There have been a few questions recently about the drum sample's origins, so I thought I would share the link to the NPR interview where Shadow talks about the drum sample being taken from a high school band recording from the 60s/70s. Unfortunately he doesn't identify the record, but we can say with certainty that the sample is not from Frankie Seay and the Soul Riders - Soul Food. www.npr.org/transcripts/165145271
There is an NPR interview w/ DJ shadow from 2012 where he says he got the drum beat from a record of a high school band from the 60/70s. Seems some high schools used to press their own records featuring their school band
Wow, that's awesome! I'd love to hear that record and the track he sampled. Maybe I can track it down. Weirdly enough, one of the first records I ever sampled as a kid was my Mom's high school choir/band record, so it must have been a popular thing to do back in the 60s/70s
It is the album that represents me, I bought the album the same year it came out when no one had yet awarded it. The equipment used was an Akai MPC 60 mkII and an Alesis 8-track DAT to record 8 separate sequences of each song. The approach is that of a DJ, if you look closely, the cuts on the album are imperfect, there is no beginning or end from one song to another, this is because dj shadow approached it as a DJ mixtape session using only one MPC and battle vinyl to scratch to represent you as a DJ in the world of hiphop. According to what DJ Shadow says in his interviews, his idea was to do a DJ session with an MPC and he began to realize that the MPC 60 could be used to compose 1 hour sessions, but without vocal phrases it would be poor and very static, the scratch of The songs were magic, in message, the expression of each song where phrases are made with the vinyl. Some later albums are also with that idea, instead of making a 3-minute song, he had the idea of making an hour-long song and releasing that as an album. An idea that James Lavelle rejected and where he proposed making cuts so that the tracks were more findable, but with continuous playback of the tracks, without silences or fade in fade out. DJ shadow accepted that and they released the album on MoWax. 1996 was a time where only people with a lot of money had Protools from 4 track stereo to 8 track mono with 24 bits of professional sound in 1996. But he used an 8-track Alesis DAT to record separately. James Lavele had Protools for those 8 tracks and he digitized these DJ shadow demos in his protools for approximately an hour. This is when they worked more on the album with the demo turned to Pro tools and going through a NEVE mixing console. You could easily do this album with any DAW, but this is where DJ Shadow reveals a learning. When the equipment is limited, it forces you to be more ingenious with what you have, you don't have more, there are no sweets, there are no tools that work miracles, only a sampler that has 1.44 mb diskettes and 12-bit, 40kHz, Stereo poor sound quality. Ram memory for 768KB (13.1 seconds) expandable to 1.5MB (26.2 seconds), it has no filters, it only has 16 voices of polyphony. And now with machines that have 4GB like Machine+, 2GB MPC one MPC live, some complain to create music. I guess a Roland DS 61 with 128 voices of polyphony is a monstrous workstation It is truly incredible how, having more resources, no one can express so much of their ingenuity, talent and creativity, people who do not want to get bored doing hard work to compose masterpieces, as a very young DJ Shadow did in 1996. Now the kids today with a 128 or 256 mb, 1GB sampler, think it's crap, for a sampler machine, things like MC707, SP404, Digitakt... really? The reading of creativity and good musical taste that this album gives us is truly incredible. All those who complain about new machines with this album you break their plan to hate sampling machines Any of these things surpass an MPC 60 in sound quality and editing system. MPC 60 has no filters, it is a sampler that reproduces what you record without filters and with it this great musical marvel was made. It should also be noted that the law of using samples longer than 4 seconds was a problem, and the MPC 60 offered the new way to justify that those 4 seconds were no longer 4 but rather 4 pieces of 1 second to use the same , was a technology that destroyed anti-sampling laws in the United States. MPC 60 was the great revolution that invalidated sanctions for albums by artists who used samples. Thanks for the video, the work you do for the focus is great.
You are in incredibly knowledgeable on the subject. Thanks for sharing all of this. I really appreciate your point about his scratching adding a whole level of creative expression. I never looked at it quite like that, but you're absolutely right, it really adds such a fantastic human element to the otherwise static nature of the medium.
