Publisher - The art of sampling.

Here’s a simple truth. Within the beatmaking tradition (of the broader hip hop/rap music tradition), the more beatmakers who make beats, the more fluid the notions about what constitutes a dope beat. But hip hop/rap music, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American popular music form, has the incredible power to reuse, retool, reconceptualize, and recontextualize the […]

Madlib shook up the beatmaking community Saturday when he announced that he’d made all of the beats for Bandana, the stellar collaborative album with Freddie Gibbs, on his iPad: As I’ve said in my book The BeatTips Manual, if you take away the stable piece of any well-known and respected beatmaker (producer), for instance, DJ […]

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book The Art of Sampling, 3rd Edition, which I’m currently running a Kickstarter campaign for.  If after reading you have learned anything from this article and you would like to learn much more, please take a moment to pledge your support today and share this campaign with your […]

Released in 1989 as the title track of the album of the same name, “Road To The Riches,” produced by Marley Marl, features a sample of Billy Joel’s “Stiletto” (1979). Kool G Rap & DJ Polo and Marley Marl were never sued for copyright infringement, and for good reason: “Roads To The Riches” would likely […]

First, it was “Blood on the Leaves.” Outrage from everywhere for how Kanye West used a sample of Nina Simone’s heart-wrenching rendition of  “Strange Fruit,” a 1939 song about lynching written by teacher Abel Meeropol and first popularized by Billie Holiday.  (Today, some curiously describe “Strange Fruit” as being sacred.) After the “Strange Fruit” flip, […]

Madlib shook up the beatmaking community Saturday when he announced that he’d made all of the beats for Bandana, the stellar collaborative album with Freddie Gibbs, on his iPad: As I’ve said in my book The BeatTips Manual, if you take away the stable piece of any well-known and respected beatmaker (producer), for instance, DJ […]

Here’s a simple truth. Within the beatmaking tradition (of the broader hip hop/rap music tradition), the more beatmakers who make beats, the more fluid the notions about what constitutes a dope beat. But hip hop/rap music, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American popular music form, has the incredible power to reuse, retool, reconceptualize, and recontextualize the […]

Madlib shook up the beatmaking community Saturday when he announced that he’d made all of the beats for Bandana, the stellar collaborative album with Freddie Gibbs, on his iPad: As I’ve said in my book The BeatTips Manual, if you take away the stable piece of any well-known and respected beatmaker (producer), for instance, DJ […]

Oliver Wang breaks down Main Source’s “Looking At the Front Door” and points out why Large Professor’s production work on this song exemplified sophisticated leaps forward in hip hop song structure. The first album I ever bought on the strength of a music review was Main Source’s Breaking Atoms, circa 1990. I had been reading […]

Record gems with open drum sounds. I’m a strong advocate for using custom drum sounds. Although I have no issue with stock drum sounds (I’ve used stock drums in the past, and I have no problem with using them in the future), I believe that one of the most effective ways of creating your own […]