Turn on the radio these days and you may hear the latest chart topping track and think to yourself “Hmmm, this sounds familiar”, or perhaps you hear a golden oldie and realise that your new favourite song isn’t completely original. I know this is something that has happened to me many times, and the explanation is often sampling.

Sampling has now become something that is common place amongst popular music. Everyone from Jamie XX, Alt-J, Rihanna and even One Direction have recently sampled well know tracks to form their own music. However, despite now being a mainstream practice its beginnings are far more humble.

The technique of sampling first emerged in the 1940’s during the Musique concrete movement, where various artists began to experiment with the manipulation of tapes and vinyl records.

It wasn’t until the late 1960’s that the use of sampling had its first mainstream use, with artists such as Pink Floyd and The Beatles both featuring sampled sounds on their music. However, despite being used in popular songs by mainstream artists, the technique was still considered to be ‘avant-garde’ and would continue to be for the next few decades. Then, throughout the mid-1970’s and early 80’s tape based machines began to die out and were replaced by the first affordable samplers.

Thanks to this, the use of sampling really came to the forefront in the late 1980’s thanks to the Hip-Hop movement. Early artists such as Grandmaster Flash and Sugar Hill Gang were amongst the first to use sampling as a base to form new and exciting music that people had never heard before.

Despite many legal battles over the coming years, sampling continued to form the backbone of many classic Hip-Hop tracks and eventually spanned into other genres of music.

Despite artists commonly sampling well known tracks, they will also often find their inspiration through other music. This includes a selection of our very own library music. Artist such as Gnarls Barkley, T.I and Danger Doom have all sampled a selection of the JW catalogue to create their own music.

Have a listen here…