Dude, You are undoubtedly the man of the hour with your deconstruction thing you got going on here man!!! I wish I had the resources to do what you did cuz I’m a poor beat junkie that loves unique but timeless beats 😎
Not for nothing, but if you've got a computer, you should be able to download and run any number of free DAWs (grab the free version of Ableton Live, the program I'm using here, for example) and do a lot of this beat making yourself! It's a fantastic project/hobby to get in to.
Thank you for educating me on this absolutely seminal album! I came across it because I was big into Ninja Tune artists in the 90s (Herbalizer, Kid Koala, Dj Vadim who I got to meet once!) And I had no idea what a treasure it really was... Thank you! It's like having a painting you've always just known and loved and someone coming along and telling you it's a Picasso and here's why it's glorious 😮 ❤
Thank you for the note! This album will always been unreal in my books. I also had a similar experience with Ninja Tune artists...Kid Koala, The Herbalizer, DJ Food, their whole roster was exactly what I wanted to hear back then. Cheers
It is, without a doubt, the most important unknown sample for me. When I first heard that flat, boxy sounding kick, the dull bell of the ride and detuned snare, it was instantly the coolest thing I had ever heard. I would give a lot to find the origin of that sample.
@@KarlBoltzmann Doesn't help that when searching high school bands on discogs, there are way too many to closely inspect, and most songs aren't on TH-cam.
I don't think the source has been posted and or catalogued anywhere, otherwise it seems like it would have been found. It might take Shadow himself to reveal the source, but he might not even remember.
All these years I thought the piano was from a scary movie in the 80’s or something!!! Thank you dear Sir! It’s been me of the greatest openings to a song ever 🤔😁👍🏾👊🏾😎
Around the same time this song came out, I was in college and was recovering from surgery to remove a cyst from my brain stem. During that recovery period I came across this album @ record down the street from the hospital I was staying @! I was diagnosed with MS after that & his sounds helped me to deal with the unknown
Wow, that's incredible, Scott. You must have a close connection to this album. Do you have a favourite track that helped you through those times? It's certainly helped me in my life too, especially this track. I wish for you good health and hope you're doing well.
Just give me an idea when you dropped that piano down low- make a whole album made by sampling DJ Shadow's album of samples... Reconstructing... Sometimes it's unintentional where you'll sample something and you think you've done something really unique and you realize it's in a famous song. Case in point I sampled Dead can dance's Lisa Gerrard. And then I realized that Future sound of London had used the same sample! Well at least I know I'm on the right track no pun intended.
Shadow is the Picasso of sampling production in my modest opinion…(I forgot to mention that we share the same last name ~ Davis ~ and that my best friend who’s a DJ’s first name is Josh 🤔😉🤦🏽♂️😁)!!!
I think the ride/bell was definitely sampled but he has layered other drum samples over it to enhance the kick and snare and create that distinctive pattern
Since I made the video, I learned that Shadow actually sampled the beat from some high school recital recording. Maybe some day, someone will find it and put it out there, but as far as I know it's not been identified yet.
Great video, however..... I need to point a Couple of things dude.... This was done on an Akai MPC60 sampler..... these guys would’ve chopped up the beat to get the individual hits and then resequenced it.... each drum hit would’ve been repitched, had sample attack/ decay values changed.... and velocity changed for the sequencing! Your effort sounds like it’s been over compressed and it’s ducking levels a lot.... pumping! If you got your drum loop, converted audio to midi and resequenced it, you’d be close enough to the MPC work flow (Ableton even provides mpc swing values in the groove pool) The ‘drum solo’ would’ve been done using the MPC ‘roll’ function.... that stutters the hits.... Btw, the drums sound massive on this because I believe Dan the Automator helped engineer it.... I could be wrong....
Thanks for checking in! Since I made the video I became aware of an NPR interview where Shadow explains that the drums are from a high school band's record (www.npr.org/transcripts/165145271). He doesn't identify the record, but, like I suggested in the video, the sample was not taken from Frankie Seay's - Soul Food. That is why is wasn't possible to make the drums sound anything like Shadow's - Building Steam, not because of anything to do with the MPC vs Ableton. I can also say, after making many of these videos, that Shadow and Dan the Automator (I think you're right that Dan mixed these tracks), didn't often do more than very simple EQs and sometimes re-amp these samples for the final mix. As you can hear in my other deconstructions, Shadow doesn't rely on a lot of complicated cuts/drum re-sampling/fx or other manipulations that would have been available on the MPC..at least not for Endtroducing.
