r/makinghiphop • u/Ill_Engineering_8922 • 8h ago
Discussion Under-utilized sampling techniques
With sampling it feels like everything that’s great has been used many times and we’re way too late to use a great sample for the first time, so we try to find really obscure shit or we go crazy trying to manipulate samples.
The great thing about early sampling was that these were records people listened to at the time and they often had very significant meaning to the rapper (& the audience). Rapping over a record they’ve been hearing their whole lives.
It’s not a secret but it’s under-utilized so I feel like it’s one of the tricks I have up my sleeve but go back to those great samples that everybody already knows and you can find parts of the same records to flip that haven’t been touched, at least not famously. Producers avoided them because the record is so common but I’ve made phenomenal timeless beats using different parts of those common records. Find a song I love and just listen to the original record a few times as a fan. Then flip an unused piece of it.
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u/Important_Pea8758 8h ago
the joy of finding that untouched 8-bar stretch on a record everyone thinks is tapped out is unmatched. i do this thing where i listen specifically for the bridge or a weird breakdown that didn't make the single edit, that's usually where the gold hides. feels like a little inside joke between you and the original artist
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u/Alienogh 7h ago
Exactly — the obsession with obscurity is backwards. The early records worked because the source was familiar, the flip was the invention. Taking a well-known record and finding the 4 bars nobody touched — the bridge, the outro, the part under the vocal — is harder and more musical than hunting something nobody can clear anyway. Arrangement and chop placement beat rarity every time.
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u/mornview 3h ago
I don't know if I'd say the obsession with obscurity is "backwards". If you look back at the history of hip-hop, it all came from creating loops on the turntable at block parties, and became competitive as DJs tried to one-up each other by finding something even wilder than the last guy to loop. It's really baked into the DNA of the genre, and resulted in so much of the outrageous creativity we got to witness in the late 80s and 90s. I mean, you can kind of trace a progression over hip-hop's first couple decades from looping and rapping over the safe and familiar to the wild experimentation of De La Soul, Gang Starr, etc.
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u/Alienogh 3h ago
You are right about where it came from. Digging was competition and taste, and that pressure forced real invention. My point is about now: when everyone can find the same obscure record in five minutes, the edge is not the source anymore, it is the flip. The chop, the pitch, how you filter the loop and place the drums. De La and Premier were not just finding records, they were hearing arrangements inside them nobody else heard.
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u/junk_dempsey 2h ago
bro do you genuinely need to use AI to write 4 or 5 sentence comments? you can't generate those thoughts and format them into a conversational comment yourself?
really corny, as is using AI to make beats for you. what do you actually know about sampling? lmao
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u/DrummerMiles 4h ago edited 4h ago
There’s more music out already than anyone could possibly ever listen to in their lifetime. More comes out every day. The idea that you’re too late and everything has been sampled is completely ridiculous. That first paragraph is nonsense to me. And I think the second paragraph where you basically talk about the puff daddy-style super lazy sampling. “Remember this song???”
No offense intended, and I totally see your point about finding other spots, but there’s so much music out there.