal and like schmaltzy, you know, overwhelmingly you know,
cinematic production with all the strings and stuff to really
take that song where it needed to go. Or for example,
you know, Jimmy Hendrix's version of All on the watch Tower.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Or another example would be and this is one where
all the artists come out as winners. I will always
love you. Dolly Parton has a beautiful original version of it.
Whitney Houston, though, brought it to a new audience and
brought it to a level of worldwide renown and fame.
(12:16):
And the neat story about that all praise due to
Dolly Pardon. I'm legally required to say that, being from Tennessee.
The neat part about that is that Dolly Pardon was
absolutely over the moon happy with Whitney Houston's version. She's
had all this beautiful stuff to say about it. We're
gonna get into probably in part two, we're gonna get
(12:38):
into some of the more controversial stuff about sampling. But
just so we've got all our our guidelines clear here
for this monster jam of music. We've talked about a cover,
we talked about remixes. We've we mentioned interpolation, but nol
I guess the best way for us to say that
(13:00):
is an interpolation occurs when you hear some part of
a previous song exactly as it is included or woven in.
I don't know you. Could you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, you definitely, and it's definitely something you hear a
lot in songs today, like you know, for example, and
it might sometimes be paired with the sample, so there
could be a little vocal nod you know, to the
original song that actually either sings the exact melody, and
it's not meant to be sneaky. It's kind of meant
to be an homage, but it's sort of like it's
(13:38):
it's it's using that to add to the kind of
gravitas of the song by putting it in the light
of that original song, you know, and sort of saying,
here's our style on this, but it's not. It's maybe
like think of it as like a modernization of like
a Beach Boys song.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
You know, there was a I think there was a Garbage.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Song back in the day on their album Versus two
point zero where she says, I'm like you're the talk
of the town. You're the talko of the that's I
think is a is a Beach Boys. Uh, it's like
literally a little snippet of a Beach Boys song. But
I think this is a really great place to start
be because it used to you know, it took advancements
(14:17):
in technology for sampling as we know it to even
become possible for like manipulation of pre existing sound to
even become possible, you know, in the earlier days sampling,
you know, for what it was at the time, I
(14:39):
guess would have really been more kind of interpolations or nods,
like say, like a jazz riff that somebody made really popular.
You know, you might hear somebody recontextualize that same riff,
you know, in a new piece of music, right because
that was the only thing they could do. They had
to play it, and it would not have been considered
theft necessarily if it was done in a clever way
(15:02):
and it was woven into the fabric of kind of
a new piece of music. But it wasn't until turntables
and you know, the audio tape you know, came around
that people were able to take a recording, cut out
a little snippet of it literally either loop it, or
you know, physically manipulate the media in such a way
that you could stack that on top of other pre
(15:25):
existing kind of production bits.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, man, and this I like that. We're porting this
out too, because sometimes, especially if you're not a hip
hop fan, sometimes it's a little too easy for people
to say, oh, sampling, you're just taking something and you're
taking you know, let's say six seconds of it or whatever,
and you're just popping it in and looping it. That
(15:49):
does happen. But there really is an art and as
science to this, and you can do really really creative
dare I say postmodern things. Let's let's start there with
the jazz musicians. Okay, so this is not plagiarism. That's
an important thing to know. Often when jazz musicians are
playing and say the early nineteen hundreds or whatever, they
(16:13):
might see another musician they know in the crowd, right,
and when they see that person, let's say you're doing
your trumpet solo or whatever, they see that person and
they might add a little riff that they know that
person created as kind of a nod, a mark of respect,
and let's play together. This was a really cool thing.
(16:34):
And then of course, if you're a jazz aficionado in
the crowd and you get it, then what an easter egg.
And people love this. That's why they liked seeing the
live music, even if they had the records when records
became much more common.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, and this stuff really was a way of rewarding
the careful listener or the fan. These are kind of
little in jokes almost or just ways of kind of
everyone feeling included.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Of course, I love that you pointed out that this was.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
A way of commune to other musicians, but as these
things made their way onto records, it's a way of
kind of carrying on the legacy of other players. And
I don't think at this point people were necessarily clamoring
to be like, now that was mine.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
It's certainly not the same as say, like stealing a
joke verbatim from another comedian, right, you might maybe borrow
the setup of another comedian and then make it your own,
you know, do a little twist on it. But this
is kind of more like that. You're taking a little
thing as a out of respect and saying, look, I
think I dig what you're doing, so I'm gonna throw
(17:36):
it in here into the mix. And then you got
yourself a bit of a got yourself a stew.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
A sonic stew.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
And what I wanted to mention too, just about the
idea of what you pointed out, people maybe mischaracterizing sampling
as like lazy or like in some way just like
stealing because you didn't have an idea of your own.
I would and if I think you were saying some
people think that, we don't think that. I think what
we think is it's more like making a collage, you know. Yeah,
(18:02):
it's more like taking cool things that you see in
the world, in nature perhaps, or in different magazines, and
cutting it up and put it together to make something
that is in fact greater than the sum of their parts.
And a French composer named Pierre Schaeffer really pioneered this
at the advent of being able to manipulate sound through
(18:24):
literal physical manipulation of magnetic tape.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Yeah, yeah, and Arpal Pierre thought of this more like
a a study in the art of sound. In the
world of literature, the analog to this would be the
postmodern movement. Right, you are taking pre existing concepts, stories,
and so on, and you are putting them together. I
(18:50):
had a really interesting conversation last night about this about
art as synthesis, right, And art as synthesis means that
every creative mind, whatever they make and whatever given medium,
they are taking snippets of their own life experience, of
other art and creations that they like. They are analyzing them.
(19:11):
They're applying a critical eye and then through this through
this interrogation, they synthesize and they make something new out
of something existing. Now that sounds a little high faluting
for a comedy podcast about history, but I think it's
a good way to describe it. And this, Okay, this
Pierre guy, by the way, in this regard, he's tremendously important.
(19:35):
He's often not acknowledged as widely as he should be.
He is the one who is at the bleeding edge
of technology at the time. This music concrete is this
way of taking that tape music, making this sound collage.
And for him, really you can think of him as
(19:55):
a guy who created a technique of composing. He wanted
to take all these sounds with the technology available and
kind of vivisect them, cut him up, put him together,
collage them. I think it was later, actually pretty briefly
after there was the German electroniche music, right, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Mean sure with folks like craft Work eventually, but Stockhausen
there's all these like, you know, synthesizer kind of pioneers
who were using you know, combinations of tape machine and
like things like I don't know for mely the history
of music is riddled, as you would say, Ben with
misuse of technology right in the best possible way. Let
(20:37):
me let me let me clarify what I mean by that. Like,
you know, you take a piece of equipment that was
maybe designed for a broadcast purpose, like literally recreating speech,
you know, like like magnetic tape or wax cylinders, which,
by the way, that's more what Schaeffer and then his
partner Pierre Henry were using.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
This is pre magnetic tape.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
They were using disc cutters, you know, to act create
these kind of recreations of sound they could then manipulate.
It wasn't until a little bit later that magnetic tape
became widely available. But magnetic tape and things like tone generators,
a lot of these were developed by the military, you know,
like for example, tape would have been used during World
(21:19):
War Two as ways of sending transmissions that could just
play on a loop, right, you know, that would have
been important, whether it be things like number stations or
you know, just warnings or whatever things that would be
broadcast out. And I saw the most incredible walk through
of Abbey Roads studios in England, and that is you know,
(21:40):
ground zero for a lot of evolution of music technology. Again,
they figured out how to use it wrong in the
best possible ways. And they were talking about the studio
managers talking about this one particular tape machine they have
there as being you know, basically they went after the
war was over, they were able to kind of, you know,
(22:01):
some technicians from Abbey Road were able to go and
look at some of the military tech that was now
kind of considered to be now part of the public record,
I guess, you know, and they kind of retro engineered
it or reverse engineered it and figured out how to
make because they were hearing these transmissions like why does
it sound so good? How are they able to make
(22:23):
it sound so clean? Because prior to that it would
have been on things that were much more low fidelity. Right,
So that's exactly what we're talking about here with music Concrete.
