4/19/2021 0 Comments Funky Drummer Sample Wave
The Funky Drummer breakbeat soon spread far beyond hip-hop, appearing on well over 1,000 recordings by pop artists ranging from George Michael and Sinead OConnor in the 1990s right up to Emeli Sand and Ed Sheeran in the past decade.Its also a prime example of how copyright law has historically failed to compensate drummers.Stubblefield famously never received any royalties from all the hits his drum break was used on.
![]() This was the case even if the music was largely improvised, as in the case of Funky Drummer. It was also in keeping with copyright law conventions at the time, which usually recognised the legal author of a musical composition as the person who wrote the topline melody and lyrics. ![]() Ringo Starr did not receive co-writing credits for his drumming contributions on Beatles songs, for example, even though his drum parts have often been retrospectively deemed by musical peers to constitute a distinct compositional element of the bands work. ![]() You can now point to plenty of contemporary chart hits that dont feature an electric guitar, but there are almost none that dont prominently feature a beat between kick and snare whether acoustic, sampled or synthesised. They often receive a formal share in songwriting credits as co-writers and producers. This has led to a relatively hidden ancillary industry of sample replay companies that are hired to painstakingly rerecord well-known drum breaks (and other parts from guitar riffs to vocal samples). These are designed to resemble the original recordings as much as possible. Funky Drummer Sample Wave How To Digitally RecreateWissing also runs a website, Getting The Sound, which offers tutorials on how to digitally recreate famous breakbeats resulting in a new recording of an existing audio recording that is sonically indistinguishable from the original. Yet part of the legacy of Funky Drummer is the discourse and debate it has generated on exactly this point: everyone seems to agree that Stubblefield was not fairly remunerated for his creativity. But what would be the implications for musical culture if music copyright legislation was changed in his favour. If every element of musical creation was locked down as a form of intellectual property from a standard blues chord progression (upon which most blues songs are constructed) to a swinging ride cymbal pattern (the underlying rhythmic pulse upon which countless jazz compositions were built from the 1940s onwards) we might conceivably be left with no freely available musical building blocks to make new compositions. But Funky Drummer raises a crucial question: where do we draw the line between a generic part and an original musical composition This is the tension that Funky Drummer brings sharply into focus, and it is at the heart of understanding how we make sense of musical creativity.
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