Features

Marley Marl, the father of hip hop/rap’s music modern beatmaking tradition and the man who spearheaded hip hop/rap music’s major sampling era, remembers his early source materialfor sampling this way: he reason I even used, went back to…

Why sampling has no partiality to traditional musical tonality.

Released in 1989 as the title track off 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…

It’s during the Pioneers/Avant-Garde Period that hip hop/rap music experiences a second art-based renaissance. By 1988, the modern hip hop/rap music era was two years old, and hip hop/rap music had shifted from a mostly dance-based music to…

Diamond D is a producer and a rapper from The Bronx, New York who came up in the '90s.  He is one of the original members of the hip hop collective D.I.T.C.  The collective featured Lord Finesse, O.C., Big L, Fat Joe, Buckwild, Showbiz and…

Of all the early adopters of drum machines, as part of the recording process, nobody used the drum machine like Sly Stone first did in 1969. His use of the drum machine is the precursor to what beatmakers (producers) in the hip hop/rap…

You hear a sample. Then what?  What's the next step? Do you leave the sample as is? Do you change its pitch?  Do you chop it?  If you chop it, where do you chop it?  Do you leave this up to "auto-chop" functionality to decide?  Do you add…

Of the three English musicians who were able to earn a solid living solely or primarily from their compositions, not performance, George Frideric Handel was the most important in terms of the composers’ fight for copyright. Handel made his…

In The BeatTips Manual (2015) and previous editions of The Art of Sampling (2013, 2017), I noted that the sampling tradition of hip hop/rap music was never in jeopardy of dying. In view of recent commentary that continues to suggest that…

Some people think that sampling is only for people who can’t play “real” instruments and people who don’t know music theory. But this is a terrible lie! Sampling, which represents its own art form and music process, has been chosen as a…