And then now back to Abbey Road. The Beatles, you know,
were fans of these types of techniques, and they even
use some of this tape splicing and you know, using
different sounds and combining them, you know, like train sounds
(22:45):
and field recordings of nature and use it on a
piece of music called Revolution number nine on.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
The White album. Yeah. Yeah, And we also see that
this this practice sort of gates in the world. In
nineteen sixty one, there's a guy named James Tenney. He
creates something called Collage number one most creative name, but
it's an important It's an important track because he takes
(23:14):
an existing, very popular song, Elvis Presley's recording in blue
suede shoes, and he clips out parts of it. He
moves them around. Anybody who has worked with editing of
any sort, you can kind of picture the timeline right
the different tracks he's doing an analog version of that,
and then he plays them with this tempo. This is
(23:37):
pretty experimental. You can hear this. By the way, you
can find this online and check out what we're talking
about for pretty much all of these examples, so you
can find them somewhere. There was another one just a
few years later by two guys Bill B. Cannon and
Dicky Goodman. This was called Flying Saucer, and it was
like an early version of Girl Talk with a weird
(24:01):
UFO agenda, which I love. It's they took a bunch
of rock and roll hits, they smushed them together in
this creative way, and then they also have a fake
news report. Before the term fake news became weaponized they
have this like made up comedy sketch news report about
aliens coming from outer space, and this becomes popular, I
(24:24):
mean not you know, it's not like topping the charts popular,
but becomes known enough, becomes a novelty to the point
that lawyers get involved, right, and then we're gonna you know,
obviously this is this is a only the beginning shadow
of that can of worms being busted wide open. So
we start to see music recordings being treated as instruments
(24:50):
on their own, right, Like that's sort of what each
individual piece here is. You know, you're making a piece
of music that's combining different pieces of pre existing stuff,
and you're kind of using them as elements in some
sort of arrangement or orchestration. Not necessarily like SYNCD up rhythmically, right,
These are more like kind of you know, amorphous sort
of sound collages, you know, that are meant to be
(25:11):
sort of experiential. But we're not really we don't have
the technology yet necessarily, or maybe no one's thought of
it on how to get things to kind of rhythmically align.
It wasn't until the invention of a really cool instrument
called the chamberlain that we really start to see this
idea of manipulation of sound being used as another instrument
(25:32):
in the orchestra and the ensemble. A guy named Harry
Chamberlain invented this electro mechanical keyboard which contained within each
key in this very large, very clunky piece of equipment
is a loop of tape. And let's just really quickly
talk about what a tape loop is. Typically, you know,
(25:52):
tape is a on reels, you know, and it would
be a.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Song perhaps, you know, if you're in a studio, you
might mix mixed your song down onto a reel of
tape that has a stereo you know, two tracks, a
left track and a right track. If you make a loop,
you can actually splice together a discrete piece and have
it play over and over again over what's called a
tape head, and that is the part at the bottom
(26:19):
of between the reels, kind of the big chunky part
at the bottom of the tape machine if you've seen
a upright reel to reel. Chamberlain did this per key.
So essentially, each key triggers a loop of tape that
has a single sound, a single note of that sound,
and then when you can play them all together, you
get a chord, and they would be things like flutes
(26:41):
or strings or even the human voice.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
And it's a brilliant application of technology and art. He
also wasn't really in it for the money. These were
very expensive to build, they were pretty expensive to buy.
There weren't very many made. But it was interesting because
it sounds like we're talking about nine ancient history, but
I think the last chamberlains were actually made in the
(27:08):
nineteen eighties, In like the early eighties or from what
is it, nineteen seventy nineteen eighty one, there were around
one hundred Chamberlain M one, M two's nim fours made.
So this is this is really cool. I love unique
musical instruments, and I think this is as neat as
Ben Franklin's glass harmonica totally.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
And if you want to think about like the sound
of a chamberlain or what we're gonna go on to,
it's kind of you know what came after it, the melotron.
Think of the sounds of bands like Electric Light orchestra yelo.
You know you have like these big sweeping pad sounds
that sound like string.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It was like, that doesn't sound quite like.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
An orchestra something's a little uncanny valley about in a
cool way, or if you know the Smashing Pumpkins album's
Sorry Siamese Dream, there's a song on it called space
Boy that has this cool kind of like tapey out
of tune, kind of like the choir sound or music
of the band Genesis or Emerson, Lake and Palmer. These
(28:12):
were all kind of adopters of Oh and of course
Strawberry Fields Forever by the that that is you know,
classic melotron slash Chamberlain tape, you know, keyboard and yeah,
it's a beautiful sound because it is its own thing.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
It's like it's interesting with music technology, things get invented
kind of in a wave off. What if we replaced
the orchestra, you know, but that it ends up not
being what it becomes. It becomes more like this is
something that's different than the orchestra. The orchestra is the orchestra,
but this gives us it's it has its own unique
quality to it. And that carried on with the melotron,
(28:47):
which was developed a little bit later. Well, I want
to go back to Electric Light Orchestra, especially to shout
out one of my favorite songs by them turned to
Stone because because the band themselves said that when they
would do this in live performances, the part where it
gets really really fast. I talked with our pal Casey
Pegrin about this at length when I was going through
(29:08):
an el O phase when they get to the really
really fast part of the lyrics. They said they had
about an eighty percent success rate in live shows just
getting through it and getting every word.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
So shout out to you Elo. They didn't replace the
vocals there, they did my hand or by a voice
box every time. Yeah. Melotron though, So with our shoutout
to Yello, let's talk about the melotron, we need to
shout out a guy named Bill franzen Bill franzen Is
starts off as a money dude. He's an investor, and
(29:44):
he says, look, I'm going to get two of these
Chamberlain instruments. It's nineteen sixty two. I'm gonna get him
shipped to the United Kingdom. I'm going to make a
deal with a company that was called Brad Mattock Limited
later street Lee Electronics, and we're going to mass produce
these with the economy of scale. We're going to give
(30:05):
it a new name the melotron, and this is where
they make like the very first melotron that you could buy,
the Mark one is essentially a clone of the Chamberlain.
You could say it's a cover of the instrument. This
of course, they start to evolve and make their own innovations.
They get the Melotron in four hundred, the M four
(30:28):
thousand came out in two thousand and seven. And want
to shout out a couple of different cool blogs we found.
Let's let's give a shout out to a brief history
of sampling on tommin dot de. This was this was
where we got a lot of cool information. There's also
some videos you could watch of people playing Chamberlain's doing
(30:50):
the disc cutting for music concrete and then also playing
a melotron.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Melotrons are neat because, like you said, they really are
just a carryover of the Chamberlain and and you know,
the first ones were clones, and they started getting a
little more elaborate where you could have multiple tape sets
in each one, and that may have been the case
with the Chamberlain as well, but I kind of have
a sense that would have been much more limited I've seen.
I think maybe it was a Melotron M four hundred,
(31:16):
like one of the maybe like eighties versions, but it
has a knob on it that has a real clicky knob,
and it basically it does a shift, a physical shift
of some kind of the tape head over to a
different set of tapes. So I think on each one
of these you could maybe have like four sounds. And
the beauty of it now is obviously we're going to
get into digital stuff a little later. All of these
(31:36):
tapes have been archived and stored, so the Melotron Company
now has what's called the M four thousand and D,
which is a digital version of the melotron. They're still
quite expensive, but they're not the same as like having
this massive behemoth, you know, full of magnetic tape and
tape heads and you know, electro mechanical equipment. But they
(31:57):
have very faithfully sample do their own stuff, and you
can get on one of these melotron in four thousand d's.
They even have mini versions and there's several different models.
You can get every single one of these sounds that
would have been throughout the history of the melotron and
the Chamberlain pretty cool and a lot of them too.
(32:17):
Ben would have been little loops of like a band,
like little jazz bits, you know, a little like background
music or like swing jazz. And you can get all
of those two. I have a few plug in versions
of them. I don't have an actual melatron, I would
love one, but you can get them in plug in
form as well, and they're all very meticulously recreated from
the original tapes.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Pretty cool stuff. The December is third. Remember they use
they use a melotron, and that's what we're talking about,
is almost like a personality or an accent that it
can give a band, right or a song.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
It has a certain vintage quality that you can't get
any other way.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Right, And we are talking about a lot of very
smart people. First they're doing kind of live samples for
each other, honestly, and then we're building contraptions right to
utilize the latest technology. To your point, we haven't gone
digital yet, but fear not, it's on the way, right.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
We're not into digital yet, And I just want to
say too, up to this point, we've largely been talking
about sampling. I mean, aside from some of the music
conqurette stuff, as like recreating sounds of instruments in a
way that is easily recallable, right, Like so the Melatron,
it's not sampling as we know today in terms of
like cutting out a piece of popular music and making
(33:41):
it into something new. But these these devices are still
called samplers. And you know keyboards that say have meticulously
recreated multi recordings of a drum kit or like a
guitar or whatever, those are still called samplers. So there
are kind of two sides of the sampling. And then
sometimes people kind of lump it all into the idea
(34:04):
of taking someone's song and stealing it is not It's
way more than that, that's all we're trying to say.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, like we said earlier, it is more of a
creative act. And that's something I think we'll keep re
emphasizing to here because we're obviously team sampler. We're advocates
for this practice and this philosophy. Quick note too, on
the on that earlier statement, the when we say sampling
of these recorded instruments, we're counting vocals as an instrument absolutely,
(34:31):
because that's where you hear a choir tones or you know, yeah, yeah,
that's one of the other things get to all right,
it's the nineteen seventies it's nineteen seventy one. There's a
musician named John Congo's with a K out of South Africa,
(34:53):
and John is, according to the Guinness Book World Records,
not the most reliable source. Just being honest, John is
the creator of the first song to use a sample.
He takes a sample of a drumming track, an African
drumming track, and uses it in his song He's Gonna
Step on You Again. Okay. Now, people, even people at Guinness,
(35:18):
argue about this because whenever you're talking creative acts, it
can get kind of muddied, right, parallel thinking, right, right.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
I mean, this is like the stuff was out there
at this point to do these kinds of things. It
was just who was going to do it first and
the most popular version of it, I would argue, and
I think we would both agree that this was probably
happening in all over the place. People were trying experimenting
with this stuff. That's just how humans work.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, And so there's all right, brief side note on
the Guinness Book of World Records, which we could totally
do an episode on the Guinness Book of World Records.