Because of linear algebra. Wouldn't it be a mathematical fact that any sample can be mapped to any other sample or melody, for that matter? How could we know for sure?
In spite of my name, I am no mathematician so I can't say how it would relate to linear algebra, but in my world there are no hard rules to making music. So yeah, you can map any sample or mash together any and all sounds and get a result but without some thought, it'll likely sound terrible. The fun of sampling, or really making music at all is mashing sounds together in an original way that sounds interesting and pleasing to the human ear. It is an exercise in being open to accepting happy little accidents and most importantly understanding when those accidents are something special. Music and math are very much intertwined of course. Mathematics is at the foundation of almost everything in our lives but I personally don't think that math should be the main ingredient when composing music.
Definitely no relation there. I appreciate the offer, but I've got my hands completely full with my own projects. As long as you're enjoying making and recording music, you should keep it up. Every song is a journey and a story told.
It's from “Music Makers - Percussion” which was apparently a record from 1974 that was provided to schools as a public service by Chevron for some reason. Here is the interview with George Marsh that that Shadow sampled. Check around the 4:20 mark th-cam.com/video/TLlpvenrUTU/w-d-xo.html And here's a little more info www.discogs.com/release/1452988-Various-Music-Makers-Percussion
I wasn't sure either, but when I was doing my research before making this video, I found out that the Guinness Book cited Endtroducing as "The first album created entirely of samples". Other albums used samples before obviously, but this album was made entirely of samples. Although that claim has since been disputed as there might be a couple of vocal samples that he recorded and mixed in.
@@KarlBoltzmann theres literally whole pantheon of Hip Hop Records created entirely of samples before Shadow. Most of the techniques he used he learned from hearing those records.
@@RunGunStudio Yes, you're absolutely right that there are hundreds/thousands of Hip Hop records that were created using samples before this one. What differentiates Endtroducing from those many albums is that absolutely everything you hear is a sample. The vocals, the drums, every element. While Hip Hop records were made this way long before Endtroducing, they would have included recordings of vocalists/MCs/rappers and or other elements like beats from a drum machine that were recorded over the samples. This is widely cited as the truth, but I would honestly love to be proven wrong! If you have an example of a full length record that was solely produced with samples and no recordings before Endtroducing, please send it my way!
@@KarlBoltzmann You’re not even a little wrong, people don’t actually listen or read. Obviously the hip hop albums before Shadow used samples but they sung and rapped over it themselves. Shadows’ vocals were samples aswell. ENTIRELY SAMPLES.
@@bobzmuda3940 The only part of Endtroducing that isn't sampled is the dialogue part, "D'you feel like Darth Vader? I never had a cat before..." on Mutual Slump. It's Shadow's girlfriend, recorded at Dan the Automator's studio.
There have been a few questions recently about the drum sample's origins, so I thought I would share the link to the NPR interview where Shadow talks about the drum sample being taken from a high school band recording from the 60s/70s. Unfortunately he doesn't identify the record, but we can say with certainty that the sample is not from Frankie Seay and the Soul Riders - Soul Food.
www.npr.org/transcripts/165145271
this is great thank you for adding the link!
There is an NPR interview w/ DJ shadow from 2012 where he says he got the drum beat from a record of a high school band from the 60/70s. Seems some high schools used to press their own records featuring their school band
Wow, that's awesome! I'd love to hear that record and the track he sampled. Maybe I can track it down. Weirdly enough, one of the first records I ever sampled as a kid was my Mom's high school choir/band record, so it must have been a popular thing to do back in the 60s/70s
School records are always a good pick up, Rarely any Lawyers.
Sounds like DJS has a fair amount of processing on the drums also wherever he sampled them from. Reverb/delay on the snare etc
Can only imagine how rare the record is.
It is the album that represents me, I bought the album the same year it came out when no one had yet awarded it.
The equipment used was an Akai MPC 60 mkII and an Alesis 8-track DAT to record 8 separate sequences of each song.
