The history of sampling music first started back in the 1980s. It was about borrowing another artists beat to the song into their own. But the sampling of recorded music evolved out of sound collage that started decades earlier. By sound collages, we don’t mean just instruments. It was the sounds of things like trains and mechanical noises. The Beatles’ dabbled with this with their song “Revolution 9.” The recording began as an extended ending to the album version of Lennon’s song “Revolution.” Then he, George Harrison, and Yoko Ono combined their vocals, speeches, sounds, and other short tape loops of this to come up with the longest track that the Beatles ever released. Music is way less original than we think. What is the most popular example of sampling you can think of? That’s right, a turntable for a DJ! It’s like a new form of music and it sounds cool.

In class we talked about one of the first examples of sampling known as the Mellotron. This was originally developed and built in England in the 1960s. It was an electro-mechanical keyboard that allowed musicians to play string of different instruments on tape triggered by a key. You could literally trigger like a whole string of orchestras just by pressing one key. They were first used by rock bands in the early 70s. An example where this is used is the song “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues. You’re taking an instrument and making it playable by another instrument. If I was a person who knew how to play the keyboard I would not know how to play the violin. With the Mellotron I technically could. Is that cheating? This turned into a form of sampling developed using records in which artists could repurpose. They would repurpose the original sound with their own lyrics but with the exact same melody. “If you sample, you license.” Bridgeport Music case in 2005 says that if you sample anything, you have to pay to use or be sued. The Power Puff girls have to pay James Brown for using a sample in one of his songs to include in the introduction music.