Ableton Forum

wow this one is damn complicated and there is much much grey area both legally and creatively so forgive me if this sounds contradictory at times.


the act of manipulating is all relative to the manipulators ears. some people thinking pitching it down three steps and eq'ing works. others run the shit through every fx twice. whatever.

but if someone is actually manipulating a sample so much that it is unrecognizable than noone can figure out what the hell it is unless they rooted around and found your original source material. end of story right?

but no matter how obscure the shit is, if you can tell that it sounds remotely similar to the original you know you best watch out for the legal...

there was a situation with a Madonna on one of her semi-recent songs in which the producer used a guitar sample. how ever obscure as it was, the recording was from somewhere else. a song written by another musician, that he put his soul, time, money into. now just because its madonna and she is loaded, in this situation is besides the point. it was someone elses music, pitched down slightly and changed to fit the song. it was the melody of the original material. it slipped by uncredited. the producer may have not even remembered where the sample was from, or had it poorly labelled. why is it ok for someone to use someone elses song without asking? just because it was out in public? its not like taking a Manet, Monet, Picasso and painting over it. its like going to the museum and grabbing the actual art and painting on that. (oddly enough i know plenty of musicians who are game to sue anyone that comes near somnething they wrote but take any picture off the web and use that.)

now the record companies definately have it out for everyone and are very obviously in bed with Congress. they fuckk anyone over left right and center. just look at how they rip publishing from artists.....think about how many african american musicians have the rights to songs they wrote compared to the few old white guys that own all of them.

so copyright extension laws suck for reasons such as these guys keeping those songs forever-

but what if the musician owns the publishing and/or recording of the one tune that made any money ( and has the possiblity to make more through licensing or whatever)---spent his whole life being a productive creative individual but has not a dime to pass on to his children in pensions or even cash---cant his kids inherit that.....tricky situation then......

so even while the record companies are ripping off the musicians--if you sample a musicians playing--it hurts them too...a fellow musician. thats all they are. a fellow musician, engineer, or producer trying to make a living being creative. they created something, and it sucks that we have to worry about getting sued if we even give them the respect they deserve by mentioning them. the least we should be able to do is give them credit.

nother grey area though-if you are creating a new piece of music out of tidbits-you should get credit for writing (as well the sampled person, as they contributed to the writing) which gets messy with publishing....if you read the liner notes on DJ Shadows Endtroducing and then read the liner notes on Private Press-you know what i am talking about--not sure what happened in that situation but apparently Shadow wasnt allowed to say he wrote some of those tracks and that he "compiled" them or something like that. lame.

sometimes clearing samples beforehand can cost little, or the artist is willing to negotiate (if the label allows)...sometimes these artists will actually work with you on YOUR music. again they are musicans looking to create music just like us!\

its a shite situation and the record labels do little to help, they only understand about keeping money in their pocket. they dont care about us being creative or not, they just want to keep the money. they saw public enemy as money going out to every sample. they didnt like that. they saw puff daddy only using one sample and selling two hits (the original and his newone). They like that. Then Dr. Dre figured out that instead of paying for recording and publishing he could find a sample, base a song around it and then just rerecord it and pay only for publishing......

such a mess such a mess,, be honest and remember to treat your fellow musicians with respect as we all want the same thing-to make music.

how would you feel if someone used a piece of music that you spent hours/weeks/days/months programming/recording/playing/writing and didnt give you credit? sucks.

also-if you aint selling enough records or pissing Kasey Kasem off not many people will take notice.

anyway, sorry bout the rant,...have fun making music.....

love

elijah

Moonburnt wrote:ooh, juicy topic. ok, to add fuel to the fire , i want to debate this seemingly good point, for debate's sake (and by the way i have some imminent sample-clearing issues to face myself ):

smutek wrote:If I take a photograph of a monet, print it out and paint it black, then put a picture of a cow fucking your mother on it is it still a fucking monet?

So to continue that analogy, i assume the monet must still have added something special, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered to put it in your composition in the first place? You must have seen something in it that you wanted to borrow, even though it was going to be obliterated by the cow and rikhyray's momma getting it on. If the monet didn't have that something special in it, there would be no benefit to be gained from incorporating it rather than composing from the ground up. Of course sampling is great and has wikkedly wicked amounts of artistic potential, but perhaps it's destined to be one of these legal grey areas that doesn't have a single definitive right answer.

That is not necessarily true. It would depend entirely on the artists intent. What statement could the artist be making by specifically choosing a monet to paint black and defile with a pornographic image? Maybe the substance lies not in the monet itself but in the fact that it was a monet that was choosen to be destryed..... see what I mean?

What statement would an artist be making about popular music by choosing a Brittney Spears track to mangle beyond recognition then pasting over top of it, say, a piano melody by Bach?

