22 terms. The vocabulary of found sound and its transformations.
Amen Break
A 6-second drum solo from "Amen Brother" (The Winstons, 1969). Sampled in thousands of tracks; the rhythmic foundation of jungle, drum & bass, and hip-hop. The most sampled recording in history.
Bit Crush
Reducing the bit depth of a sample (from 16-bit to 8-bit) to introduce quantization distortion and digital grit. Characteristic of early samplers like the E-mu SP-1200 (12-bit) and Akai S950.
Breakbeat
A drum loop taken from the break section of a funk or soul record — where the drums play alone without other instruments. The founding element of hip-hop. DJ Kool Herc isolated and extended breaks using two copies of the same record in 1973.
Chop
To slice a sample into segments and rearrange them into a new rhythmic pattern. The foundational technique of MPC-based production. Each chop is a decision about which moment to preserve and when to place it in time.
Creative Commons
A flexible copyright licensing framework that allows creators to permit certain uses of their work (sampling, remixing, commercial use) without requiring individual clearance. An alternative to the all-rights-reserved default.
Crate Digging
Searching through vinyl records in physical crates — at record stores, thrift shops, estate sales — to find obscure source material. The practice is both methodology and ritual. DJ Shadow epitomizes crate-digging as a way of life.
Fair Use
A US copyright doctrine allowing limited use of copyrighted material without permission. Factors: purpose (commercial/educational), nature of work, amount used, market impact. Transformative use strengthens fair use claims but rarely fully protects samples.
Flip
Transforming a recognizable sample into something unrecognizable through chopping, pitching, filtering, and rearranging. The sample flip is considered the highest form of sampling artistry — the original becomes raw material, not a reference.
Ghost Note
A very soft, barely audible drum hit between main beats. In sampled breaks, ghost notes on the snare create the "breathe" between the 2 and 4 — the organic feel that makes a programmed beat sound human.
Granular Timestretch
A time-stretching algorithm that splits audio into short grains (10–100ms) and repeats or skips them to change duration without changing pitch. Creates characteristic smearing artifacts at extreme ratios. Used in Ableton's Complex/Texture modes.
Interpolation
Re-recording (not sampling) a portion of an original song with new musicians. Avoids master recording rights but still requires composition rights clearance. Legally and economically different from direct sampling.
Loop
A sample that repeats seamlessly — a fundamental building block of sampled music. The loop is sampling's base unit: a moment from someone else's time made permanent and recombined into something new.
MPC
Akai's MIDI Production Center. The dominant hip-hop production tool since 1988. The MPC60, MPC3000, and MPC2000XL define three generations of beat-making culture. J Dilla's MPC3000 timing redefined what "feel" means in rhythm.
One-Shot
A sample triggered once per hit, not looped — typically a drum sound (kick, snare, hi-hat). Building beats from one-shots rather than loops (Marley Marl's innovation) gave producers rhythmic control impossible with looped breaks.
Phase Vocoder
A frequency-domain time-stretching algorithm using Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT). Analyzes and resynthesizes audio preserving spectral content. Higher quality than granular at moderate ratios; develops phase artifacts ("phasiness") at extremes.
Pitch Shift
Changing a sample's pitch without changing its duration. Requires a time-stretching algorithm operating inversely. Producers use pitch shift to fit samples into a song's key or to create harmonic variation from a single source.
Quantize
Snapping note and sample triggers to the nearest grid division. Over-quantization removes the human timing variations that create feel. J Dilla deliberately turned quantize off to preserve (and exaggerate) the natural drift between beats.
S950
Akai S950 — a 12-bit, 48kHz hardware sampler widely used in hip-hop and jungle production. Its limited bit depth creates a characteristic grittiness; early house and hip-hop producers treated this limitation as a feature, not a bug.
Sample Clearance
Legal permission obtained from both the master recording holder (label/artist) and composition rights holder (songwriter/publisher) to use a sample commercially. Post-1991, legally mandatory. Can cost tens of thousands of dollars or be refused entirely.
Swing
A timing pattern where even subdivisions are played slightly uneven — typically the second 16th note in a pair is delayed. MPC swing pushes off-beats back, creating the "bounce" that separates hip-hop from metronomic electronic music.
Timestretching
Changing a sample's duration without changing its pitch — allowing material recorded at any tempo to fit a new BPM. Algorithms include granular, phase vocoder, and formant-preserving methods. The key technology enabling sample-based production across tempos.
44.1kHz
Standard digital audio sample rate (44,100 samples per second). Derived from the Nyquist theorem: must be at least twice the highest audible frequency (20kHz). CD quality. Early samplers used lower rates (22kHz, 11kHz) producing characteristic digital degradation.