Samples and inspiration

Much like myself, my father has always been an avid music enthusiast and collector of vinyls and CDs. Over his lifetime he has collected a huge collection of albums from a wide variety of genres of music. Unfortunately the physical space this collection held became increasingly cumbersome, and as a result he was (eventually) persuaded to digitise most of his collection. After a little bit of persuading (and begging) I was given the files on a hard drive (over 1Tb) which I have been relentlessly digging through ever since.

Every week or so I spend a couple of hours trawling through song after song looking for material that can be recycled and repurposed into HipHop. Exploring a variety of genres including; rock, folk, country music, jazz, soul, blues, French ballads, slow jams, Portuguese folk, Irish folk, Romanian folk, choir music, psychedelic, 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's pop music, punk and many other genres.

The actual process of sampling involves cutting short sections (normally phrases or individual notes) and assigning them to hardware drum pads. As sampling music can often be dangerous territory when it comes to creativity, I have set about working with certain rules regarding the use of sounds. This means when I sample I make sure that I avoid looping sections from an existing song, instead, I use individual notes and play out my own phrases, often re-pitching and stretching the samples to try and create something that is indiscernible from the original composition.