5 ms·
Amen: the world's most famous sample and the rise of the musical copyright
- quinndupont 15y agoWeirdly melodic and somber, but interesting video nonetheless.
- Figs 15y agoInteresting video. I wish the narrator didn't sound so robotic though.
- CrazedGeek 15y agoTV Tropes has a list of examples: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmenBreak http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmenBreak
- Groxx 15y agoThat's a horrible TV Tropes article. It reads like Wikipedia...
- jinushaun 15y agoThat's why drum and bass all sounds the same to me. Reggaeton also has a similar situation, where everyone uses the exact same beat for the rhythm. It's called the "Dem Bow" beat.
- yangyang 15y agoOnly a fraction of current D&B uses the amen break. Plenty of current stuff doesn't use sampled drum loops. Loxy & Resound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0mcxqhJ2j8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0mcxqhJ2j8 Consequence ft. ASC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwdSS--cgo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwdSS--cgo S.P.Y.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnl_EumKXX4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnl_EumKXX4
- dave1010uk 15y agoIf you haven't seen it, Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music [1] is an interesting source of how different electronic music genres evolved and are influenced. It contains example samples of many tracks and I've found whole sub-generes of electronic music that I never knew existed. [1] http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ (warning: autoplaying sound)
- meatsock 15y agoishkur contends the whole thing was a pisstake and not to be taken seriously. i count as evidence of that the fact i am included in the list as a result of responding to a thread of his at the right time. you can get a sense of his generally snide/sarcastic tone all over his site. luckily almost all real internet discourse about the guts of electronic music are sheathed in many conflicting layers of indirect subcultural references. check hyperreal.org for details =)
- rbxbx 15y agoI'm inclined to agree. Also considering the quality of info and relevance of associated audio samples. Also, meatsock? As in the dude from the c8 forums and slsk breakcore chat back in the day? Odd to catch you here. It's rob/robad/etc from sickmode etc :)
- phlux 15y agoI came to say the same... I take Ishkur's attitude much like I would Yahtzee Croshaw of the escapist... A lot of snide attitude done in character.
- thepumpkin1979 15y agoThis is an interesting video, but how does this has anything to do with Startups, Technology, Development, UX or Tech Business... This is the why I think HN is becoming another Reddit. It's a shame...
- icarus_drowning 15y agoInteresting link. Certainly related to the rise of alternative copyright models, which are certainly related to technology and startups. Obviously relevant and valid HN link.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoI see that you've just passed your one-year anniversary here, so I guess you are now officially entitled to complain that HN is turning into Reddit, but I think that this video is actually an exploration of an interesting hack.
- danilocampos 15y agoAnyone who works in technology is going to have to deal with intellectual property, as well as the laws/attitudes around the same. Moreover, music is an essential component of culture, which means comprehension of music, or at least its recombinant nature, may improve your chances of creating a consumer product people love. edit: And come on, you've been around long enough to have read the FAQ: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." (my emphasis) This passes by any measure. Being well-rounded is a good idea. I love seeing content like this way more than the insipid, obvious, naval-gazing, circlejerking blog nonsense that often passes for worthwhile reading just because the author mentions "funding" or "startups" or anything else in vogue n times before the post finishes.
- sixtofour 15y agoCopyright.
- tiles 15y agoThe end of the video discusses how a "society free to build upon the past" is able to create new forms of expression from old ideas. As opposed to articles condemning software patents and IP trolls, this video explores the benefits of unencumbered reuse of earlier work.
- sixtofour 15y agoThe author's own site (including the video), Nate Harrison: http://nkhstudio.com/ http://nkhstudio.com/
- bobstobener 15y agoThe break started here (at :05 sec) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUImpeQG66U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUImpeQG66U
- lpolovets 15y agoFYI you can link to exact to exact times in youtube videos by appending #t=XXXmYYYs to the link (m=minutes, s=seconds). For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUImpeQG66U#t=0m5s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUImpeQG66U#t=0m5s
- J3L2404 15y ago"Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, like nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new. Culture like science and technology grows by accretion. Each new creator building on the works before. Overprotecting stifles the very forces it is supposed to nurture."
- jannes 15y agoI, too, found this quote very remarkable. But it left me wondering. Can anybody tell me where the harm in underprotecting "intellectual property" comes from? This is an honest question. I don't understand it. Maybe it's because I'm too young and don't depend on "intellectual property" protection yet. I don't understand where this idea comes from that ideas can be owned by anyone. What if the limit of copying would become what's copyable and not what is allowed to be copied? Wouldn't that accellerate innovation? Isn't innovation more valuable to a society than anything else? Why do we put a tax on it?
- pavel_lishin 15y agoThe obvious argument is that it lowers the incentive for people to create truly new ideas. If you can't patent or copyright something, why would you sink a significant amount of time, money, or effort into it? Especially for big projects - operating systems, etc.
- archangel_one 15y agoThe usual argument is that protecting "intellectual property" encourages the production of culture, ie. you are forced to buy copies of CDs instead of copying them for free, which means that the artist earns more money and thus there is a financial incentive for them to record songs. Obviously the same argument can be taken to apply to TV, movies etc and IIRC is more or less implied by the US constitution (it says that a system of limited rights may be permitted for the progress of the creative arts, or something like that). I guess the same thing is taken to apply to innovation as well, that Apple is encouraged to invent a cool new operating system for their mobile phone because they control it exclusively once they've done that. The argument would run that if anyone could then just copy it, Apple wouldn't gain relative to their competitors by creating it so wouldn't have spent the money in the first place, and hence less innovation. I'm not necessarily arguing for this point of view - goodness knows I think that it's too far-reaching and over-enforced at the moment. That's just a description of some of the usual arguments in favour of it.
