I should probably talk about my favorite sample, the amen break. Here is the waveform in all it's glory:
The simple answer is: Control.
Drums are the foundation of any piece of music. But it's doubly important in rhythmic heavy types of music like heavy metal, which is what my friend was recording. A raw recording of a drummer, no matter how tight, cannot be as perfect as that recording turned into MIDI and than quantized-that is to say snapped to a grid. There's just no way. Plus when you have the drum tracks as MIDI, you can re-arrange the drums, or take the same arrangements and use different sample sets/"kits" and mix them in endless variations. Control.
So back to the amen break... Which is a six second long mono recording of drums played in 1969 by a virtually unknown drummer named Gregory C. Coleman. I want to break down the path that this sound has taken since the point it was recorded.
1. The drum solo was played in a studio sometime in 1968 to 1969.
2. Microphones in the studio picked up the sound of the drums, as well as reverberations from the room the drums were played in.
3. The mics were connected to a mixing console, which was connected to a tape machine, both of which added coloration (distortion, phasing, etc) to the already coloured sound that the microphones picked up.
4. The mixed recording was mastered and pressed to vinyl for mass consumption. The record "Color Him Father" sells a bundle, everyone is happy.
*** Approximately a decade of radio silence ***
With the advent of the sampler, someone records the drum solo and uses it as the percussion in their song. Meaning:
5. The mastered vinyl record is recorded and played back via a sampler.
Later on as sampling becomes more and more prominent, the sample gains a life of it's own, and gets repressed onto vinyl or available in CD form in the form of sample packs. Adding these additional steps to the process:
6. Recordings of the mastered vinyl record are made available and sampled. The mastered vinyl is now RE-mastered, often compressed further, and otherwise processed via DSP.
7. The re-mastered vinyl appears as a 44100khz, 16bit WAV file available for download online.
Than that's just where the fun begins! Now you can take that CD-quality file, and compress and process it any way your mind can think of! Now, of course by this point the original sound of the drums is almost completely lost, and what remains is basically a chunk of digitally processed noise. But that's itself an amazingly beautiful thing.
What has been lost along the way, other than some of the original acoustics of the room, and sound of the drums as produced in the room, is control over the sound. When using the break, you realize that all the sounds of each part of the kit are "glued" together. The kick has a ride cymbal hit over it, the snare does too, everything is covered in the wash of the cymbals. The timing also varies throughout the break. The crash at the end doesn't get to ring out to silence like it would if you were sampling it in the studio-But it's perfect.
So what's more real, recording a drummer and than making it MIDI? Or starting with the MIDI and using it to trigger a breakbeat? I don't really know anymore.
