Dr Dre vs Kanye West

While I would have liked to have picked two artists or producers that I could draw on in my own work for the EMP project, in terms of the artists I listen to, sampling is just is not a huge part of how they construct their music. So I thought it might then be interesting to look at two artists that have built careers off of sampling. Hip hop is not a genre of music that I have ever had an interest in, not even a passing phase at some stage of my youth. However, I am very aware of who both of these men are and the fact they have used sampling extensively with great success over the course of their careers. Interestingly they both use sampling in different ways to construct or draw inspiration for songs but use similar technology to do it.

While Dr Dre has moved on from the sampling that he used to do in the late 80's and early 90's, these days opting to have session musicians play samples live so he can dictate groove and feel better (and also avoid paying licensing fees), he is definitely one of the very first producers to have major success with sampling. A period of the early 90's saw him using an Akai MPC3000 to sample old George Clinton and James Brown records, plus other similar artists of the early 70's. Altering the tempo and feel of a drum beats and bass lines were initial techniques used to form the skeleton of a song. From there additional synths, instrumentation, female vocal sampling were used to get a track to the stage where someone would rap over it. An entire genre of music was formed around this specific production style called G-Funk and Dr Dre is considered by many to have been responsible for it's creation or at the very least one of it's pioneers due to his sampling techniques.

Here the opening drum beat is taken from When The Levee Breaks by Led Zepplin. The track also features several other samples being used to contribute either melody, vocals or additional drum beats.

The Akai MPC is also a huge part of how Kanye West constructs his music however rather than taking drum beats and bass line samples, he is most famous for sampling vocal hooks in his chorus, pitching shifting and them and then producing drum beats and vocal melodies for his verses from there. Rather than looking to old funk music Kanye samples from a huge range of old 60's and 70's soul artists. Many of them completely obscure. So I imagine that as a young artist he did a lot of crate digging and buying of .50 cent throw away LP's just to see if there was something interesting hidden on it. It's a completely different style of writing and ultimately it yields a song that sounds very different. Early Dr Dre material is quite lazy in feel, while Kanye West's material has a more up beat pop feel due to the vocal hooks being such a large part of how the song is constructed. Obviously era plays a huge part in this too, as tastes in hip hop certainly changed in the 15 years the separated these two men. But it is really interesting to observe how using the same equipment and techniques in slightly different ways creates such sonic differences within the same genre.

The backing vocal melody through out this track is taken from Afromerica by Continent Number 6, sped up and as a result pitched in a way that sounds like it's being chanted by women. The song also features a melody from King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man and a drum beat from Cold Grit's It's Your Thing.

References

http://equipboard.com/pros/dr-dre

http://equipboard.com/pros/kanye-west

http://www.whosampled.com/Kanye-West/Power/

http://www.whosampled.com/Dr.-Dre/Lyrical-Gangbang/