The approach is that of a DJ, if you look closely, the cuts on the album are imperfect, there is no beginning or end from one song to another, this is because dj shadow approached it as a DJ mixtape session using only one MPC and battle vinyl to scratch to represent you as a DJ in the world of hiphop.
According to what DJ Shadow says in his interviews, his idea was to do a DJ session with an MPC and he began to realize that the MPC 60 could be used to compose 1 hour sessions, but without vocal phrases it would be poor and very static, the scratch of The songs were magic, in message, the expression of each song where phrases are made with the vinyl.
Some later albums are also with that idea, instead of making a 3-minute song, he had the idea of making an hour-long song and releasing that as an album.
An idea that James Lavelle rejected and where he proposed making cuts so that the tracks were more findable, but with continuous playback of the tracks, without silences or fade in fade out.
DJ shadow accepted that and they released the album on MoWax.
1996 was a time where only people with a lot of money had Protools from 4 track stereo to 8 track mono with 24 bits of professional sound in 1996.
But he used an 8-track Alesis DAT to record separately.
James Lavele had Protools for those 8 tracks and he digitized these DJ shadow demos in his protools for approximately an hour.
This is when they worked more on the album with the demo turned to Pro tools and going through a NEVE mixing console.
You could easily do this album with any DAW, but this is where DJ Shadow reveals a learning.
When the equipment is limited, it forces you to be more ingenious with what you have, you don't have more, there are no sweets, there are no tools that work miracles, only a sampler that has 1.44 mb diskettes and 12-bit, 40kHz, Stereo poor sound quality.
Ram memory for 768KB (13.1 seconds) expandable to 1.5MB (26.2 seconds), it has no filters, it only has 16 voices of polyphony.
And now with machines that have 4GB like Machine+, 2GB MPC one MPC live, some complain to create music. I guess a Roland DS 61 with 128 voices of polyphony is a monstrous workstation
It is truly incredible how, having more resources, no one can express so much of their ingenuity, talent and creativity, people who do not want to get bored doing hard work to compose masterpieces, as a very young DJ Shadow did in 1996.
Now the kids today with a 128 or 256 mb, 1GB sampler, think it's crap, for a sampler machine, things like MC707, SP404, Digitakt... really?
The reading of creativity and good musical taste that this album gives us is truly incredible. All those who complain about new machines with this album you break their plan to hate sampling machines
Any of these things surpass an MPC 60 in sound quality and editing system.
MPC 60 has no filters, it is a sampler that reproduces what you record without filters and with it this great musical marvel was made.
It should also be noted that the law of using samples longer than 4 seconds was a problem, and the MPC 60 offered the new way to justify that those 4 seconds were no longer 4 but rather 4 pieces of 1 second to use the same , was a technology that destroyed anti-sampling laws in the United States.
MPC 60 was the great revolution that invalidated sanctions for albums by artists who used samples.
Thanks for the video, the work you do for the focus is great.
You are in incredibly knowledgeable on the subject. Thanks for sharing all of this.
I really appreciate your point about his scratching adding a whole level of creative expression. I never looked at it quite like that, but you're absolutely right, it really adds such a fantastic human element to the otherwise static nature of the medium.
Dude,
You are undoubtedly the man of the hour with your deconstruction thing you got going on here man!!! I wish I had the resources to do what you did cuz I’m a poor beat junkie that loves unique but timeless beats 😎
Not for nothing, but if you've got a computer, you should be able to download and run any number of free DAWs (grab the free version of Ableton Live, the program I'm using here, for example) and do a lot of this beat making yourself! It's a fantastic project/hobby to get in to.
Shadow worked wonders with that MPC 60.
Thank you for educating me on this absolutely seminal album! I came across it because I was big into Ninja Tune artists in the 90s (Herbalizer, Kid Koala, Dj Vadim who I got to meet once!) And I had no idea what a treasure it really was... Thank you! It's like having a painting you've always just known and loved and someone coming along and telling you it's a Picasso and here's why it's glorious 😮 ❤
Thank you for the note! This album will always been unreal in my books. I also had a similar experience with Ninja Tune artists...Kid Koala, The Herbalizer, DJ Food, their whole roster was exactly what I wanted to hear back then. Cheers
I feel ya dog!!