- parenthesis 15y agoAnother ubiquitous break is the `Apache' break: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY-Z6wm6TMQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY-Z6wm6TMQ
- mambodog 15y agoHere's a whole collection of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLQyWoBXb2M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLQyWoBXb2M On a related note, I'm always amused by Youtube video descriptions breathlessly claiming "NO COPY RIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENEDED".
- fuddle 15y agoCheckout the Amen Break iPhone app too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph7HnNLKh6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph7HnNLKh6Q
- p_monk 15y agoThe "Amen Brother" drum break is far from the most sampled or most famous drum break in history. Check out a list of more heavily sampled breaks here: http://the-breaks.com/stats.php http://the-breaks.com/stats.php The above list is far from complete, obviously. If I had to put my money on it, id say the most sampled drum break is "Impeach The President" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8
- jamesbritt 15y agoHow does this site decide what to check for the use of a sample? We're at the point where sampling is so easy, so ubiquitous, that counting usage is impossible without some arbitrary selection criteria (e.g. "I've heard of it", or, "The people who compile <some chart> have heard of it").
- code_duck 15y agoStrange, I just happened upon this for the first time 3 days ago seemingly at random.
- fedd 15y agoi found the presented samples different from the original. it would be better if the drum lines from different songs were showed as notes, or i can't believe that they are derived. i think it's a stretch to make a beautiful statement, that somebody invented some loop in 60-s. i even thought the author wants to tell that if i wrote a little break bit myself, i used that amen sample (just rearranged and manipulated in any number ways). but i didn't i swear. never heard of this before today.
- pash 15y agoGlossed over in the video, and in the discussion here so far, is that even when a court rules a derivative work to infringe a copyright, there's no need to obtain a license so long as the derivative work is "creative enough" to qualify as fair use under US copyright law (and similarly in many other jurisdictions). So while it's true that the Sixth Circuit ruled in 2005 [1] that unlicensed samples of any duration constitute copyright infringement, what's left unsaid is that samples still may be used without bothering about licenses so long as they're used as part of a sufficiently creative new song. But what's "creative enough"? Ah, there's the rub. The real story here is how copyright owners are able to abuse a quirk of the law in order to strong-arm musicians into paying licensing fees, even when everybody knows full well there's probably no legal obligation to pay them. "Sample trolls" exist precisely because fair use is only a defense to litigation, which means it can only be invoked in the course of a lawsuit. So there's no sure way to know whether you need to license your use of a sample until you get sued, you claim fair use, and a judge tells you whether you should have (past tense) bought a license or not. It's much cheaper, of course, just to pay for a license up front and be done with it. Unfortunately, its hard to imagine a way to resolve this conundrum if copyright holders are still to be granted monopolies over derivative works [2]. Consider the canonical law-school example of a derivative work, Marcel Duchamp's goteed Mona Lisa (LHOOQ) [3]. If Leonardo had been around to defend his copyright, would Marcel have been able successfully to invoke the fair-use defense? It all depends on how creative the judge thinks it is to give old Lisa a mustache. Reasonable judges may disagree. And then consider Andy Warhol's colorful posterized Mona Lisa silkscreens, or Kazimir Malevich's collage-cum-painting Composition with Mona Lisa, which incorporates a small copy of Leonardo's painting. Even if you thought Marcel's work was a blatant rip-off, you might think Andy's or Kazimir's is fair use. (Then there's Salvador Dali's Self Portrait as Mona Lisa.) Point is, it's impossible to draw a bright line on fair use, even for a particular work. But that's not to say there's no bright line anywhere. When it comes to recorded music, one such line is whether a work actually incorporates a copy of the recording. If it's not a sample, but a new recording that happens to sound the same, there's no issue. (A ruling that duplicating any portion of a musical composition constitutes infringement is nigh unimaginable.) So just go record your own version of the beat you want to use and there's no issue. 1: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport_Music,_Inc._v._Dimension_Films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport_Music,_Inc._v._Dimen... ; a good write-up on the case is at http://www.ivanhoffman.com/fairusemusic.html http://www.ivanhoffman.com/fairusemusic.html . 2: And maybe they shouldn't be. But then the debate would probably turn back to what constitutes a derivative work. 3: This and other riffs on the Mona Lisa are shown at http://www.aiwaz.net/gallery/mona-lisa-as-modern-lisa/gc234 http://www.aiwaz.net/gallery/mona-lisa-as-modern-lisa/gc234 . By the way, for those of you who doubt the ubiquity and permutivity of the Amen Break in today's hip-hop, here are a few tracks I picked out in a quick once-over of two albums by The Roots. From almost-a-sample to you-gotta-be-paying-attention, these all use the Amen Break: - "Rolling with Heat" (slowed down, but otherwise almost unchanged) - "Thought @ Work" (syncopated by dropping a beat) - "Duck Down!" (very slow, syncopated) - "I Don't Care" (syncopated) - "Web" (very syncopated) - "Boom!" (very syncopated) If you can hear the signature "bum bum BAH, buh-DUM buh-DUM" in those last few, you can see why people call it the most ubiquitous break. It truly is all over the place, albeit often in heavily manipulated form.