When I sample something, its because theres something ingenious about — Sampling

"Its pretty much impossible to clear samples now [in 2005]. We had to stay away from samples as much as possible. The ones that we did use were just absolutely integral to the feeling or rhythm of the song. But, back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies and stuff, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now its prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70 percent of the song and $50,000. Thats where sampling has gone, and thats why hip-hop sounds the way it does now." —Beck"

"I think its wonderful, and its a kind of poetic justice. When I was a teenager, I used to go down to Birdland and hear Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke. Later on, when I was at Juilliard, I heard John Coltrane. This had an enormous impression on me. In 1974, after a concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall, this guy with long hair and lipstick comes up to me and says, "Hi, Im Brian Eno." Then in Berlin in 1976, after a performance of "Music for 18 Musicians," I met David Bowie. Now cut to the Orb and their generation. Thats the way life ought to be. Thats the way Bach and Bartok and Stravinsky worked, and its how Kurt Weill worked. There should be a back-and-forth between what goes on in the street and the clubs and what goes on in the concert halls." —Steve Reich"

"A lot of people still dont recognize the sampler as a musical instrument. I can see why. A lot of rap hits over the years used the sampler more like a Xerox machine. If you take four whole bars that are identifiable, youre just biting that shit. But Ive always been into using the sampler more like a painters palette than a Xerox. Then again, I might use it as a Xerox if I find rare beats that nobody had in their crates yet. If I find a certain sample thats just incredible—like the one on Liquid Swords—I have to zap that! That was from an old Willie Mitchell song that I was pretty sure most people didnt have. But on every album I try to make sure that I only have 20 to 25 percent [of that kind of] sampling. Everything else is going to be me putting together a synthesis of sounds. You listen to a song like "Knowledge God" by Raekwon: it took at least five to seven different records chopped up to make one two-bar phrase. Thats how I usually work." —RZA, The Wu-Tang Manual, 2004"

"For hip hop, the main thing is to have a good trained ear, to hear the most obscure loop or sound or rhythm inside of a song. If you can hear the obscureness of it, and capture that and loop it at the right tempo, youre going to have some nice music man, youre going to have a nice hip hop track." —RZA"

"Modern recorded music has evolved from focusing principally on musicianship and performance into an auditory collage where no sound is off limits. Sampling is simply another color on our palettes. Whether were sampling old records, using advanced multi-sampling, or recording sounds ourselves, the final artistic product is paramount and should not be compromised in the face of any corporate legalities." —Sono"

"[Samples have] a certain reality. It doesnt just take the sound, it takes the whole way it was recorded. The ambient sounds, the little bits of reverb left off crashes that happened a couple of bars ago. Theres a lot of things in the sample, just like when you take a picture—its got a lot more levels than say, the kick-drum or the drum machine, I think. [...] Looking at a sampler the way it was used first—to try and simulate real instruments—you didnt have to get a session guitarist and you could just be like, Hey, I can have an orchestra in my track, and I can have a guitar, and it sounds real! And I think thats the wrong way to use sampling. The right way is to get the guitar, and go, Right, thats a guitar. Lets make it into something that a guitar could never possibly be. You know, take it away from the source and try to make it something else. Might as well just get a bloody guitarist if you want a guitarist. Theres plenty of them." —Amon Tobin dead link, view archive here"