Sounds like the same break used in “So Whatcha Want”
Interesting. I don't really hear that, but that is one of my favourite BB tracks.
Hey Karl, I've fell in love with this masterpiece years ago but I never get in to deep background of it. Thank you so much!
You're very welcome!
We have gotta find that drum sample. Probably my holy grail of samples yet to be found.
It is, without a doubt, the most important unknown sample for me. When I first heard that flat, boxy sounding kick, the dull bell of the ride and detuned snare, it was instantly the coolest thing I had ever heard. I would give a lot to find the origin of that sample.
@@KarlBoltzmann Doesn't help that when searching high school bands on discogs, there are way too many to closely inspect, and most songs aren't on TH-cam.
I don't think the source has been posted and or catalogued anywhere, otherwise it seems like it would have been found. It might take Shadow himself to reveal the source, but he might not even remember.
All these years I thought the piano was from a scary movie in the 80’s or something!!! Thank you dear Sir! It’s been me of the greatest openings to a song ever 🤔😁👍🏾👊🏾😎
Around the same time this song came out, I was in college and was recovering from surgery to remove a cyst from my brain stem. During that recovery period I came across this album @ record down the street from the hospital I was staying @! I was diagnosed with MS after that & his sounds helped me to deal with the unknown
Wow, that's incredible, Scott. You must have a close connection to this album. Do you have a favourite track that helped you through those times? It's certainly helped me in my life too, especially this track. I wish for you good health and hope you're doing well.
What an awesome lesson, thanks so much! "Building steam..." was and is for me the key track on Endtroducing.
It has been for me as well. I've still never heard another track quite like it.
What he did near the end of that song with the stereo field was amazing.
Great vid ❤
love your videos!
Thank you
This is brilliant
Great video
Just give me an idea when you dropped that piano down low- make a whole album made by sampling DJ Shadow's album of samples... Reconstructing... Sometimes it's unintentional where you'll sample something and you think you've done something really unique and you realize it's in a famous song. Case in point I sampled Dead can dance's Lisa Gerrard. And then I realized that Future sound of London had used the same sample! Well at least I know I'm on the right track no pun intended.
I love playing around with these samples, even sampling other breaks/pieces of the sampled track to see what other gold is there.
great work dude! love this tune
Thanks!
Shadow is the Picasso of sampling production in my modest opinion…(I forgot to mention that we share the same last name ~ Davis ~ and that my best friend who’s a DJ’s first name is Josh 🤔😉🤦🏽♂️😁)!!!
ummm just gotta say this guy karl is the coolest dude everrrrr!
You legend you!
This is so cool! I learned a ton.
thank u so much for doing this! amazing!
I think the ride/bell was definitely sampled but he has layered other drum samples over it to enhance the kick and snare and create that distinctive pattern
Since I made the video, I learned that Shadow actually sampled the beat from some high school recital recording. Maybe some day, someone will find it and put it out there, but as far as I know it's not been identified yet.
Awesome deconstruction- very very cool
This is so neat!!
Nice job !
Dope video
Hello and many thanks for the commitment to such great classic. Would you possibly also post your ableton project file?
Thank you! I am thinking about doing that for all of these deconstructions. I will let you know when I get the time to do that for this track.
Great video, however..... I need to point a Couple of things dude....
This was done on an Akai MPC60 sampler..... these guys would’ve chopped up the beat to get the individual hits and then resequenced it.... each drum hit would’ve been repitched, had sample attack/ decay values changed.... and velocity changed for the sequencing! Your effort sounds like it’s been over compressed and it’s ducking levels a lot.... pumping! If you got your drum loop, converted audio to midi and resequenced it, you’d be close enough to the MPC work flow (Ableton even provides mpc swing values in the groove pool)
The ‘drum solo’ would’ve been done using the MPC ‘roll’ function.... that stutters the hits....
Btw, the drums sound massive on this because I believe Dan the Automator helped engineer it.... I could be wrong....
Thanks for checking in!
Since I made the video I became aware of an NPR interview where Shadow explains that the drums are from a high school band's record (www.npr.org/transcripts/165145271). He doesn't identify the record, but, like I suggested in the video, the sample was not taken from Frankie Seay's - Soul Food.
