Music/Sample

< Music

See also: Audio | Music | Intellectual Property | Fair Use

A digitally recorded sound that can be used by musicians to build a song.

Many audio samples are available on the internet, and can be used royalty-free in new recordings. Most of these samples are recorded musical instrument “hits” or short motifs that can be used in place of purchasing and/or playing the real instrument.

Some genres of music involve songs that are built up completely from samples, often re-using complete musical phrases from other songs or interesting sounds and pieces of dialog from movies or everyday life. Some artists have caused controversy by building songs featuring too much of another artist’s musical phrases – these artists have been sued and attempted to protect themselves under fair use laws. See The Verve “Bittersweet Symphony” (successfully sued by The Rolling Stones) and Vanilla Ice “Ice Ice Baby” (unsuccessfully sued by David Bowie and Queen).

The hip-hop, techno and industrial genres are strongly based on samples.

Below is a list of sources to get free samples:

This list is not exhaustive. Pages may be down.

TakeDown.NET -> “Music/Sample”