Is a lot of fun, but is by its own admission,
not perfect. It was actually made to settle bar disputes
when people would be drinking and arguing in bars. So
it's not exactly a scientific work, but it is really
(36:07):
cool and the folks working there do their best. They
do a lot of fun things. They take it seriously,
but in some cases it can be difficult to figure
out the real first of something, So you will find
a lot of people saying Guinness might have gotten this
one wrong and that the real first song to use
a sample in this way was Mike Stephenson or Michelle Bernauld,
(36:32):
a French composer, was his song Burundi Black. It also
has a sample of a group of drummers. These are
from the Ingoma tribe in Burundi. This appeared on a
nineteen sixty eight album Music of Burundi. This guy Mike,
he adds guitar, he adds keyboard, and he creates this
(36:54):
song Burundi Black. So it's kind of like in hip
hop where you might take a nice, a tasty beat,
just the drum sample from it, and then boom you
add the organ, Boom, you add some vocal samples of
someone going oh yeah, are youre ah yeah, and then
someone else being like okay, and now it's suddenly a
(37:15):
different song.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, no, it's it is very transform and then that's
we're also going to sorry transformative. We're going to get
into that whole debate too as to when is it
like okay to borrow like this and when are you
putting yourself in serious legal jeopardy if you end up
with a hit on your hands. The very basis of
technically not technically truly belongs to somebody else. And it
(37:38):
also to your point earlier, Ben about synthesis, this is
all a big conversation about just the nature of creativity,
you know, and like where we where ideas come from,
and like you know, what is and is not off limits,
and like with the finite nature of the human imagination
and all of that good stuff. So seventy one, you're right,
we have this, Brendi Black. It's a loop of this, this,
(38:01):
this drumming, this kind of field recording, you know, from
indigenous drummers, from the Ngomont tribe drums to your point earlier, Ben,
as well, you know, they're some of the easiest things
to sample because they're cyclical and repeating by their very nature.
So you you know, this point we would be talking
about people probably making actual tape loops, you know, perhaps
(38:24):
recording it onto a real to reel that we said,
and like you know, the beatles of this all the
time where you are are Pink Floyd, you know all
any band that uses this kind of sound, you know,
this kind of like looping tape y kind of stuff.
You can actually just take a real to reel tape
machine or like a portable Nagra tape machine and you
can make the loop and you splice it together with
(38:46):
splicing tape and you can make a seamless loop that'll
just go over and over again. You can even do
stuff where you take the tape, spool it off of
the the real and loop it around like a microphone
stand or some believe and used like beer bottles that
they would hold, you know, and then that that loop.
Those are usually for more amorphous, less precise loops. But
(39:07):
to make a really precise rhythmic glube, you have to
cut it like really really accurately and then have it
loop like that. So this is all done by hand
with with raizors, you know, and and tape using these
splicing blocks. It was like film reels exists very it's
exactly the same. And in fact, film editing, you know,
there's a there's an aspect of audio editing as well,
because you're you're you're splicing. You have the audio track
(39:30):
and the video track and they're both, you know, videos
on film, the audio is on magnetic tape.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
And you know, I.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I'm not going to purport to be able to understand
how magnetic tape works exactly, or like how graglets were
on a vinyl. It's magic. As far as I'm concerned,
I understand the basis of it. I mean, it is a
way of storing data. You know, you use magnetic tape
to store data. So that's the best that I can.
(39:57):
You know, essentially, audio is just capturing sound waves through
a microphone. That is a way of picking up vibrations
on the air. You know, air carries sound their different
wave forms. You know, if you use a synthesizer, the
purest waveforms are just like a saw tooth wave or
(40:18):
a sine wave or whatever. Complex waveforms are when all
those things combine together and create these like really interesting harmonics.
And that's literally what sound is. It's not much more
complicated than that. And then you're using various electronic components
to translate the vibrations that microphone is picking up, combine
them with other ones, and then store them on a
thing that can be replayed. But we're getting right up
(40:39):
on the advent of the first digital sampler.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, so let's step back to sew up RUNDI Black.
It comes out, It does pretty well. It sells one
hundred and twenty five thousand copies in the United Kingdom,
and generally those two guys, Mike Stevenson and John Congos,
those two guys will be mentioned as the first people
to use a sample in a song. Right. If we
(41:07):
look at nineteen seventy six, this is where we see
the dawn of the digital the computer music melodion, which
sounds like a really cool job. It's actually the first
digital sampler. It's monophonic, meaning it doesn't have those two channels.
It's vented by a guy named Harry Mindel. And this
is a contraption. I love the word contraption. I don't
(41:29):
think it has negative connotations. I think it should be
used more often. This thing is a contraption. It's heavy.
If you look at it, and you pull pictures of
this up pretty easily, Folks, if you look at it,
it's like an old school cathode ray nineteen sixties television
looking thing, and it's got a keyboard, and then under
it it's got something that's about the size of a
(41:51):
household microwave that is the processor. Remember this is before
a lot of miniaturization of technology, so this is a
charm and uh and people start using it. One of
the most famous early adopters is the man myth legend
Stevie Wonder on his nineteen seventy nine album Journey through
(42:12):
the Secret Life of Plants, which still is a great name.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Absolutely, and folks like Herbie Hancock, you know, would have
been aware. Anyone that was like at a certain level
of fame. You know, they would have had first crack
in these kind of things because they could afford it.
They could afford it or not only they were probably
just let allowed to use it, just so that the
manufacturer and like the creators they needed to get co
signed by like these big artists like Mogue for example,
(42:38):
Moge synthesizers. They were not popular until you had folks
like Emerson, Lake and Palmer bringing these giant things out
on tour. And then you know when they started making
more miniaturized versions of them, like with the Mini mog
you started to see the Beatles using them on records,
you know, on Abbey Road for example, And that's what
leads to these things becoming household names because these these
(43:00):
megastars you know, are using them. Same with this one,
the computer music melodeon, and essentially all it is, I mean,
we think about computers now how easy it is for
us to record and playback sounds and do video and
do any number of things that would have been absolutely
just impossible to do at the time. All it is
is basically the same concept as that melotron. Each key
(43:24):
plays back a sound. It can be a set of
sounds where each key is just a note in a
particular instrument that's recorded to each you know, key position,
and so you can play back sets. But then you
could do things like I don't know if you remember,
speaking of Stevie Wonder, there's an episode of The Cosby
Show where Stevie Wonder is in it and they're in
the studio with Stevie Wonder and he's showing THEO or
whatever whichever character was, I can't recall his sampler, his keyboard,
(43:48):
and he's like he records his voice into it and
he goes jamming on the one jamming on the one
drumn on the w DR. It's pitched. You can record
it and then pitch it. Each key takes it down
a certain interval of musical steps.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
So you could.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Really create things that were impossible to do beforehand. Oh yeah,
and this, So the way this stuff proliferates is that
you're talking about rarefied air right with these musicians. So
once one person does something really creative and interesting with it,
everybody else wants to explore. It's not necessarily in a
(44:23):
competitive way. It's more like, imagine you are a painter
and one of your buddies who is also a painter,
discovers a new color right right, and then you it's
not you being a jerk, it's you saying, I want
to paint with that color too, which I think is
pretty amazing. And we're getting to one of we're not
(44:45):
doing you I want to jump the gut. But we're
getting to one of my favorite parts of music history here.
We've got to earn our way to it. We've got
to talk about some more of these digital innovations. Man, Like,
there's still really nice ments. Yeah every time.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, there's still yeah, there's still like okay, like the
oh the fair Light computer musical instrument called the Fairlight CMI,
that's what it says for a computer musical instrument. Uh.
This was polyphonic. It's a digital synthesizer and it had
it was like an early version of a one stop shop,
(45:23):
you know. It kind of I think, I don't know.
It reminds me of that technology that came out back
in back in the eighties where they had early versions
of like smartphones or early versions yeah, like touchscreen stuff,
and it just never caught on because it was very expensive.
(45:45):
But this thing, the fair Light, had a digital audio
workstation and it also had a touch screen.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Which is essentially Yeah, we think of digital audio workstations
today as like any computer software that allows you to
make multi track recordings like Adobe Audition. Adobe Audition would
be a digital audio workstation. The real popular ones for
music production things like pro Tools or Logic Logic Pro
you know on Apple, or there's free ones, just one
(46:14):
called Reaper that people really like.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Fruity loops.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Back in the day, loos is dope, fretty lous is
really and actually there's fl studio is still quite popular.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
People still use it.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
There's lots of different ones, and there are lots of
debates over which one is the best one. I love
the one called Ableton Live that is very loop based
and it's a real creative tool. A lot of that's
It's made by a German company and it is kind
of the go to for electronic musicians. I've always loved
it for its kind of creative sketch pad ability, but
I've recently started using Logic as well for band more
(46:45):
band kind of recordings.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
But the fair Light CMI really was sort of an.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Early version of that because you could record audio into
it and have it playback more than one thing at
the same time you hit on it. Ben the idea
of it being polyphonic, and I actually, when I was
doing my Stevie Wonder story earlier, I sort of was
incorrect because the melodion was monophonic, meaning you can only
(47:11):
play back one sound at a time, which isn't you
know that's a limitation of you know, certain instruments that's
actually done always a bad thing, Like certain synthesizers are monophonic,
meaning you can only play lead lines, you can only
play melodies. You can't play chords, but on the fair
Light you could. And I've actually seen one of these
in person. They're white, they're very stark and futuristic kind
(47:34):
of looking, and that touch screen was huge. And so
then you had folks like Quincy Jones using these again,
Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel. You know, any eighties kind of
luminary would have gotten their hands on one of these.