Is the artist trying to make a buck or make a statement?

heh both.

whether they are trying to make a statement or a buck doesn't matter, its the fact that they chose brittny spears to do it with instead of doing it from the ground up. I don't even know why people feel sampling is a grey area at all, to me it's as simple as pie. sampling 1 bar of myself playing and then mangling that sample all to hell and sampling someone else playing for 1 bar and then mangling all that to hell is the least confusing thing I can think of. its very simple ....who wrote what I sampled me or someone else, all the whole issue takes is that one question. if a person finds themself in court and for some unfathomable reason they are confused by whats happening they only ever need to ask that one question to figure out what should be done. 'whos shit did I sample" that should make it painfully clear who to give the money /credit too. I mean the whole thing is so blatantly rediculous.

even the universe has put clues everywhere for us knowing that we humans need as much help as we can get for instance what do we call source material.........we call it SOURCE material, hence if we are not the source then what ground do we have to be claiming that the source should get no credit or monetary gains since we have the nerve to claim credit and monetary gains for ourselves and we're not even the source. aaarrrgghhh it's ludicrous.

me myself, I am a sampling m/f there is no instrument I enjoy more than samplers, software or hardware I love them so much that I can hardly write a song with out sampling even though I play instruments, I feel like I'm not finished by a long shot if I haven't used the sampling artform heavily in my process and I sample the shit out of vinyl , tv, the radio, everything and anything I can get my hands on I just fuckin enjoy it imensley all the sonic and creative possibilities are truly wonderful.

but.......

I am in no way confused about where the source material came from when I'm sampling. no I have never paid any sample royalties, no I am not going to start tomorrow, I always keep track of everything though so that I can give credit and if I ever make some money then they'll make some money.
you can't just write a song that just took 5 steps to do it and the first step was sampling the source material and then when you're done writing the song you cut the first step out and only acknowledge steps 2 -5, call it a day and give yourself all of the credit and profit. that's just stupid. you're lying to yourself.

I think, my opinion mind you, if a person is an artist they could care less about making a buck. Making a buck is secondary, at best. An artists primary goal is expression through art, whatever the medium. Artists make art not bucks - Van Gough had not sold a single painting at the time of his death. Not one. Ironic isn't it? Now most countries can not afford to purchase a Van Gough.......

but I digress.....

this is a more complicated subject than i realised. money aside, i think if an artist/producer is sampled, they should receive recognition for it, even if it is uninteilligible. for instance, if someone sampled a drum or music loop from someone else, and tweaked it too the point to where it was unreconizable, they still chose to use that particular sample, because it was obviously important, if it wasn't, then why sample it in the first place? and considering the time that the original artist put into that sample to make it sound the way that they did, they deserve credit for that.
there are however examples where copyright goes too far and only serves to protect the finances of the fat-cat-music-industry-beaurcrats; case in point, back in 1997, the verve's bittersweet symphony, the had a sample from an orchestra playing a rolling stones song, but the sample was subliminal, but because it was the stones, in which the industry executives make a killing off of, the verve got no writing credit for it except for the lyrics, the stones and their label got the royalties for it. that to me, are the politics that have destroyed the music industry and put it where it is today.

"..they gonna privatise the air..." sung Gary Clail in the eighties

but van gough should of gotten paid and it sucks that he didn't, he deserved it. as do all artist.

smutek wrote:That is not necessarily true. It would depend entirely on the artists intent. What statement could the artist be making by specifically choosing a monet to paint black and defile with a pornographic image? Maybe the substance lies not in the monet itself but in the fact that it was a monet that was choosen to be destryed..... see what I mean?

What statement would an artist be making about popular music by choosing a Brittney Spears track to mangle beyond recognition then pasting over top of it, say, a piano melody by Bach?

Is the artist trying to make a buck or make a statement?

Hey did you seek my permission to quote me in your post? Gets a bit ridiculous doesn't it. But say when people borrow phat beats, most of the time it's a fair assumption that they are sampling them simply because they're phat beats, rather than to make any kind of intellectual statement.

I like the idea that was raised before, of just "referencing" a sample as a footnote, as if it an academic bibliography, and leaving it at that. My understanding was that in the literary world, that was perfectly legal, by way of being "fair use". It would be nice if that same logic was legal (or at least illegal but unenforced) for music, but i guess when people want to quote a piece of music, they stand to potentially make serious $ so it's bound to be contentious.

By the way, does anyone know what a typical price range would be for legitimately clearing a sampled drum break by a big name. Are we talking hundreds, thousands, 10s of thousands? Or would it be a royalty?

D K wrote:

A bit ambivolent are we? Yeah tell me about it.

ambiv a lent?
nah...just expressing the myriad of feelings i've had regarding the content of this thread.
as a professional musician, it concerns me. as an artist, i could care less.
either way though, i stll gotta eat.
can i get sued yet for using those emoticons without permission?
it's not too far off....
kind of like in that great flick BRAZIL
cheers
dk

i fully agree with you mic-minimal fully agree

its the producer's/samplers responsibility to know what his source is--

i was saying sometimes poorly labelled computer files can lead to "incidents" and that people who arent keeping track of these things are the suck.

as for Van Gogh.......not even gonna start

WHO WRITES THE RULES?

(serious question by the way)

Komplex wrote:WHO WRITES THE RULES?

(serious question by the way)

mr. $ and all his little friends.

The rules are written by those who have most to gain of them.