Did Producer Timbaland Steal From the Demoscene?

[jkirk]

hmmmm i have never heard of any of the songs he performed or produced(and i listen to that style of music)it is amazing so many people think his stuff is great but relatively unheard on the radio(at least in my neck of the woods).

i really don't think of him as a big deal as others apparently do in the music biz.

[jkirk]

i found a listing here and i have heard 3-5 of them. that ain't much.

timbaland produced tracks

How people can generalise about Hip hop or gangsta rap is above me.

human nature
country is generalized as beer and square dancin.
rock is generalized as sex&drug music as in sex,drugs and rocknroll
folk is generalized as being boring
classical is also generalized as being dead composer's music
rap is generalized as not real music meant for gangs

i usually just ignore it and go on. you will either like a style of music or not.

There are rappers who only talk about Drugs and killing etc without any real message or hope for the future, Fiddy cent, the game, snoop etc.....

this is true but i don't listen for a message. i listen for the bass track and rhythm. if it has a great message i like it more but i don't restrict my music to the message contained in the song. tho i prefer 80's and early 90's rap.

[jkirk]

Did Drum & Bass/Jungle ever makes it´s way over to Georgia?

if it did i didn't know it. sometimes here in the states the lesser known styles get lumped into the category that is most similar to it. for example miami bass and technobass gets lumped into hip hop since it is a much larger genre.

[jkirk]

CannonFodder wrote:

The record Loose has 12 tracks,. "Do it" is one of them, that'd mean 1/24th of the profits. Loose has sold 3 million copies (early december 2006, so it's more by now).

Well, I can see Nelly Furtado personally suing the arse off Timbaland too for loss of earnings. :lol:

i'd bet nelly furtado didn't see any of the profis off the album.

[jkirk]

ral-clan wrote:

I´ll have to disagree on this point. A sample is a sample, there is no defined ¨industry standard sample lemgth¨.

The very word "sample" means "a small bit".  i.e. if you taste a little corner of a cake you are having a sample, but you cannot claim to still be "sampling" it if you eat the whole thing (like Timbaland did with Tempest's song).

the meaning has since changed.

merium webster defines it (in this instance)as
3 : an excerpt from a musical recording that is used in another artist's recording

notice there is no length specified so a full song can also be considered a sample

[jkirk]

Danger Mouse Grey Album, which is made from 100% samples taken from the Beatles White Album to re-create Jay-Z´s Black album

excellent album btw  :-)

[jkirk]

ral-clan wrote:

merium webster defines it (in this instance)as
3 : an excerpt from a musical recording that is used in another artist's recording

And if you read carefully, that definition says EXCERPT.  An excerpt as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary is:

A passage or segment taken from a longer work, such as a literary or musical composition, a document, or a film.

So if you take the WHOLE thing, you are not taking an EXCERPT, which is then not a SAMPLE.  To SAMPLE something, you must take an EXCERPT, which is a PASSAGE or SEGMENT.

 

and i suppose if you didn't sample the 1-2 sec silence at the end and beginning you would still say i didn't sample.
or maybe i sample the first and last half of the song thereby making two samples covering the entire piece.

Otherwise, I could rip a whole 20 minute track off a BBC orchestra CD, add a vocal line or rythm track, and sell as as my own - arguing that I SAMPLED it. No...this is a re-mix, and if done without crediting and paying the original copyright holder it is plagiarism and theft.

same goes for samples. you must clear the samples used with the copyright holders.

the difference here is he claims to have wrote the song despite 70-90% of it being sampled. he also acts as if he owes the authors nothing for usage which is also wrong. his sample argument doesn't hold water. in the case of the grey album the producer never intended to make a profit and said publically that he made tha album from the white album and the black album. he never tried to brush it under the carpet.

do you understand what the real issue is?

[jkirk]

If it merely takes the unmodified tracks and layers stuff on top, that is NOT sampling, it is re-mixing.

i missed this.

remixing can be what you say but this is not set in stone. a remix can have no portion of the original song but the lyrics. it could be recreated from samples or any number of styles. there is no standard remix style or limit to how much of the original song has to be included. this merely states the intention to take a song and remix it.

btw you must sample the song before you can remix the song unless you intend to do away with all the original aspects of the song.

[jkirk]

So the very act of George transferring the old fragile multi-track reels to a hard-disc so he would then have something to work from is sampling then? I think that's a bit of a stretch. It's not like he was going to cut or paste phrases from the digitized tracks....

uh ripping is copying a digitalsong from a cd.

sampling is recording a digital file from an analogsource. this can also apply to using digital files in such a way to create a song.

Based on most of the feedback and outrage I've seen on forums about this Timbaland controversy, I'd say that my definition of what sample vs. a rip is shared by a lot of people out there.

the outrage has nothing to do with the definition of a sample or a ripped file and you know it. he didn't ask permission to use the file. he didn't pay royalties. he didn't credit the origial authors. and he still tried to claim it was his work even though it was obvious he didn't do it.

[jkirk]

ral-clan wrote:

uh ripping is copying a digitalsong from a cd.

sampling is recording a digital file from an analogsource. this can also apply to using digital files in such a way to create a song.

Sorry man, but sampling is taking audio from any source (digital or analog).  The very Wikipedia article you guys referred me to states that the earliest samplers were doing everything in the 1950s/60s with analog tape.  (analog to analog).  Today, a lot of people sample from both analog and digital sources.

this is true but in today's society this is not a commonly used method. as for sampling digital files you missed part of my post.

this can also apply to using digital files in such a way to create a song

though in the most strict terms it is taking a part of music for use in another song. it is also a term used to describe the transfer of music from analog to digital. the transfer of digital to digital is best described as ripping since the sampling process is not being used.

What I was trying to point out is the fact that a lot of people (Timbaland included) are trying to defend what he did by saying Tempest was merely sampled.  By this logic, if Timbaland only SAMPLED Tempest then this somehow falls under fair use, and he did nothing wrong.

actually sampling don't get you a get out of jail free card when it comes to this. he can use "clear" samples but not any sample. a clear sample is a sample from a pd recording from a pd arrangement. since both are public domain there is noone to pay. since this was not a pd performance or a pd arrangement any sampling excuse is just that an excuse. Read the page piru linked to it spells the law out pretty well.

[jkirk]

Timbaland did not sample Tempest's song, he ripped it.

i can agree with everything except the line quoted above since we don't really know how the song was converted. if there was a conversion prog that he would know about then yes it was ripped. however if he played it from a c64 and captured it then it was sampled. since we don't know the method used we will never know what it was.