And that's where you know that orchestra hit sound been
that first came out on the fair Light, And legend
(47:57):
has it that it was actually a sample of a
Stravinsky performance of the Rights of Spring, and that sound
has been put on cassio keyboards and you know, like
cheapy kind of like you know a little you know,
learn how to play kind of keyboards ever since. And
now it's being brought back a lot and a lot
of this like hyper pop music and stuff that is
(48:19):
very kind of referential of these these older periods. But
that is a sample of an orchestra that you know,
when you get a keyboard like this, all of the
sounds on it, technically you're allowed to.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Use them, right Otherwise they wouldn't be on the machine
unless you're buying something homebrew, which you can. You can
find people who will make these things for you. They're
mad scientists, and I am in love with every one
of them. The big thing that happens now is this
economy of scale. Right as technological innovations occur, unless somebody's
(48:55):
playing some reindeer games, inevitably a piece of technology will
become affordable to more and more people. That's just the
pattern we see throughout history totally, unless someone's trying to
interfere with that, like in the world of nuclear weaponry.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Well frankly with creativity. It's kind of the pattern you
want because it is a It is the democratization of creation.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
You know. It doesn't mean that only.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
The super rich can go to acting school and become
you know, a star an actor, or go to music school.
It now means that through YouTube videos, tutorials and free
software garage band fruity loops, anyone can make the can
get their ideas out, and it just means we have Sure,
it means we have a lot more to sift through,
but usually the really good stuff rises to the top
(49:44):
by its own merit. And I think, I think, yeah, hopefully,
but in a perfect world, I really think that that's
it's it's there's nothing, there's nothing greater than anybody being
able to exercise some creative muscle, you know, because anybody
could do it if they had the tools. That That's
why I'm a huge proponent of the democratization of knowledge, Right,
it should not be restricted because it is powerful. And
(50:07):
knowledge is another type of technology, I would argue because
a lot of it's human created. Well, technology, writing is technology,
you know. I mean the way to spread these ideas
is in and of itself technology too, you know.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Yeah, And so this this idea of things becoming affordable,
this is key, This is the next problem to solve.
It happens in the early nineteen eighties. We see digital
samplers become much more affordable, much more accessible. This is
the era of the MPC getting on the scene, the
(50:41):
SP twelve hundred, the EBUSP twelve hundred, These things all
of a sudden seem to be everywhere. And people who
have really creative minds that could not afford an orchestra,
that could not you know, maybe have the time and
energy and cap all to play producer and say, let
(51:02):
me go find somebody who has a French horn, right,
and can spend the afternoon doing this riff with me.
Now they are able to become the authors of their
own sonic destiny. And Folks, we did say this was
going to be a two parter, so we we actually
went a little further and decided we were going to
(51:23):
hold the rest for part two. No, I can't wait
till we get to hip hop, because we were going
to talk just about the some of the controversies of sampley.
But I think maybe we say a good thing too
for parts Yeah, No, I undercent me.
Speaker 2 (51:34):
And the thing is, like like I said at the
top of the show, this is something that's very near
and dear to both of us and Max as well,
and so we're gonna we've got a lot of our
own little size to share, you know, because this is
something that's very close to us, that we've kind of
grown up with as well, and you know, as fans
of all kinds of music and music production, we got
a lot to say about the subject, and we're happy
(51:54):
that you're along for the ride with us. Meanwhile, huge
thanks to research associated Shordinaire Jeff Bartlett for this absolutely
whopping research grief on on topic that we are all
super super excited to talk about Jonathan Strickland, the Quistor,
Long may he rain in anonymity hopefully yes, And Big
Big Things, of course, as always, inevitably have repeater Bowmans
(52:18):
in every show. Big Thanks to Max Williams, thanks to
Jonathan Strickland, thanks to Chris Frosciotis, thanks to Eve's Jeffcoat,
thanks to The Grave Digger, and thanks to Caleb Blood.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Those last two are from Monsters Jam.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:28):
Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning
in Skirt Skirt. Before we do anything, I think we're
gonna have to. We're gonna have to talk about the
events of this weekend, maybe with a pat on our
collective backs for not gonna shout out our super producer
Super I was getting there for Superproducer Max for Go Brown.
(00:50):
They called me Ben Guys. We had an adventure pretty recently.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Of epic proportions. Yes, we went to mostag It was
we chose very specifically. We could have gone on Saturday
Saturday Saturday, but that wouldn't have been the same as
Sunday Sunday Sunday. So that's what we did. We went
to Monster Jam at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. I'm not
sure about you, fellas, but I'd never been to a
(01:18):
motor speedway of any variety before, so it was really
a whole new experience for me. And brought the kid
along too, who had a sensory overload explosion of a time.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah. I had grown up a little closer to that area,
spent the formative years there, so I had been to
the Motor Speedway before, most recently a number of years ago,
when good friend of the show Ramsey, and I went
to see Burt Reynolds at an exhibition of all the
stunts from Cannonball Run. But the scale of the Motor
(01:51):
Speedway is egregious. It's the most American sized thing you
could imagine. And I think we were all prize when
we were recording our previous episode on the Origin of
Monster Trucks to learn that Monster Jam was in fact
not only still a thing, but coming to our fair
metropolis of Atlanta that very weekend. So we decided that
(02:17):
we would get together and go on a little bit
of day trip of a day trip, and I just
had such a lovely time with you guys. Great.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, we had a little bit of lunch beforehand one
of our favorite local spots, shout outs on Manuals.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Manuals, that's the.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Way to the Jimmy Carter's favorite restaurant, the Peanut Man.
A lot of politicians over the years have made that
kind of their home. I think Barack Obama posted up
there for like some sort of events at one point.
You're right, I remember hearing that they checked the light bulbs. Yes,
they checked. They didn't just check them, they replaced them.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
That's right. That's right, because apparently apparently security is way
tighter at manuals when the president and shows up versus
the you know, the podcasters getting brunch. But I wanted
to ask you guys before we get into this week's
two part episode, which we're all very excited about. What
was something that really surprised you about Monster Jam.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Well, I was definitely surprised to see, I believe Ben
you pointed out or heard maybe while I was off
getting an overpriced slushy in a creepy skull stein that
the original Grave Digger made an appearance and won the day,
by the wayay, which prompted some people to say it
was rigged.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah, so surprised.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, I was surprised to see that because I guess
I wasn't expecting you know, it wasn't expecting that. But
there were T shirts obviously very much a draw. I
was just surprised, as I think you were, Ben, by
the diversity of the crowd. It was all kinds of
folks that were there to enjoy Monster Jam.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, I was. I was surprised by that. A bit.
We also realized pretty quickly that this was the biggest
event in that town, you know, as Max said, a
few counties wide probably. And another thing that surprised me
that I hadn't really thought of seeing a monster jam
as an adult was that a lot of the trucks
(04:15):
break constantly and it doesn't really affect their score.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Rights, right, yeah, and they've got like cruise to come,
you know, roll up on the roll up on them
and then help them out.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Also, there was a loader I guess you'd call it.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
That was you know, what was a caterpillar I guess
is the big company that makes those kind of back
ho things. But it was a custom job. Where the
front part of it, which I'm affectionately referring to as
the bucket, I think that's actually right, but I'm just
I'm not quite sure. Let us know what you think
out their ridiculous historians, anyone working in construction. But it
looked like a dinosaur head kind of. And then on
the back the little part that I guess is usually
(04:53):
like a little pick kind of for like, you know,
stabilizing the thing. It looked like a a dinosaur's tail
and it would flip the trucks back over when they
maybe miscalculated on some sort of maneuver and landed, you know,
upside down or on their side.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah yeah, that happens pretty often. But we saw the backflips.
A couple of those landed successfully. These trucks, which are
already massive, went incredibly high at the air. Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I mean it's just like you know, the Motor Speedway
is basically the part around the edges where the NASCAR races.
You know, they go around in circles, but it's huge,
and it's like, you know, Max pointed out that these
types of arenas are the biggest of any types of
sporting arena, and it makes sense because for it to
be a meaningful race, it's got to be a decent
amount of space and then the But none of that
(05:44):
is used for the Monster Truck Rally.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I guess we'll call.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
It only the part in the middle, which is maybe
where like a rock band might play. And they obviously
had to do a lot of work basically excavating it, right,
I mean, all of these hills and ramps and stuff.
