i was listening to pink floyd's "fearless" which includes 'you'll never walk alone' by rodgers and hammerstein, when i began to think of what might have been the first time one song included parts of another song like a sample.

my guess is that surely a jazz musician or classical composer had done it, but the earliest i can think of is "all you need is love", in which the beatles also sing parts of 'yesterday', 'she loves you', and possibly 'all together now'.

incidently, there is a great bootleg version of "hey jude" where, in the coda, john does his 'goo goo ca choob' thing.

can anyone site an earlier example?

Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite featured actual caliope music culled from EMI's vaults. George Martin took several different spools of tape and cut them up into 1 foot sections and then pasted them back together in random order.

I've always strictly considered sampling as using digitized representations of analog sounds (musical or otherwise).

I don't exactly know when such digital sampling began, but it probably would be easy enough to find internet info about it.

I can remember hearing digitized (I presume) samples of James Brown's riffs and guttural vocalizations early on in '70s/'80s Rhythm & Blues and Rap music and, of course, MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" had Rick James' "Super Freak" theme very prominently sampled as its basis.

I've heard that Stevie Wonder "looked" into it also.

But, if we are allowed to consider and/or include "analog sampling" (that is, old tapes of song parts or sounds being re-recorded onto a new tape along with fresh material), such as the singing of bits from different Fab Four songs on "All You Need Is Love" (which was actually probably done "live," when John got a wild hair of inspiration during the session) or the taped calliope music on other Beatles' stuff, I can think of lots of earlier examples.

The surf sounds and seagull cries on Otis Redding's "(Sitting On) The Dock Of The Bay" and all the hot rod and car crash noises on Jan and Dean songs or on "The Leader Of The Pack" come to mind from the '60s.

Of course, these could also just have been recorded "live" right there in the studio (as radio sound effects were done) while the master tape was being laid down or added later on a multi-track machine.

And, if this sort of "analog sampling" is allowed, you can go even further back (to the '50s) when Patti Page sang a duet with herself on "Tennessee Waltz" via a pre-recorded tape or when Buddy Holly did the same with both guitar and vocals on "Words Of Love" at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, NM.

Or much earlier (the '40s, I think) with Mary Ford doing a "self duet," singing on "How High The Moon," while Les Paul (the innovative player and noted designer of electric guitars, record producer and recordist) did the same with his stacked and layered guitar accompaniment.

Les could even get almost those same guitar effects with his "Paulverizer," which attached to his guitar in live performance.

This allowed him to immediately play along with himself on this self-conceived and self-built record/playback/erase/and-here-we-go-again device, dependent on a short closed-loop tape, which ran at his choice of speeds.

It sat right there on his guitar and now, I believe, it all sits in the Smithsonian.

Mary, however, relied on a second singer, miked up and just offstage to deliver her trademark harmonized vocals in concert.

Chet Atkins and other devilishly dexterous dudes actually play combination pieces like "Under The Double Eagle"/"Dixie" or "Freight Train"/"Camptown Races" live and simultaneously all by themselves without using tapes or samples at all.

They'll finger-pick one song on the bass strings and the other on the treble ones.

And look right at you and grin.

Just like the "Nashville Cats" that John Sebastian and The Lovin' Spoonful told us about.



I wanted to mention how the overall 4/4 march time of "All You Need Is Love" has measures of 3/4 waltz time which appear at specific, recurring places throughout that cool Lennon/McCartney minor masterpiece.

It's one of my favorite Beatles' songs, but that rhythm change will forever keep the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band from being able to march and play it, unless they would all skip their feet, every time the music skips that beat.

After seeing the innovative drill that the Drum Majors gave us on T+1, such eclecticism might be in our Aggie future.

That time change trivia probably reveals nothing new to my learned musical colleagues here on this BB, but it's a cool thing to realize or discover if it hasn't yet caught your attention as to just why that song catches your attention.

Another example of such a back and forth meter change is in the cool intro of The Allman Brothers Band's "Whipping Post."

Gig 'em, FAST FRED '65.

Before the world wide web, village idiots usually stayed in their own village.

[This message has been edited by FAST FRED (edited 12/12/2003 6:00p).]

Once again, my head is spinning after reading one of FAST FRED's posts.

The first sampling ever done in the western hemisphere was Tone Loc's "Wild Thing" using Van Halen's "Jamies Cryin'".

In actually, sampling has existed in one form or another in Norhtern China dating back to the Zao Ling Dynasty which was 1500 bc.

I may be wrong.

Fred,

Would you consider Pink Floyd's "Money" a continuous flip from four to three beats? Or is it just too incessant and should be considered simply 7/4?

Hey, talkingmike, are you the one who never answers when I say, "Mike? Mike? Testing. One, two, three?"

To answer your question, I feel that song as 3/4, then 4/4 and over again.

So, if you're counting out the beat of Pink Floyd's "Money" aloud or in your head as 7/4, you'd use the words one through six, each of which has only one syllable.

But when you come, in your mind or with your murmuring lips, to that two syllable word, "sev-en", it really throws off the feel for me.

So I'd avoid that by going "1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4."

The song's bass pattern and its fingering also seem to fit this.

Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" in 5/4 fits "1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5" very nicely.

It's really the prerogative of whoever writes the music to designate the time signature which best gives everyone who follows a clue as to just what he/she was feeling.

I've heard that Frank Zappa notated some stuff in 11/4.

But that two syllable word "seven" and then the three syllable "eleven" would make me yearn to break that challenging weirdness down into shorter measures, so as to count it out more easily.

I guess you could always solve 7/4 (and even, by extension and with a quick tongue, 11/4) going "one and two and three and four and five and six and se-ven, one and two and three and four and five and six and se-ven."

But that's a lot of words when counting out an up tempo meter.

Doing it that way (using "and" to identify and help feel the half-beat) is good for maintaining a feeling that the music really IS moving when the song is a slow one like "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

Or, at the other extreme, to give the proper rhythmic "pulse" for a really fast polka.

Or, yet another thought, for a piece with LOTS of notes (with many of those notes coming on that half-beat) as in the "William Tell Overture" of Lone Ranger thematic fame.

The whole idea of using "measures" to divide up notated music is to make it more manageable.

Otherwise, you could have a musical composition that had, as a ridiculous example, 1612 quarter note length beats, enclosed within a single measure, with a multi-syllabic, self-defeating time signature of 403/4.

When you listen to or perform music, obviously that's a form of communication amongst one another that we all enjoy.

Consider further, however, that when you memorize the words or can hum a song's tune;

Or if you read music enough to figure out a melody, even if it's only sight reading a hymn in church;

Or when you contemplate or figure out a piece of music to the level at which we've been posting;

Or if you follow chord charts or read sheet music when you play:

Hey, you are in actual, personal, bona fide, de facto COMMUNICATION with the musical genius of your choice from MoTown's Holland-Dozier-Holland, Mexia's Cindy Walker or Burt Bacharach or Mozart or Lennon/McCartney or Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Brian Wilson or Stevie Wonder to George Gershwin, John Philip Sousa, Leadbelly, Charles and Rev. John Wesley, Hank Williams or Jimi Hendrix, etc., etc., etc.

Now that's a self-esteem building thought to kick off this weekend!!!

And that's what's cool about music.

You may not "write the songs that make the whole world sing," but you can participate.


Gig 'em, FAST FRED '65.

Before the world wide web, village idiots usually stayed in their own village.

[This message has been edited by FAST FRED (edited 12/12/2003 6:54p).]