Some of the best, most exciting drum and bass out there have some kind of vocal sample in there. Whether it be singing sampled from an old record, sampled lyrics from classic hip hop, a sample from a film or TV series, or just Dillinja going “HO!” Using the human voice as a melodic, textural, rhythmic or comic element in a tune almost always makes it sound better.
That’s how this genre was born. All the elements are sampled, perhaps with a few 808 and 909 drum machines to add extra deep thud that you couldn’t always find to sample from a record.
Then after the sampler/808 era, enter the MIDI musician, with a studio made up of drum machines and keyboards. Where to get the same level of musically rich content that you could just sample from hit records, you would have to play as good as James Brown or the Winstons. This produced a new type of minimalist sound. Ultra clean kicks and quick snappy snares, all digital, no noise, perhaps a little too clean.
I moved away from sampling stuff and focussed on the raw music itself, even though I wasn’t a musician and had only reached roughly grade 1 or 2 in music theory. Essentially everything I was producing came from happy accidents or trial and error. Arguably a much slower process towards making lots of music. I had fun doing it although found frustration at how few tracks I could finish.
Fast forward to 2020 when lockdown began and I had all this free time. After 20 years of trying to make tracks, since my beginnings on Fast Tracker II, I had finally found and started to build on a system for finishing lots of music.
I had become much more confident in my technical abilities after a great many false starts. It’s taken me about 10 years of playing with EQs, firstly to realise how important they are, how powerful they are, then how to actually use them in any given situation. I don’t know how producers can start making consistent hit records after say only 4 years of studio experience. Good coaching I suspect!
So now here I am. Making drum and bass, with kicks and snares that cut through, and a sub bassline that is balanced with them. Confident. Technically intermediate. Not a beginner. Not an expert either, as there’s no limit to the amount of experience that can be gained from.
You can have this technical ability, it’s like engineering but instead of making cars work again, it’s making tracks sit together in a balance. Using tools and components, it’s all there, and with a bit of experience you might be able to guess what’s wrong and how to fix it before even picking up a spanner.
Where is the soul though? A lot of electronic music lacks it. All digital, all made inside a computer, all quantized perfectly to the beat, much of it never catches on. Where is the grit? The life? The enormously complex sound of the human voice? The scratchy muffled distortion of tape recorded, vinyl pressed classic funk and soul that makes up so much of the qualities of electronic dance music.
It was time for me to start sampling. Fearlessly. My fear was that if you sample an old hit record, it will almost certainly be owned by a huge record company, with its own legal department to hunt down copyright violations of their intellectual properties. Kids sampling their records and making a few quid off them.
I don’t think these legal teams would bother hunting down your track with 3 second sample of David Bowie in unless you happen to get in the top 40 and are obviously making a few quid. So what’s the fear? I’m asking myself right now. Especially for underground music such as DnB, but it’s gone more mainstream.
Put it this way, if I did sample a tune and it went 1 million views, would I really care if Sony or Universal or whoever owns the rights, sends me legal letter asking for money? Probably not. I would email back seeing if we could come to an agreement to split the royalties depending on how much of their content is in the tune compared to mine.
I missed this whole sampling craze, but here I was wanting to give my tunes the excitement layer of a human voice. So I went for the safe option. As obscure sample as possible.
Well known anti-nuclear arms campaigner and, someone who could have saved us from the heinous privatisation of the NHS of the tories, Jeremy Corbyn, must surely have said something I can sample. A great leader because of his true values and his wise words, trying to unify people instead of divide. I could literally just record anything he says!
55 years had past since the atomic bombs were dropped on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it popped up in my feed, and Jeremy Corbyn was giving a little speech at the memorial service. I heard a soundbite in there, I could have chosen any, but the point was to capture who was saying it, and what the memorial was about. That’s what you can hear in “W.M.D.”
Now I have to remind myself that I have been sampling a lot in the past decade, I have been using a lot more classic drum breaks, especially the break from The Winstons “Amen, Brother” and the Lyn Collins “Think (About It)” break, amongst many others. It seems okay to sample these drum solos as it’s been done since the 90s and hasn’t really stopped.
Turns out I do sample.