That is why is wasn't possible to make the drums sound anything like Shadow's - Building Steam, not because of anything to do with the MPC vs Ableton. I can also say, after making many of these videos, that Shadow and Dan the Automator (I think you're right that Dan mixed these tracks), didn't often do more than very simple EQs and sometimes re-amp these samples for the final mix. As you can hear in my other deconstructions, Shadow doesn't rely on a lot of complicated cuts/drum re-sampling/fx or other manipulations that would have been available on the MPC..at least not for Endtroducing.
Because of linear algebra. Wouldn't it be a mathematical fact that any sample can be mapped to any other sample or melody, for that matter? How could we know for sure?
In spite of my name, I am no mathematician so I can't say how it would relate to linear algebra, but in my world there are no hard rules to making music. So yeah, you can map any sample or mash together any and all sounds and get a result but without some thought, it'll likely sound terrible. The fun of sampling, or really making music at all is mashing sounds together in an original way that sounds interesting and pleasing to the human ear. It is an exercise in being open to accepting happy little accidents and most importantly understanding when those accidents are something special. Music and math are very much intertwined of course. Mathematics is at the foundation of almost everything in our lives but I personally don't think that math should be the main ingredient when composing music.
@@KarlBoltzmann I need a collaborater to help my music sound better. Someone like you! Yes, I thought you were Boltzmann Jr.
Definitely no relation there. I appreciate the offer, but I've got my hands completely full with my own projects. As long as you're enjoying making and recording music, you should keep it up. Every song is a journey and a story told.
u look like both a young and old sam fisher
lol, the benefits of having grey hair at a young age I guess?
Who talks in the song? Where ist it from?
I should revisit this one and go over every sample. That is George Marsh th-cam.com/video/TLlpvenrUTU/w-d-xo.html
Boa noite de quem é a voz no 4:05 ?
It's from “Music Makers - Percussion” which was apparently a record from 1974 that was provided to schools as a public service by Chevron for some reason.
Here is the interview with George Marsh that that Shadow sampled. Check around the 4:20 mark
th-cam.com/video/TLlpvenrUTU/w-d-xo.html
And here's a little more info
www.discogs.com/release/1452988-Various-Music-Makers-Percussion
the drums are pitched up
Do you think the snare, the bass drum, the ride, or all three are pitched up? I'm pretty confident that it's just sampled from a different record.
@@KarlBoltzmann true well the comment below mentioned the documentary where he reveals the sample.
Deconstruct ? Lmao! if you don't have the Akai Mpc2000 Forget about it! in my (Tony Soprano voice!)
Not the 1st record made by samples.
I wasn't sure either, but when I was doing my research before making this video, I found out that the Guinness Book cited Endtroducing as "The first album created entirely of samples". Other albums used samples before obviously, but this album was made entirely of samples. Although that claim has since been disputed as there might be a couple of vocal samples that he recorded and mixed in.
@@KarlBoltzmann theres literally whole pantheon of Hip Hop Records created entirely of samples before Shadow. Most of the techniques he used he learned from hearing those records.
@@RunGunStudio Yes, you're absolutely right that there are hundreds/thousands of Hip Hop records that were created using samples before this one.
What differentiates Endtroducing from those many albums is that absolutely everything you hear is a sample. The vocals, the drums, every element.
While Hip Hop records were made this way long before Endtroducing, they would have included recordings of vocalists/MCs/rappers and or other elements like beats from a drum machine that were recorded over the samples.
This is widely cited as the truth, but I would honestly love to be proven wrong! If you have an example of a full length record that was solely produced with samples and no recordings before Endtroducing, please send it my way!
@@KarlBoltzmann You’re not even a little wrong, people don’t actually listen or read.
Obviously the hip hop albums before Shadow used samples but they sung and rapped over it themselves. Shadows’ vocals were samples aswell.
ENTIRELY SAMPLES.
@@bobzmuda3940 The only part of Endtroducing that isn't sampled is the dialogue part, "D'you feel like Darth Vader? I never had a cat before..." on Mutual Slump. It's Shadow's girlfriend, recorded at Dan the Automator's studio.