Last week I talked about Bernard Purdie’s song Soul Drums from 1968 which got sampled in Devil’s Haircut . The same track also got sampled in a Christmas track by Mansfield, entitled 2010.12.25 from 2000. Bernard Purdie is a session drummer who performed with people like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, BB King, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Joe Cocker.

Sampled drum breaks from Bernard Purdie songs are also in popular demand. The block rockin’ beats in Block Rockin’ Beats (1997) by the Chemical Brothers came from Purdie’s Changes from 1972. Interestingly the song was sampled before by Zhigge in Rakin’in the Dough (1992), but it used a bassloop. Changes itself is a cover of Them Changes (1970) by Buddy Miles.

The Prodigy’s 3 Kilos (1994) samples Good Livin’ (Good Lovin’) (1972). The song 3 Kilos is on the album Music for the Jilted Generation. On the same album is Poison which contains a bunch of drum samples, one of them being Bernard Purdie’s Heavy Soul Singer (1972). The same sample can be heard faintly in the back ground on Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (1998).

I mentioned Beck already, but his album Odelay contains another track, Hotwax, that samples Song for Aretha (1971) also by Bernard Purdie. Pepe Deluxe used the same sample in Lying Peacefully (2003).

To top it off, Bernard Purdie himself ‘sampled’ too. His 1971 track Funky Mozart borrows the basics from Symphony #40 in G Minor by Mozart from 1788. That’s some old funky stuff.

My personal favourite that contains a Purdie sample? Block Rockin’ Beats obviously:

Let it be noted that I am B-sting, electronic musician, producer, bass-player and on a very rare occasion a DJ. You might say “well duh, we know this.” But apparently it’s not universally known. Thanks to my Google alerts, I occasionally notice there’s other B-sting’s. If they’d typed their name in Google before they chose theirs, they would’ve noticed my various websites are the top results, for a reason.

I’ve been using the name B-sting as an online name since I built my first website around 1995 on the now defunct De Digitale Stad (DDS). When I got my first chat account (on icq), I was B-sting. Other B-sting’s later joined, but even if you look now, you’ll notice I have the lowest number. Still. Every forum I ever joined: B-sting (or Bsting if the dash was not allowed). Years later I got B-sting.nl and eventually B-sting.com. Because I am B-sting.

I don’t own the name B-sting. There’s multiple Mr. Smith’s out there and not all of them are LL Cool J. There’s a photograper with the name B-sting, there’s multiple gamers with the name B-sting, a consultancy firm, a blogging mom, a painter, a golf club, a meme, there’s even an EP by an Australian band named the Testeagles entitled B-sting (which came out in 1998, after me mind you). Good for them. But it kinda annoys me there’s other musicians who still pick the name B-sting. How hard is it to check if a name is unique, before you chose it?

I can’t blame the English jungle/garage-DJ the Impeccable DJ B Sting, since he started using the name around the time I did and Google wasn’t around back then to check it for either of us. Also I have the dash, he doesn’t. And he’s Impeccable. Good for him. We invented the wheel around the same time. It happens.

But apparently there’s also an unsigned South-African rapper who recently decided B-sting was a good name. I’m sorry to disappoint you Brandon Jason Gow, but I am B-sting. You were 2 years old when I became B-sting. You can’t stop me from being B-sting, but then I can’t stop you either. I just think you should have checked your name before you picked it. I wish you good luck moving on up on the Google rankings (you’ll need it), but I think picking another name might be easier. Especially if you want to be signed. I mean when you registered your ReverbNation-account, you could have noticed the name B-sting was already taken. Did you look it up? It is me.

Hey, Nirvana didn’t check their name, but if they had access to Google in 1987, I don’t think they would’ve used the same name as a British rock band from the Sixties either. It’s just bad marketing, even if eventually they did become more famous than the other band. Even Bad Company eventually changed their name when they got sued by the other Bad Company. And who can forget about The Originals/The New Originals/The Regulars? Just saying.

It’s interesting to see how some artists draw samples from the same artists and albums they have done before. Take Beck and his album Odelay, more specifically Devil’s Haircut from 1996. The track contains a lot of samples, which would take a few years to figure out. I’ll limit this post to three that stand out.

Beck samples a band called Them (with singer Van Morrison) and he takes two samples from two separate tracks from the same album Them Again from 1966. One is I Can Only Give You Everything, the other Out of Sight. Interestingly, Beck’s album Odelay features another sample from Them Again. From It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue is used directly in Jack-Ass.

Part of the drum loops comes from the excellent song Soul Drums from 1968 by Bernard Purdie. You kinda wonder why only Mansfield was the only to sample the same track in the song 2010.12.25 from 2000, since it’s such an excellent drum break which is so easy to sample. Not that Bernard Purdie never got sampled. He has been sampled a lot, but I’ll tell you all about that next week.

