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Looper's Delight
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Hello folks , I`d like to offer my toughts of the subject. Since I live in Norway I`m not really familliar with the bands and organisations you`ve mentioned , so this is more in the "philosophic" alley. The law on sampling is unclear and ambivalent. It states that you can sample anything given that you create a NEW , INDEPENDENT and ORIGINAL work. Further it states that if noone can recognize what you`ve sampled , then you`ve broken no copyright. Pretty vague , huh? What can be copyrighted? Noone can the copyright chordprogressions , meters , grooves , rythmns , keys , riffs , licks etc. etc. You can copyright a combination of these , as in a song. Pick up a fake book and check out "All of me". It`s a basic song , with a chord progression and a melody. That`s all. If you reharmonize the chords and add passing-chords or substitute on chord for another but keep the melody; you`re still playing "All of me". If you change the melody but keep the chords you`re not playing the same song anymore. In this case it seems to me that melody is the only thing that can be copyrighted. BUT. But once you record it ? What then? If you play all your Wes or Benson licks on top of the chords , do you own them? If you record the voicings of Johhny Smith or the harmonocs of Tal Farlow , do you own them? No , of course not. But you own the recording. You own the sound. The writers of "All of me" own the melody you`re playing , but you own the recording of yourself playing it. It seems to me that SOUND is the keyword here. Not just the sound of the instrument but the groove/feel , the spirit. The orginality of your playing. If you sample a couple of bars "Funky Drummer" ,the James Brown tune, you are taking the spirit ,groove and sound of that particular drummer and using it to boost your own thing. This is , in my opinion , a copyright infringement. If you add reverb or chorus to the sample you`re still using HIS thing. But if you alter the sound/feel/groove of the sample? If you chop the beat up , move the bits around and speed it up to make a jungle groove? Then you`ve moved away from the drummer`s own creation and used it to make your own. You have simply used his stuff as starting point , like a soundsource. Just like you might have used a mdid channel 10 on a GM machine. Only you`re not using individual drumsounds , you`re using individual pieces of drumgrooves. A "sample-ologist" might be able to trace this "jungle-groove" you made , and tell that it`s from "Funky Drummer" and sue your ass off. But this means that the sound itself is copyrighted. That the combination of mic-placement , the room in the studio , the eq`ing , the outboard effects and the drums that produced the sound are "owned" by James Brown. If this is true then the drummer who played the beat can never record it again under the same sircumstances. If he got the same sound he did on Brown`s record he would be stealing from "da man". So I think the complex problem of "copyright" should be approached in a intuitive way. Not with spectral analyses or technical "back tracing" but with a musical approach. If the samples are merely building blocks , and not complete structures in the musical piece then I think it`s OK. Anyways , I see now that the point I was building up to has eluded me. I`m not really shure what I`m trying to say here...........Just airing my thoughts on the subject. Now if you guys would just pretend to discuss my post for a couple of days maybe I wouldn`t feel so darn dumb. :-) Yours , Thomas W Feel free to check out my web-site: http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/Promenade/1628/