Make sure you've made out your will. Secure pressure doors. Tighten all straps. We're going in.
Some musical cultures, particularly hip-hop, thrive on fearless sampling of others' work; laptop lotharios love to chop up vocals, melodies, rhythms and musical hooks, mangle them and then, heedless of prosecution by an irate lawyer, make something new from the resultant collage. Some take the risk for the sheer pleasure of splicing and dicing; some because they can't think of anything original themselves; some to take revenge against the musical establishment, and some (most, I would suggest) because they can't afford to pay a hefty licensing fee to the relevant artist and/or record company. All well and good if you have the stomach for it and don't mind trampling on other musicians' rights.
Fair enough, but wouldn't it be better to use samples that don't require crossed fingers and a nervous gulp? I'm thinking not only of would-be musicians and film-makers, but also teachers, students, pupils and other cash-strapped desperadoes. If nothing else, the CC sampling world is tailor-made for anyone, of whatever age, locale or background, who needs a sample for a song, a play, a radio production, a lecture, homework or a particularly annoying doorbell, to use what they need without fear or favour. Many charities would benefit from exploring what's available.
Experienced musos will be familiar with the sources I'm about to suggest, but those new to the Creative Commons culture of sharing are about to discover one of the many things that makes the internet a sink of depravity an Eden of fun, frolics and funky stuff.
*taps lectern*
Please take note of the licensing details for each sample. Some will allow you to copy, share, chop and mix to your heart's content; others will not. In most cases, a simple attribution will suffice to placate the copyright holder, but it's prudent to check. Be doubly cautious if you intend to use these samples in a commercial situation; you might have to agree to a licensing contract.
Right, here we go. Click on the images to visit the sites. (I know - a CTW technological breakthrough! I'm partying like it's 1999.)
CCMixter does exactly what is says on the tin. It supplies gazillions of CC samples (and samplepacks) that can be used for remixes galore. But there's more, he rhymed: thousands of songs, all of which detail the CC samples used to make them (thus allowing anyone to cherry-pick their favourite parts and use them in their own songs); editors' and users' picks of the best songs; podcasts; forums; oh, and samplepacks and song stems from top CC people like Brad Sucks and top, formerly non-CC people like DJ Vadim. Samples can be searched via tempo, CC licence, and just about any tag you care to mention. CC Mixter is a friendly, welcoming place. Feel free to download songs & samples, make stuff of your own, upload it and get it heard and reviewed.
You'll find lots of sound effects at SoundBible.com; it's especially handy for movie scores, games designers or people who want to scare the crap out of kids on Halloween. Take note of the two main sections: Free Sound Effects and Royalty-Free Sounds. The latter are CC & public domain, so you can use them commercially - as long as you check the licence before using.
Blips is a marvellous collection of high-quality glitchy samples, packaged into coherent collections and ripe for re-use in any number of genres. I'll let Blips describe this little gem of a site: “a repository of blips and bleeps, clicks and cuts, pops and plops”. The CC license is most generous, permitting users to employ Blip samples for non-commercial & commercial purposes. Just tell the poor blighter that you've done so.
The Freesound Project is a serious-minded endeavour that hasn't forgotten how to have fun:
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to
- browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a "sounds-like" type of browsing and more
- up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
- interact with fellow sound-artists!
We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used
for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble
finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have
voiced this problem, but so far there hasn't been a solution.
Freesound differs from a site like CCMixter in that it deals only in snippets of sound, not complete songs. There's an amazing array of sounds to be previewed and downloaded. Electronica fans get a free supply of heroin to try and wean them off the aural crack.*
The One Laptop Per Child project is one of those causes that brings a smile to the face. This admirable project helps children from deprived areas and countries to rip the latest stream of Inglourious Basterds research and learn and play and communicate and generally grow up to wear spectacles and too-short trousers. It warms my heart. I could bang on about the 10GB of free samples...
I'll say that again.
...the 10GB of free samples it supplies via a Wikipedia page, but OLPC does it much better than I possibly could:
Loops, Grooves, Licks, Stings, Hits, Pads, Melodic Motives/Themes/Phrases, Sound-Effects, City and Country Soundscapes..., Motors, Machines, Toys, Guns, Explosions, Swords, Armor, Cars, Jets, Pot & Pans, Acoustic and Synthetic Noises, Acoustic and Electronic Drums, Voices, Western and World Instruments, Real and Human Animals, Industrial and Natural Ambiences, Film and Game Foley, and more, more, more! This huge collection of new and original samples has been donated to Dr. Richard Boulanger @ cSounds.com specifically to support the OLPC developers, students, XO users, and computer and electronic musicians everywhere. They are FREE and are offered under a CC-BY license for downloading and use in your teaching, your demos, your research, your music, your remixes, your games, your videos, your slideshows, your websites, and your XO activities. Each of the 7000+ samples is 16-bit, WAV, Mono, normalized to -3dB, and provided at 3 sample rates - 44.1K, 22.5K and 16K.
Amazing, non? Pah. Regarding the last site in this article, OLPC is but a Sampras to its Federer, a paper aeroplane to its space shuttle and a lager shandy to its ten pints of wallop. Last but not least in this pantheon of free CC samples is the only real Tardis in existence:
Bit of a letdown, isn't it? That's the actual size of the Internet Archive's logo, so don't send your complaints to me. That tiny temple contains all the knowledge of the known universe an absolutely immense reservoir of material. I don't have the space to describe the miraculousness of the IA., or archive.org as it's commonly known. Suffice it to say that you'll find digitised historical collections (academics will be forever grateful), texts, audio, moving images, software and archived web pages. In other words, for our purposes: films, TV adverts, radio programmes, speeches, sounds, music and just about anything else that could be considered ripe for sampling.
How big is the archive? Think OLPC to the power of infinity - and beyond. I've had great fun listening to radio episodes of the grand-daddy of police procedurals, Dragnet (from the 1950s, young hipsters), wonderfully hammy recountings of the Sherlock Holmes stories and, a guilty secret this, watching old TV commercials that are at once hilarious, touching and deeply disturbing. The site is too vast to comprehend in a few short visits. Some people discover it and never leave. As always, check the licence if you intend to do more than just listen to or view the contents.
To stop these useful links being trampled in the deluge of sparkling prose that pours forth from this 'ere website, tomorrow I'll add a new (and rather ungrammatical) category to Catching The Waves: “Free & Legal Samples”. If I put much more stuff in that sidebar's collection of precious artefacts, this website will start to list. List. List. Geddit? List as in lean? List as in a column of items? No? Tough crowd. It's pearls before swine.
Anyway, I hope that all of you out there, hoodies, geeks, hipsters, tutors, pupils and grannies alike, will enjoy exploring these excellent and useful sites. Finally, as a way of thanking archive.org for its hard work, and as a reward for all of you (me included) who have made it to the end of this article, here's a short behind-the-scenes film of Catching The Waves hard at work detecting, downloading, selecting and reviewing music for your listening pleasure. The audio is in no way suitable for chopping and splicing. Not at all. Goodnight.
*This might not be true.
