Chris McCormick wrote:
Sometimes a clap is just a clap, but some producers spend hours and hours hand crafting (pun intended) clap sounds. Production can be an artform in and unto itself. I am sure there are producers out there who would be ticked off if you used their delicately constructed clap sound without their permission. ;)
Yeah....another story I heard is one about George CLinton showing the producer of Zapp how to make a good clap-sound. They went to a deep underground location and George told'em the secret....
As for me I make a 'good' clap-sound out of some clap sound from a record, mixed with a tiny bit of snare. I guess more of you guys do that aswell... To me personally, I think this clap-sound is 100% MINE, not Rick James', as the sound coming from a record and mixed with another sound (snare) is not the sound he made, and is crafted in a whole other way than he crafted his clap (appearently 'sampled' from a drummachine). There's also lots of tweaking on the sound, as it might have artifacts from the vinyl or Rick James' production, and you want the sound of it to be blended with the rest of your mix. You don't just sample it and it's all done, sampling from real records is a whole different story than using sample-CD's or the likes.
So, in other words, if you compare for example any Public Enemy record to any 70's funky James Brown record....it JUST isn't the same kind of music, the two are for TOTALLY different uses and aiming for TOTALLY different audiences. What JB is really saying when he sues PE is "you sell my music, and I want royalties". Seriously....you think the availability of PE's records has led people away from JB's records? I think absolutely not, rather the opposite. For me I learned about JB's funkiness from nothing but PE and other hiphop records. This made me buy JB records, so now I have both PE *and* JB! I believe I'm not the only one, as hiphop clearly gave funk and 70's retro a major boost in the 90's. Who had heard of George Clinton and Zapp nowadays, if it wasn't for them....? Hiphopers made them rich ones again by sampling them, and then they want even more money afterwards by suing them.
I (for different reasons) spent a year on the tune I posted, and I very much doubt that Rick James or any of the others I sampled have spent as much time on any of their respektive tunes. For those not into hiphop and the likes, I can safely assure you that sampling does NOT equal less work. It's rather the other way around, as it's harder to blend different records (tuning, tempo), then it is to just play it or get a band to play it. It's a different art, and it will NEVER replace any other kind of music, not even funk wich it originated from.
The sad part is that music industry and copyright laws has ruined hiphop music. The stuff you hear nowadays is just synthpop with R'n'B singers, or very carefully selected and licensed samples. This controls the art, and has led it into some inferiour music like you might hear on the radio.
So until people realise that sampling!=labour saving, hiphop and other sample based music is in a rather bad shape. I guess we'll have to be "Criminal Minded" ;)
-- Ringheims Auto - Fri musikk for bilstereo! http://ringheimsauto.friwebteknologi.org