That stuff's not always there, you know. They had to
build that stuff with dirt, you know, from scratch. So
that was pretty impressive, just the whole I don't know
(06:07):
the logistics of the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
The production. Yeah, the production. Everybody's got there. So they've
got the they've got like the profile video that plays
for every driver, which those things are I think on purpose,
really funny. And they all have their cool nicknames. All
the trucks are themed. There's like Megaladon, which I think
(06:30):
was your favorite. That was uh with uh what was
his name? La Due? There was le duc Le Duke
was the driver of Megaladon. No, maybe he was the
driver of the now I think he was.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Mildon had a bit of a rough run though. Yeah,
if we were called I think he you know, we were.
We made it a little late and we got there
for the freestyle event, which is like you know, it
sounds like with skateboarding brav where you basically just show
bowed around and do all the flips and maneuvers that
you can hand. And yeah, something went broke down on
old Megaladon. He didn't make it for more than thirty seconds,
(07:05):
but the rules were if you get up to thirty seconds,
you still get scored, and he got a respectable he
got a respectable smort because he did some pretty cool moves.
El Toro did a neat flex where he has the
thing is obviously looked like looks like a bull. He
kind of climbed up to the top of a hill
and then started shooting steam out of his his anthropomorphizing
(07:25):
this truck here nostrils, I guess, headlamp nostrils El Toro Loco.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah. And I went and looked up some of their
other work. I think I might have a new obsession.
I'm not sure I might. I might assume when they
come back now that we know it's such a big production,
both as a show and getting there. Another thing that
they did that I really enjoyed calling out to Max's
(07:52):
KFE wrestling references. They all had snippets, dare we say,
samples of plane as as they're introu That's what this
week's two part episode is all about. Free samples, right,
you know?
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, costre oh exactly, little cubes of cheese, all that good.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Slice of pepperoni.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, or if you go to like a super h
smart perhaps a little ramikin plastic rammichin of noodle soup.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Perhaps I love the things that look like a medical
sample sized cup of kimchi, just enough to mess with
your breath, just enough. No, thank you, I'll give that
what it passed.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
No, no, we we just we are talking today about
the history of sampling. Sampling in music, and I mean
the term really it does come from, you know, something
very similar to what we're talking about with food stuffs,
the idea of taking a little snippet and recontextualizing it,
you know, putting it in a new light or a
(08:58):
separate little cup. Let's just say, so, what exactly is sampling.
It is exactly what I said. It's an art. It
is a very controversial thing over time, and we're gonna
talk all about that, but essentially, it is taking something
from a song, whether it be a part that is
highly recognizable or a part that no one would ever
(09:20):
be able to recognize. Out of context, you can transform it.
You can use it as the basis for a tune,
you can use it as a refrain of some kind,
or just some extra little bit of texture. We also
will run into terms like remixes, covers, and interpolations. All
of these things play into the fascinating history of sampling
(09:42):
and our research associate Extraordinary Jeff went above and beyond
on this one.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
We are really good.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
This is definitely gonna be a preemptive two parter because
there's so much history wrapped up in this, so much
cool pop culture. It's just really kind of a whole
thing that we're gonna get into, and I think it's
something that's close to both you and i've been as
music fans and fans of hip hop and music production.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
This is something that's very close to both of us.
Oh yeah, yeah, so say we all you know the
I like they're bringing up samples, remixes, covers, interpolation. They
all kind of orbit around the same concept, but they
apply it in different ways. One thing you noticed, you
noted about the way a sample could be transformed. I
(10:26):
would say there's also something that's pretty common in hip
hop where a sample is sped up or slowed down
to hit the tempo of whatever else the producer has
in the sonic cauldron. I like what I like the most, though,
I gotta confess I love a good sample, But I
am a sucker for a cover. And we're not going
(10:47):
to talk too much about cover songs day, but folks,
I can nearly guarantee you unless you have done some
digging already. I can nearly guarantee you that one of
your top twenty favorite songs in the world, the version
you like is probably a cover totally.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Like I mean, you know, we get this out of
the way because it really isn't exactly part of the
podcast today. But like, for example, of the song without
You by Harry Nilssen, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
I can't leave lieve it is with that.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
The original version of that is by a band called
Bad Finger, who were on Apple Records, was the Beatles label,
and they were like really kind of you know, taken
under the wing of the Beatles, and they had a
couple other hits of their own. But the version of
without You by Bad Finger is so incredibly dull, like
it's you know, the bones of it are there. It's
(11:38):
the same song, but it took Harry Nilssen's kind of
soaring vocal and like schmaltzy, you know, overwhelmingly you know,
cinematic production with all the strings and stuff to really
take that song where it needed to go. Or for example,
you know, Jimmy Hendrix's version of All on the watch Tower.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Or another example would be and this is one where
all the artists come out as winners. I will always
love you. Dolly Parton has a beautiful original version of it.
Whitney Houston, though, brought it to a new audience and
brought it to a level of worldwide renown and fame.
(12:16):
And the neat story about that all praise due to
Dolly Pardon. I'm legally required to say that, being from Tennessee.
The neat part about that is that Dolly Pardon was
absolutely over the moon happy with Whitney Houston's version. She's
had all this beautiful stuff to say about it. We're
gonna get into probably in part two, we're gonna get
(12:38):
into some of the more controversial stuff about sampling. But
just so we've got all our our guidelines clear here
for this monster jam of music. We've talked about a cover,
we talked about remixes. We've we mentioned interpolation, but nol
I guess the best way for us to say that
(13:00):
is an interpolation occurs when you hear some part of
a previous song exactly as it is included or woven in.
I don't know you. Could you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, you definitely, and it's definitely something you hear a
lot in songs today, like you know, for example, and
it might sometimes be paired with the sample, so there
could be a little vocal nod you know, to the
original song that actually either sings the exact melody, and
it's not meant to be sneaky. It's kind of meant
to be an homage, but it's sort of like it's
(13:38):
it's it's using that to add to the kind of
gravitas of the song by putting it in the light
of that original song, you know, and sort of saying,
here's our style on this, but it's not. It's maybe
like think of it as like a modernization of like
a Beach Boys song.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
You know, there was a I think there was a Garbage.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Song back in the day on their album Versus two
point zero where she says, I'm like you're the talk
of the town. You're the talko of the that's I
think is a is a Beach Boys. Uh, it's like
literally a little snippet of a Beach Boys song. But
I think this is a really great place to start
be because it used to you know, it took advancements
(14:17):
in technology for sampling as we know it to even
become possible for like manipulation of pre existing sound to
even become possible, you know, in the earlier days sampling,
you know, for what it was at the time, I
(14:39):
guess would have really been more kind of interpolations or nods,
like say, like a jazz riff that somebody made really popular.
You know, you might hear somebody recontextualize that same riff,
you know, in a new piece of music, right because
that was the only thing they could do. They had
to play it, and it would not have been considered
theft necessarily if it was done in a clever way
(15:02):
and it was woven into the fabric of kind of
a new piece of music. But it wasn't until turntables
and you know, the audio tape you know, came around
that people were able to take a recording, cut out
a little snippet of it literally either loop it, or
you know, physically manipulate the media in such a way
that you could stack that on top of other pre
(15:25):
existing kind of production bits.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, man, and this I like that. We're porting this
out too, because sometimes, especially if you're not a hip
hop fan, sometimes it's a little too easy for people
to say, oh, sampling, you're just taking something and you're
taking you know, let's say six seconds of it or whatever,
and you're just popping it in and looping it. That
(15:49):
does happen. But there really is an art and as
science to this, and you can do really really creative
dare I say postmodern things. Let's let's start there with
the jazz musicians. Okay, so this is not plagiarism. That's
an important thing to know. Often when jazz musicians are
playing and say the early nineteen hundreds or whatever, they
(16:13):
might see another musician they know in the crowd, right,
and when they see that person, let's say you're doing
your trumpet solo or whatever, they see that person and
they might add a little riff that they know that
person created as kind of a nod, a mark of respect,
and let's play together. This was a really cool thing.
(16:34):
And then of course, if you're a jazz aficionado in
the crowd and you get it, then what an easter egg.
And people love this. That's why they liked seeing the
live music, even if they had the records when records
became much more common.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, and this stuff really was a way of rewarding
the careful listener or the fan. These are kind of
little in jokes almost or just ways of kind of
everyone feeling included.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Of course, I love that you pointed out that this was.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
A way of commune to other musicians, but as these
things made their way onto records, it's a way of
kind of carrying on the legacy of other players. And
I don't think at this point people were necessarily clamoring
to be like, now that was mine.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
It's certainly not the same as say, like stealing a
joke verbatim from another comedian, right, you might maybe borrow
the setup of another comedian and then make it your own,
you know, do a little twist on it. But this
is kind of more like that. You're taking a little
thing as a out of respect and saying, look, I
think I dig what you're doing, so I'm gonna throw
(17:36):
it in here into the mix. And then you got
yourself a bit of a got yourself a stew.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
A sonic stew.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
And what I wanted to mention too, just about the
idea of what you pointed out, people maybe mischaracterizing sampling
as like lazy or like in some way just like
stealing because you didn't have an idea of your own.
