(upbeat electronic music)
- Have you ever heard a new song
and thought it sounded familiar?
That might be because it is.
Sampling is the creative art
of cutting and pasting audio,
and it's been used to create hits for decades.
That catchy melody in Drake's Hotline Bling,
(Holine Bling music)
it's a *Timmy Thomas sample from 1972.
(Timmy Thomas music sample)
And the horns in Beyonce's Crazy in Love,
(Crazy in Love)
that's a Chi-Lites sample, also from the 70's.
(The Chi-Lites music sample)
Sampling has influenced every genre of music
from hip-hop to dance,
and it's become this global industry
where producers can buy and sell sounds online
to use in their own work.
Top Latin pop producers, Andres Torres and Mauricio Rengifo,
make and use samples to create global hits,
most notably this song.
(Despacito)
We went to L.A. to check out
how they use these snippets of audio samples
to build a song.
This is cute!
Oh my gosh, look at this little backyard!
- Welcome.
- Hi!
- Are you ready?
- Yeah, I'm totally ready!
- We started with a guitar, yeah.
(guitar cord)
And, then we were just found the quickest drum we can found.
(guitar and drum)
We will record in now some bass.
(guitar, drum, and bass)
Then, with this you can already start to write a song,
and then you probably would add more stuff
and make sections and make all that.
But this took us 10 minutes to build,
now we need to do the real thing that is write a song
and then produce it.
- Yeah no big deal.
(laughing)
Sampling started with people cutting up existing recordings
to take bits like a melody or a single drum beat
and use them in a new song.
That still happens, but now musicians
also create sounds specifically as samples.
They can be purchased on online market places,
like Splice or Sounds.com,
and for a subscription fee you can use any of their sounds.
- [Andres] So
- [Andres And Mauricio] This is
- Splice, it's like a bank of samples
and is much more than that nowadays.
It has a lot of things that we can play with,
but we mainly use it as source to get samples.
- So a lot of producers and really famous people
that has great sounds and a lot of character
on their productions put their samples there
and they share them.
So you download them in your song.
- [Woman] Andres and Mauricio have released
their own pack of samples.
- That's the snare and this is the kick.
- [Woman] Oh that's nice.
- That's like a fiddle.
- That's a nice tail-end on that.
- Yeah.
- Are there any sounds from Despacito in your sample pack?
- There are, there are.
- Probably, yeah.
- Like a lot of percussion that we have used
that are real people that we recorded,
for example the cymbals.
(Cymbals)
Yeah, that's there,
- The snare.
- 100 percent.
(Snare Drum)
- That's there.
(Bongo Drum)
- [Woman] That's nice.
- Yeah
(Despacito)
- Alright, so what project are we looking at now?
- This is Runaway by Sebastian Yatra, Jonas Brothers,
Daddy Yankee, and Natti Natasha.
- [Woman] That's a lot of people.
- Yeah
- So basically, the track is half vocals, half instruments.
- 'Cause there's a lot of artists.
- So what part of the song uses a sample?
- All the drums are sample, every drum in this song.
The kick is even in our sample pack.
- Actually the snare too.
- Like this is, this is in our sample pack
and this is, this is many sounds together.
(Runaway)
- [Woman] These market places let other musicians buy sounds
from Despacito, Runaway,
and other hit songs legally and for pennies.
- Having one central place with really powerful search
that lets you kind of dive in
from a lot of different vectors right.
You can come in and just browse what's new,
you can search and see what's hot charts,
or you can do an exact search for I need a flute
in the key of B right now, you know.
And like, what we watched was it just really evolved
the way people think about creation and songwriting.
- [Woman] Before these market places,
samples were usually created
by taking clips without permission,
but that can land artists in hot water,
including Vanilla Ice.
- My lawyers handle all the stuff,
I haven't talked to Queen or anything.
It's no big deal, all it is is sample David Bowie and Queen.
(Ice Ice Baby music)
(Under Pressure music)
- Back then, if you really wanted to clear something,
when you pulled it from a track, it could never get done.
People would try to extract it from the set
where they heard it and hope no one notices
and release their track and if their successful get sued.
This library is made so
that you can do what you want with it
and not worry about that.
And that to me is like,
when you see the number one song using it,
your like wow this is amazing.
- So if you buy a sample on Splice,
that's it, it's yours to use?
- Yeah, I mean there's like, in your works,
you don't have to do any attribution.
It's yours to use, royalty free.
That's the key, that's the term, royalty free.
There's like, you know,
minor things like you can't just resell the sample
and things like that, but in your commercial works,
you are good to go.
(upbeat music)
Have you guys heard any songs
that have used sounds from your Splice pack?
- We have heard a lot of drums being used
and a song a Why Don't We.
They used our, one guitar from our sample,
but they tweaked it and the song is really awesome.
(Come to Brazil music)
( Guitar sample)
- I totally recognize it.
- Yeah.
- We're proud.
- We feel super super cool about it.
Yeah, you can, you can sit down with your guitar
and start thinking about cords and all that
or you can download something
and you don't even know what cords are they.
- And it doesn't matter.
- 'Cause you start singing to it.
- You have the samples, you have the plug-ins,
now you have everything.
- [Woman] Sample market places are beneficial
for musicians on both ends.
They provide instant and legal access to millions of sounds
and have also become a way
for more established artists to make money.
Producers, like Andres and Mauricio, get paid in advance
to make sample packs for Splice
and again when someone downloads one of their sounds.
- We're at this era where software is the primary instrument
and also because of all the progress in distribution,
you know, you can actually heard,
you can actually make a living more.
You don't need a record, a huge record deal, to break it
or get enough money to go into a studio.
- The most important thing if you go a little deeper
than music is that it's equal,
and that's the way art should be.
To do music production, it was very expensive
and very difficult to get stuff.
- [Mauricio] That computer wasn't enough.
- No.
- [Mauricio] You needed a lot of stuff.
- Now if you can get a computer that is already expensive,
but once they get it they have access to the same things
that we have and everybody can do the same quality of music
and that for me is the world evolving
and being a better place for art.
(upbeat music)
- Hey all I hope you enjoyed the video.
It was brought to you by Aloft hotels, different by design.
Thanks for watching.
(Clap)
- [Camera Man] Got it.
- Good clap sounds.
- [Camera Man] Yes.
- Sample it.
(laughing)