For now here’s Devil’s Haircut with Them in it twice:

Batuhan Bozkurt makes things involving computational (sound) art. One of his many projects is Otomata, a simple webapp that makes pretty sequenced music. If you try it out, you might get something like this:

(Source:  Retecool)

The KLF‘s track What Time Is Love (the Pure Trance 1 version) was originally released in 1988 and is an original acid house track. Their breakthru however came with a reworked version What Time Is Love (Live at Trancentral) in 1990. They described this track as “stadium house”. This version does however contain a few samples.

The “I wanna see you sweat” sample comes from the track To the Bone by Wanda Dee released just 1 year earlier in 1989. Interestingly another sample from that track was used on the KLF’s Last Train to Transcentral.

The KLF also used a sample of the MC5’s Kick out the Jams from 1969. This had a double meaning since The KLF had previously worked under the name The Justified Ancients of MuMu, which in turns was abreviated to The JAMs. There’s also a sample by Kraftwerk’s Home Computer (1981) hidden in the middle.

After the  second release in 1990, the KLF also released a third version of the song entitled America: What Time Is Love? in 1991. This completely reworked version features a sample of Ace of Spades (1980) by Motörhead.

In the wake of the three versions of the song followed a few interesting songs. The Ragga Twins sampled it in Wipe the Needle already in 1991. Scooter (sadly) sampled it not once, but twice in a song, like he pretty much rips off any dance track that was ever famous. In 1993 The God Machine made a industrial-metal cover.The most bizarre cover of the song is most certainly The Williams Fairey Brass Band cover of it in 1997. The KLF would later feature this on their Fuck the Millennium-single. Max Tundra has done a cover in 2006. Last but not least, The Kaiser Chiefs did a cover in 2006 for BBC Radio 1 and quite an excellent one at that.

I visited the Utrecht edition of the Muzikantendag and like previous years it was veeery interesting, especially when you don’t have the stress of dropping demo’s and just enjoying the lectures.

The opening by veteran Henk Westbroek was inspiring and funny, much more so that I had suspected. It’s obvious he’s very used to the stage also when it comes to speaking out, giving a few stabs at the industry as well.

Allan Eshuis had a few interesting things to say about composition, but got into a bit of a fierce debate with a member of the audience when the topic changed to publishing. But then Allan works for the majors and is hired for writing hits, not art. Though his opinion on sharing a little to get more isn’t that far fetched either. sounds very strategic and business-like though.

He did however have a thing in common with veteran/poetic musician Thé Lau : they can both write a song around a single word that sounds great. In Thé Lau’s case he got famous for Blauw which turns out to be inspired by the blue tiles in a Greek restaurant. It turns out Thé Lau has quite an awesome encyclopedic knowledge of music too.  Respect!

The Rock your English-session by Buffi Duberman was the most useful and fun of the day. She coaches Dutch bands to make their English lots less shitty both with regards to grammar and pronunciation. Apart from just having a very bubbly personality to look at, she also wraps it all up in fun games that actually get your mind going. I’m surely going to use a few of her ideas to better my English.

Niels Aalberts (EHPO), Meindert Bussink & Claire van der Hall had a discussion on Promotion 2.0 which, knowing the parties involved boils down to the simple message: get a website, be your own warm self on Twitter and Facebook and KILL YOUR MYSPACE. You can never hear that message too often.

Stefan Schmid from Zuco103 explained a little about how he produces and writes his music and how to find and keep the essence of a song, even though it’s changed on every side. Though I don’t agree with his remark that the sampling era is kinda over (pff, then I’ll just bring it back by myself!) and his style of music is not even close to mine, I do love people like him going off on these kind of musical expeditions and ending up with something that sounds great.

To top my day off, I found a singer who was at an earlier edition of the Muzikantendag years ago and whom I had heard singing. I was so intrigued by her voice back then I was hitting myself over theh ead I had never figured out what band she was playing in. I got a card from her, turns out she’s in The Kroons. Ah, my mind is at ease now.

Oh and on the way to the station ,unconnected to the Muzikantendag, there was a guerilla party going on for a dance festival. Dudes just parked  truck with speakers near the lawn and a crowd that was already gathered danced to it. A single policeman on a bike turned up and it was obvious there was nothing he could do to stop this. Lucky for him the guerilla gig by then was pretty much over anyhow and every one went home, including me. It was a great day for music.

In 1990 three guys, Anthony Mannino, Ralph D’Agostino & Dennis Pino, produced a laid-back, 12-minute long early house track under the name C’hantal entitled The Realm. A song that most likely would have disappeared in the pile of anonymous house tracks that filled the discotheques in the weekends back then. Except it didn’t because of one simple fact: the original vinyl record also featured an acapella track with just the vocals that were featured in the song. That made it perfect for sampling.