I would and if I think you were saying some
people think that, we don't think that. I think what
we think is it's more like making a collage, you know. Yeah,
(18:02):
it's more like taking cool things that you see in
the world, in nature perhaps, or in different magazines, and
cutting it up and put it together to make something
that is in fact greater than the sum of their parts.
And a French composer named Pierre Schaeffer really pioneered this
at the advent of being able to manipulate sound through
(18:24):
literal physical manipulation of magnetic tape.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Yeah, yeah, and Arpal Pierre thought of this more like
a a study in the art of sound. In the
world of literature, the analog to this would be the
postmodern movement. Right, you are taking pre existing concepts, stories,
and so on, and you are putting them together. I
(18:50):
had a really interesting conversation last night about this about
art as synthesis, right, And art as synthesis means that
every creative mind, whatever they make and whatever given medium,
they are taking snippets of their own life experience, of
other art and creations that they like. They are analyzing them.
(19:11):
They're applying a critical eye and then through this through
this interrogation, they synthesize and they make something new out
of something existing. Now that sounds a little high faluting
for a comedy podcast about history, but I think it's
a good way to describe it. And this, Okay, this
Pierre guy, by the way, in this regard, he's tremendously important.
(19:35):
He's often not acknowledged as widely as he should be.
He is the one who is at the bleeding edge
of technology at the time. This music concrete is this
way of taking that tape music, making this sound collage.
And for him, really you can think of him as
(19:55):
a guy who created a technique of composing. He wanted
to take all these sounds with the technology available and
kind of vivisect them, cut him up, put him together,
collage them. I think it was later, actually pretty briefly
after there was the German electroniche music, right, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Mean sure with folks like craft Work eventually, but Stockhausen
there's all these like, you know, synthesizer kind of pioneers
who were using you know, combinations of tape machine and
like things like I don't know for mely the history
of music is riddled, as you would say, Ben with
misuse of technology right in the best possible way. Let
(20:37):
me let me let me clarify what I mean by that. Like,
you know, you take a piece of equipment that was
maybe designed for a broadcast purpose, like literally recreating speech,
you know, like like magnetic tape or wax cylinders, which,
by the way, that's more what Schaeffer and then his
partner Pierre Henry were using.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
This is pre magnetic tape.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
They were using disc cutters, you know, to act create
these kind of recreations of sound they could then manipulate.
It wasn't until a little bit later that magnetic tape
became widely available. But magnetic tape and things like tone generators,
a lot of these were developed by the military, you know,
like for example, tape would have been used during World
(21:19):
War Two as ways of sending transmissions that could just
play on a loop, right, you know, that would have
been important, whether it be things like number stations or
you know, just warnings or whatever things that would be
broadcast out. And I saw the most incredible walk through
of Abbey Roads studios in England, and that is you know,
(21:40):
ground zero for a lot of evolution of music technology. Again,
they figured out how to use it wrong in the
best possible ways. And they were talking about the studio
managers talking about this one particular tape machine they have
there as being you know, basically they went after the
war was over, they were able to kind of, you know,
(22:01):
some technicians from Abbey Road were able to go and
look at some of the military tech that was now
kind of considered to be now part of the public record,
I guess, you know, and they kind of retro engineered
it or reverse engineered it and figured out how to
make because they were hearing these transmissions like why does
it sound so good? How are they able to make
(22:23):
it sound so clean? Because prior to that it would
have been on things that were much more low fidelity. Right,
So that's exactly what we're talking about here with music Concrete.
And then now back to Abbey Road. The Beatles, you know,
were fans of these types of techniques, and they even
use some of this tape splicing and you know, using
different sounds and combining them, you know, like train sounds
(22:45):
and field recordings of nature and use it on a
piece of music called Revolution number nine on.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
The White album. Yeah. Yeah, And we also see that
this this practice sort of gates in the world. In
nineteen sixty one, there's a guy named James Tenney. He
creates something called Collage number one most creative name, but
it's an important It's an important track because he takes
(23:14):
an existing, very popular song, Elvis Presley's recording in blue
suede shoes, and he clips out parts of it. He
moves them around. Anybody who has worked with editing of
any sort, you can kind of picture the timeline right
the different tracks he's doing an analog version of that,
and then he plays them with this tempo. This is
(23:37):
pretty experimental. You can hear this. By the way, you
can find this online and check out what we're talking
about for pretty much all of these examples, so you
can find them somewhere. There was another one just a
few years later by two guys Bill B. Cannon and
Dicky Goodman. This was called Flying Saucer, and it was
like an early version of Girl Talk with a weird
(24:01):
UFO agenda, which I love. It's they took a bunch
of rock and roll hits, they smushed them together in
this creative way, and then they also have a fake
news report. Before the term fake news became weaponized they
have this like made up comedy sketch news report about
aliens coming from outer space, and this becomes popular, I
(24:24):
mean not you know, it's not like topping the charts popular,
but becomes known enough, becomes a novelty to the point
that lawyers get involved, right, and then we're gonna you know,
obviously this is this is a only the beginning shadow
of that can of worms being busted wide open. So
we start to see music recordings being treated as instruments
(24:50):
on their own, right, Like that's sort of what each
individual piece here is. You know, you're making a piece
of music that's combining different pieces of pre existing stuff,
and you're kind of using them as elements in some
sort of arrangement or orchestration. Not necessarily like SYNCD up rhythmically, right,
These are more like kind of you know, amorphous sort
of sound collages, you know, that are meant to be
(25:11):
sort of experiential. But we're not really we don't have
the technology yet necessarily, or maybe no one's thought of
it on how to get things to kind of rhythmically align.
It wasn't until the invention of a really cool instrument
called the chamberlain that we really start to see this
idea of manipulation of sound being used as another instrument
(25:32):
in the orchestra and the ensemble. A guy named Harry
Chamberlain invented this electro mechanical keyboard which contained within each
key in this very large, very clunky piece of equipment
is a loop of tape. And let's just really quickly
talk about what a tape loop is. Typically, you know,
(25:52):
tape is a on reels, you know, and it would
be a.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Song perhaps, you know, if you're in a studio, you
might mix mixed your song down onto a reel of
tape that has a stereo you know, two tracks, a
left track and a right track. If you make a loop,
you can actually splice together a discrete piece and have
it play over and over again over what's called a
tape head, and that is the part at the bottom
(26:19):
of between the reels, kind of the big chunky part
at the bottom of the tape machine if you've seen
a upright reel to reel. Chamberlain did this per key.
So essentially, each key triggers a loop of tape that
has a single sound, a single note of that sound,
and then when you can play them all together, you
get a chord, and they would be things like flutes
(26:41):
or strings or even the human voice.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
And it's a brilliant application of technology and art. He
also wasn't really in it for the money. These were
very expensive to build, they were pretty expensive to buy.
There weren't very many made. But it was interesting because
it sounds like we're talking about nine ancient history, but
I think the last chamberlains were actually made in the
(27:08):
nineteen eighties, In like the early eighties or from what
is it, nineteen seventy nineteen eighty one, there were around
one hundred Chamberlain M one, M two's nim fours made.
So this is this is really cool. I love unique
musical instruments, and I think this is as neat as
Ben Franklin's glass harmonica totally.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
And if you want to think about like the sound
of a chamberlain or what we're gonna go on to,
it's kind of you know what came after it, the melotron.
Think of the sounds of bands like Electric Light orchestra yelo.
You know you have like these big sweeping pad sounds
that sound like string.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It was like, that doesn't sound quite like.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
An orchestra something's a little uncanny valley about in a
cool way, or if you know the Smashing Pumpkins album's
Sorry Siamese Dream, there's a song on it called space
Boy that has this cool kind of like tapey out
of tune, kind of like the choir sound or music
of the band Genesis or Emerson, Lake and Palmer. These
(28:12):
were all kind of adopters of Oh and of course
Strawberry Fields Forever by the that that is you know,
classic melotron slash Chamberlain tape, you know, keyboard and yeah,
it's a beautiful sound because it is its own thing.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
It's like it's interesting with music technology, things get invented
kind of in a wave off. What if we replaced
the orchestra, you know, but that it ends up not
being what it becomes. It becomes more like this is
something that's different than the orchestra. The orchestra is the orchestra,
but this gives us it's it has its own unique
quality to it. And that carried on with the melotron,
(28:47):
which was developed a little bit later. Well, I want
to go back to Electric Light Orchestra, especially to shout
out one of my favorite songs by them turned to
Stone because because the band themselves said that when they
would do this in live performances, the part where it
gets really really fast. I talked with our pal Casey
Pegrin about this at length when I was going through
(29:08):
an el O phase when they get to the really
really fast part of the lyrics. They said they had
about an eighty percent success rate in live shows just
getting through it and getting every word.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
So shout out to you Elo. They didn't replace the
vocals there, they did my hand or by a voice
box every time. Yeah. Melotron though, So with our shoutout
to Yello, let's talk about the melotron, we need to
shout out a guy named Bill franzen Bill franzen Is
starts off as a money dude. He's an investor, and
(29:44):
he says, look, I'm going to get two of these
Chamberlain instruments. It's nineteen sixty two. I'm gonna get him
shipped to the United Kingdom. I'm going to make a
deal with a company that was called Brad Mattock Limited
later street Lee Electronics, and we're going to mass produce
these with the economy of scale. We're going to give
(30:05):
it a new name the melotron, and this is where
they make like the very first melotron that you could buy,
the Mark one is essentially a clone of the Chamberlain.
You could say it's a cover of the instrument. This
of course, they start to evolve and make their own innovations.
They get the Melotron in four hundred, the M four
(30:28):
thousand came out in two thousand and seven. And want
to shout out a couple of different cool blogs we found.
Let's let's give a shout out to a brief history
of sampling on tommin dot de. This was this was
where we got a lot of cool information. There's also
some videos you could watch of people playing Chamberlain's doing
(30:50):
the disc cutting for music concrete and then also playing
a melotron.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Melotrons are neat because, like you said, they really are
just a carryover of the Chamberlain and and you know,
the first ones were clones, and they started getting a
little more elaborate where you could have multiple tape sets
in each one, and that may have been the case
with the Chamberlain as well, but I kind of have
a sense that would have been much more limited I've seen.
I think maybe it was a Melotron M four hundred,
(31:16):
like one of the maybe like eighties versions, but it
has a knob on it that has a real clicky knob,
and it basically it does a shift, a physical shift
of some kind of the tape head over to a
different set of tapes. So I think on each one
of these you could maybe have like four sounds. And
the beauty of it now is obviously we're going to
get into digital stuff a little later. All of these
(31:36):
tapes have been archived and stored, so the Melotron Company
now has what's called the M four thousand and D,
which is a digital version of the melotron. They're still
quite expensive, but they're not the same as like having
this massive behemoth, you know, full of magnetic tape and
tape heads and you know, electro mechanical equipment. But they
(31:57):
have very faithfully sample do their own stuff, and you
can get on one of these melotron in four thousand d's.
They even have mini versions and there's several different models.
You can get every single one of these sounds that
would have been throughout the history of the melotron and
the Chamberlain pretty cool and a lot of them too.
(32:17):
Ben would have been little loops of like a band,
like little jazz bits, you know, a little like background
music or like swing jazz. And you can get all
of those two. I have a few plug in versions
of them. I don't have an actual melatron, I would
love one, but you can get them in plug in
form as well, and they're all very meticulously recreated from
the original tapes.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Pretty cool stuff. The December is third. Remember they use
they use a melotron, and that's what we're talking about,
is almost like a personality or an accent that it
can give a band, right or a song.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
It has a certain vintage quality that you can't get
any other way.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Right, And we are talking about a lot of very
smart people. First they're doing kind of live samples for
each other, honestly, and then we're building contraptions right to
utilize the latest technology. To your point, we haven't gone
digital yet, but fear not, it's on the way, right.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
We're not into digital yet, And I just want to
say too, up to this point, we've largely been talking
about sampling. I mean, aside from some of the music
conqurette stuff, as like recreating sounds of instruments in a
way that is easily recallable, right, Like so the Melatron,
it's not sampling as we know today in terms of
like cutting out a piece of popular music and making
(33:41):
it into something new. But these these devices are still
called samplers. And you know keyboards that say have meticulously
recreated multi recordings of a drum kit or like a
guitar or whatever, those are still called samplers. So there
are kind of two sides of the sampling. And then
sometimes people kind of lump it all into the idea
(34:04):
of taking someone's song and stealing it is not It's
way more than that, that's all we're trying to say.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, like we said earlier, it is more of a
creative act. And that's something I think we'll keep re
emphasizing to here because we're obviously team sampler. We're advocates
for this practice and this philosophy. Quick note too, on
the on that earlier statement, the when we say sampling
of these recorded instruments, we're counting vocals as an instrument absolutely,
(34:31):
because that's where you hear a choir tones or you know, yeah, yeah,
that's one of the other things get to all right,
it's the nineteen seventies it's nineteen seventy one. There's a
musician named John Congo's with a K out of South Africa,
(34:53):
and John is, according to the Guinness Book World Records,
not the most reliable source. Just being honest, John is
the creator of the first song to use a sample.
He takes a sample of a drumming track, an African
drumming track, and uses it in his song He's Gonna
Step on You Again. Okay. Now, people, even people at Guinness,
(35:18):
argue about this because whenever you're talking creative acts, it
can get kind of muddied, right, parallel thinking, right, right.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
I mean, this is like the stuff was out there
at this point to do these kinds of things. It
was just who was going to do it first and
the most popular version of it, I would argue, and
I think we would both agree that this was probably
happening in all over the place. People were trying experimenting
with this stuff. That's just how humans work.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, And so there's all right, brief side note on
the Guinness Book of World Records, which we could totally
do an episode on the Guinness Book of World Records.
Is a lot of fun, but is by its own admission,
not perfect. It was actually made to settle bar disputes
when people would be drinking and arguing in bars. So
it's not exactly a scientific work, but it is really
(36:07):
cool and the folks working there do their best. They
do a lot of fun things. They take it seriously,
but in some cases it can be difficult to figure
out the real first of something, So you will find
a lot of people saying Guinness might have gotten this
one wrong and that the real first song to use
a sample in this way was Mike Stephenson or Michelle Bernauld,
(36:32):
a French composer, was his song Burundi Black. It also
has a sample of a group of drummers. These are
from the Ingoma tribe in Burundi. This appeared on a
nineteen sixty eight album Music of Burundi. This guy Mike,
he adds guitar, he adds keyboard, and he creates this
(36:54):
song Burundi Black. So it's kind of like in hip
hop where you might take a nice, a tasty beat,
just the drum sample from it, and then boom you
add the organ, Boom, you add some vocal samples of
someone going oh yeah, are youre ah yeah, and then
someone else being like okay, and now it's suddenly a
(37:15):
different song.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, no, it's it is very transform and then that's
we're also going to sorry transformative. We're going to get
into that whole debate too as to when is it
like okay to borrow like this and when are you
putting yourself in serious legal jeopardy if you end up
with a hit on your hands. The very basis of
technically not technically truly belongs to somebody else. And it
(37:38):
also to your point earlier, Ben about synthesis, this is
all a big conversation about just the nature of creativity,
you know, and like where we where ideas come from,
and like you know, what is and is not off limits,
and like with the finite nature of the human imagination
and all of that good stuff. So seventy one, you're right,
we have this, Brendi Black. It's a loop of this, this,
(38:01):
this drumming, this kind of field recording, you know, from
indigenous drummers, from the Ngomont tribe drums to your point earlier, Ben,
as well, you know, they're some of the easiest things
to sample because they're cyclical and repeating by their very nature.
So you you know, this point we would be talking
about people probably making actual tape loops, you know, perhaps
(38:24):
recording it onto a real to reel that we said,
and like you know, the beatles of this all the
time where you are are Pink Floyd, you know all
any band that uses this kind of sound, you know,
this kind of like looping tape y kind of stuff.
You can actually just take a real to reel tape
machine or like a portable Nagra tape machine and you
can make the loop and you splice it together with
(38:46):
splicing tape and you can make a seamless loop that'll
just go over and over again. You can even do
stuff where you take the tape, spool it off of
the the real and loop it around like a microphone
stand or some believe and used like beer bottles that
they would hold, you know, and then that that loop.
Those are usually for more amorphous, less precise loops. But
(39:07):
to make a really precise rhythmic glube, you have to
cut it like really really accurately and then have it
loop like that. So this is all done by hand
with with raizors, you know, and and tape using these
splicing blocks. It was like film reels exists very it's
exactly the same. And in fact, film editing, you know,
there's a there's an aspect of audio editing as well,
because you're you're you're splicing. You have the audio track
(39:30):
and the video track and they're both, you know, videos
on film, the audio is on magnetic tape.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
And you know, I.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I'm not going to purport to be able to understand
how magnetic tape works exactly, or like how graglets were
on a vinyl. It's magic. As far as I'm concerned,
I understand the basis of it. I mean, it is a
way of storing data. You know, you use magnetic tape
to store data. So that's the best that I can.
(39:57):
You know, essentially, audio is just capturing sound waves through
a microphone. That is a way of picking up vibrations
on the air. You know, air carries sound their different
wave forms. You know, if you use a synthesizer, the
purest waveforms are just like a saw tooth wave or
(40:18):
a sine wave or whatever. Complex waveforms are when all
those things combine together and create these like really interesting harmonics.
And that's literally what sound is. It's not much more
complicated than that. And then you're using various electronic components
to translate the vibrations that microphone is picking up, combine
them with other ones, and then store them on a
thing that can be replayed. But we're getting right up
(40:39):
on the advent of the first digital sampler.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, so let's step back to sew up RUNDI Black.
It comes out, It does pretty well. It sells one
hundred and twenty five thousand copies in the United Kingdom,
and generally those two guys, Mike Stevenson and John Congos,
those two guys will be mentioned as the first people
to use a sample in a song. Right. If we
(41:07):
look at nineteen seventy six, this is where we see
the dawn of the digital the computer music melodion, which
sounds like a really cool job. It's actually the first
digital sampler. It's monophonic, meaning it doesn't have those two channels.