Soon after, the rather pretentious lyrics of the Realm popped upin various other house tracks that would go on to become big club hits. Examples are Speedy J’s Something for your Mind (1991) and The Ultimate Seduction (1992) by The Ultimate Seduction (the guys that made the Turn up the Bass compilations) that even borrow their titles directly from the sample’s speech. The first record to sample the Realm however was the 1990 track Orgasm by Ursula Hybsch.

After the success of Something for your Mind, many more dance tracks over the years plundered various parts of the sample. Noteable are Wet Like the Rain by The Bronx from 1997, Wrong is Right (1999) by DJ Jose & G-spott and Something 4 Your Mind (2008) by  Audio Junkies. There’s even a dubstep song titled Toasty (2008) by Reflect which briefly uses the sample.  In 1999 an artist named Dejure released the track Sanctuary and oddly enough it doesn’t use a sample but another girl speaking the lyrics. Might as well used the original.

My personal favourite use of the sample: Something For Your Mind by Speedy J:

Let’s talk about a sample that isn’t a sample at all. Lady Gaga can and has been accused of a lot of things involving theft of other people’s music, but one thing that’s hardly ever done in her music is sampling. And by that I mean direct sampling; recording a loop and playing it back in your own track.

There’s been outrage a few weeks back that Lady Gaga’s new single Born this Way would be creepily similar to Express Yourself (1989) by Madonna. By the way you can say Madonna borrowed parts of that song from Respect Yourself (1972) by The Staple Singers. I don’t want to get into the Born this Way/Express Yourself-discussion, but it reminded me of something going on a few years back when Bad Romance (2009) by Lady Gaga came out in The Netherlands.

Apart from really hard to distinguish drumloop from Ballanation (2000) by DJ Jean, Bad Romance doesn’t use any samples. But Dutch people instantly recognised the ‘electronic saw’ noise in Bad Romance as a sample from one of Rotterdam’s finest classic rave formations Human Resource and their 1991 hit-single Dominator. If you Google “Lady Gaga Dominator” you can find a pile of discussions in Dutch about whether or not Lady Gaga stole the sample.

Guess what? She didn’t. That distinct sound is what’s known as a ‘hoover’ among rave-lovers and is actually a preset on many synths, in this case the Roland Alpha Juno. It’s quite commonly used in rave and later hardcore tracks and you can find tons of videos of people recreating it. Even on a Casio.

The Prodigy became famous for introducing the ‘hoover’-sound into the rave scene with their 1991 song Charly (you can see the Roland-synth in the video) and they certainly didn’t sample it from Human Resource either. It’s interesting considering the Prodigy have sampled a lot of people, but most of their synth-noises come straight from the electronics. I mean, the band is named after a synth, the Moog Prodigy for crying out loud.

So: no, Lady Gaga did not sample the hoover from Human Resource:

Well it took me long enough, but my new track Perfect is now up on Bandcamp. I talked about it a month ago. The lyric writing was hard as usual and I’m still not satisfied. Not with the singing either. But I guess that’s where the title of the song comes in as a bit of irony. It’s never perfect.

Also, B-sting.com will be a year old tomorrow, so I guess this is a way to celebrate it. No really, it launched on April 1st. Just like Gmail did years ago. It keeps people guessing whether you’re serious and that’s just the way I like it.

The drum break in The Soul Searchers song Ashley’s Roachclip from 1974 was well on it’s way to become just as hugely sampled as the Amen break. But something stopped its triumphant march: it went out of fashion.

Like many breaks, it was first used in hiphoptracks in the early eighties. A lot of early hip hop sampled the song at the 11-second mark, like Grandmaster Melle Mel and LL Cool J. Some artists, used the drum break, like Michee Mee & L.A. Luv in 1987 in Run For Cover. The first use of the sample that became famous was however was Eric B. & Rakim’s classic sample track Paid In Full from 1987.

That may well have spurred on it’s sudden popularity, but not just in hiphop, but regular pop and dance music. The relaxed break suddenly popped up as a backing for Milli Vanilli’s 1988 songs Girl You Know It’s True and Baby, Don’t Forget My Number. Ice MC’s 1990 track Easy not only emulated Milli Vanilli, it also used the same sample. Snap!’s 1990 track Oops Up used the sample too. Interesting to note is that remixes of pop songs used it to make it more danceable, like Roxette’s The Look from 1989 and Caron Wheeler’s Livin The Light from 1990.

The hits then just started to roll in. PM Dawn in 1991 with Set a Drift On Memory Bliss (which combines it with Spandau Ballet’s True), Unbelievable by EMF in 1991, Sweet Thing by Mick Jagger in 1992, Come Undone by Duran Duran in 1993. Even Moby used it in First Cool Hive from 1995.

But from there it’s use in popular songs (chart hits in this case) kinda ended. Even though it is still often sampled and used in various ways since then. It seems the beat has become associated with those late 80’s/early 90’s hits and become somewhat unpopular with producers. That and the fact that most people used it ‘as is’ and didn’t slice it up, like it was done with Amen break.