It's vented by a guy named Harry Mindel. And this
is a contraption. I love the word contraption. I don't
(41:29):
think it has negative connotations. I think it should be
used more often. This thing is a contraption. It's heavy.
If you look at it, and you pull pictures of
this up pretty easily, Folks, if you look at it,
it's like an old school cathode ray nineteen sixties television
looking thing, and it's got a keyboard, and then under
it it's got something that's about the size of a
(41:51):
household microwave that is the processor. Remember this is before
a lot of miniaturization of technology, so this is a
charm and uh and people start using it. One of
the most famous early adopters is the man myth legend
Stevie Wonder on his nineteen seventy nine album Journey through
(42:12):
the Secret Life of Plants, which still is a great name.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Absolutely, and folks like Herbie Hancock, you know, would have
been aware. Anyone that was like at a certain level
of fame. You know, they would have had first crack
in these kind of things because they could afford it.
They could afford it or not only they were probably
just let allowed to use it, just so that the
manufacturer and like the creators they needed to get co
signed by like these big artists like Mogue for example,
(42:38):
Moge synthesizers. They were not popular until you had folks
like Emerson, Lake and Palmer bringing these giant things out
on tour. And then you know when they started making
more miniaturized versions of them, like with the Mini mog
you started to see the Beatles using them on records,
you know, on Abbey Road for example, And that's what
leads to these things becoming household names because these these
(43:00):
megastars you know, are using them. Same with this one,
the computer music melodeon, and essentially all it is, I mean,
we think about computers now how easy it is for
us to record and playback sounds and do video and
do any number of things that would have been absolutely
just impossible to do at the time. All it is
is basically the same concept as that melotron. Each key
(43:24):
plays back a sound. It can be a set of
sounds where each key is just a note in a
particular instrument that's recorded to each you know, key position,
and so you can play back sets. But then you
could do things like I don't know if you remember,
speaking of Stevie Wonder, there's an episode of The Cosby
Show where Stevie Wonder is in it and they're in
the studio with Stevie Wonder and he's showing THEO or
whatever whichever character was, I can't recall his sampler, his keyboard,
(43:48):
and he's like he records his voice into it and
he goes jamming on the one jamming on the one
drumn on the w DR. It's pitched. You can record
it and then pitch it. Each key takes it down
a certain interval of musical steps.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
So you could.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Really create things that were impossible to do beforehand. Oh yeah,
and this, So the way this stuff proliferates is that
you're talking about rarefied air right with these musicians. So
once one person does something really creative and interesting with it,
everybody else wants to explore. It's not necessarily in a
(44:23):
competitive way. It's more like, imagine you are a painter
and one of your buddies who is also a painter,
discovers a new color right right, and then you it's
not you being a jerk, it's you saying, I want
to paint with that color too, which I think is
pretty amazing. And we're getting to one of we're not
(44:45):
doing you I want to jump the gut. But we're
getting to one of my favorite parts of music history here.
We've got to earn our way to it. We've got
to talk about some more of these digital innovations. Man, Like,
there's still really nice ments. Yeah every time.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, there's still yeah, there's still like okay, like the
oh the fair Light computer musical instrument called the Fairlight CMI,
that's what it says for a computer musical instrument. Uh.
This was polyphonic. It's a digital synthesizer and it had
it was like an early version of a one stop shop,
(45:23):
you know. It kind of I think, I don't know.
It reminds me of that technology that came out back
in back in the eighties where they had early versions
of like smartphones or early versions yeah, like touchscreen stuff,
and it just never caught on because it was very expensive.
(45:45):
But this thing, the fair Light, had a digital audio
workstation and it also had a touch screen.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
Which is essentially Yeah, we think of digital audio workstations
today as like any computer software that allows you to
make multi track recordings like Adobe Audition. Adobe Audition would
be a digital audio workstation. The real popular ones for
music production things like pro Tools or Logic Logic Pro
you know on Apple, or there's free ones, just one
(46:14):
called Reaper that people really like.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Fruity loops.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Back in the day, loos is dope, fretty lous is
really and actually there's fl studio is still quite popular.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
People still use it.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
There's lots of different ones, and there are lots of
debates over which one is the best one. I love
the one called Ableton Live that is very loop based
and it's a real creative tool. A lot of that's
It's made by a German company and it is kind
of the go to for electronic musicians. I've always loved
it for its kind of creative sketch pad ability, but
I've recently started using Logic as well for band more
(46:45):
band kind of recordings.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
But the fair Light CMI really was sort of an.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Early version of that because you could record audio into
it and have it playback more than one thing at
the same time you hit on it. Ben the idea
of it being polyphonic, and I actually, when I was
doing my Stevie Wonder story earlier, I sort of was
incorrect because the melodion was monophonic, meaning you can only
(47:11):
play back one sound at a time, which isn't you
know that's a limitation of you know, certain instruments that's
actually done always a bad thing, Like certain synthesizers are monophonic,
meaning you can only play lead lines, you can only
play melodies. You can't play chords, but on the fair
Light you could. And I've actually seen one of these
in person. They're white, they're very stark and futuristic kind
(47:34):
of looking, and that touch screen was huge. And so
then you had folks like Quincy Jones using these again,
Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel. You know, any eighties kind of
luminary would have gotten their hands on one of these.
And that's where you know that orchestra hit sound been
that first came out on the fair Light, And legend
(47:57):
has it that it was actually a sample of a
Stravinsky performance of the Rights of Spring, and that sound
has been put on cassio keyboards and you know, like
cheapy kind of like you know a little you know,
learn how to play kind of keyboards ever since. And
now it's being brought back a lot and a lot
of this like hyper pop music and stuff that is
(48:19):
very kind of referential of these these older periods. But
that is a sample of an orchestra that you know,
when you get a keyboard like this, all of the
sounds on it, technically you're allowed to.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Use them, right Otherwise they wouldn't be on the machine
unless you're buying something homebrew, which you can. You can
find people who will make these things for you. They're
mad scientists, and I am in love with every one
of them. The big thing that happens now is this
economy of scale. Right as technological innovations occur, unless somebody's
(48:55):
playing some reindeer games, inevitably a piece of technology will
become affordable to more and more people. That's just the
pattern we see throughout history totally, unless someone's trying to
interfere with that, like in the world of nuclear weaponry.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Well frankly with creativity. It's kind of the pattern you
want because it is a It is the democratization of creation.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
You know. It doesn't mean that only.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
The super rich can go to acting school and become
you know, a star an actor, or go to music school.
It now means that through YouTube videos, tutorials and free
software garage band fruity loops, anyone can make the can
get their ideas out, and it just means we have Sure,
it means we have a lot more to sift through,
but usually the really good stuff rises to the top
(49:44):
by its own merit. And I think, I think, yeah, hopefully,
but in a perfect world, I really think that that's
it's it's there's nothing, there's nothing greater than anybody being
able to exercise some creative muscle, you know, because anybody
could do it if they had the tools. That That's
why I'm a huge proponent of the democratization of knowledge, Right,
it should not be restricted because it is powerful. And
(50:07):
knowledge is another type of technology, I would argue because
a lot of it's human created. Well, technology, writing is technology,
you know. I mean the way to spread these ideas
is in and of itself technology too, you know.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Yeah, And so this this idea of things becoming affordable,
this is key, This is the next problem to solve.
It happens in the early nineteen eighties. We see digital
samplers become much more affordable, much more accessible. This is
the era of the MPC getting on the scene, the
(50:41):
SP twelve hundred, the EBUSP twelve hundred, These things all
of a sudden seem to be everywhere. And people who
have really creative minds that could not afford an orchestra,
that could not you know, maybe have the time and
energy and cap all to play producer and say, let
(51:02):
me go find somebody who has a French horn, right,
and can spend the afternoon doing this riff with me.
Now they are able to become the authors of their
own sonic destiny. And Folks, we did say this was
going to be a two parter, so we we actually
went a little further and decided we were going to
(51:23):
hold the rest for part two. No, I can't wait
till we get to hip hop, because we were going
to talk just about the some of the controversies of sampley.
But I think maybe we say a good thing too
for parts Yeah, No, I undercent me.
Speaker 2 (51:34):
And the thing is, like like I said at the
top of the show, this is something that's very near
and dear to both of us and Max as well,
and so we're gonna we've got a lot of our
own little size to share, you know, because this is
something that's very close to us, that we've kind of
grown up with as well, and you know, as fans
of all kinds of music and music production, we got
a lot to say about the subject, and we're happy
(51:54):
that you're along for the ride with us. Meanwhile, huge
thanks to research associated Shordinaire Jeff Bartlett for this absolutely
whopping research grief on on topic that we are all
super super excited to talk about Jonathan Strickland, the Quistor,
Long may he rain in anonymity hopefully yes, And Big
Big Things, of course, as always, inevitably have repeater Bowmans
(52:18):
in every show. Big Thanks to Max Williams, thanks to
Jonathan Strickland, thanks to Chris Frosciotis, thanks to Eve's Jeffcoat,
thanks to The Grave Digger, and thanks to Caleb Blood.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Those last two are from Monsters Jam.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History News
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Noel Brown
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