:rollsafe-think-about-it:
Even if you do, you don't.[0]
Alas it would have been too late for Gregory Coleman himself.
Is there a statue of him somewhere?
(Same here - though at least so I learned about the Amen Break.)
>Coleman died homeless and destitute in 2006. It was unlikely he was aware of the impact he had made on music. Neither he [band leader Spencer] nor Coleman received royalties for the break.
The other famous drum sample - the "Funky Drummer" as drummed by Clyde Stubblefield for James Brown, Stubblefield didn't think the particular drum pattern he used was particularly noteworthy. In that case, James Brown's production choices were actually more key - his signature sound revolved around really crisp drums that he insisted needed to be clear on AM Radio and Jukeboxes. Which is what made it so useful for sampling.
[0] GFL finding anything in YouTube history / search these days hence no link. Wasn't from Synthet, I don't think.
Good grief, I thought it might be that video but somehow completely blanked on it when I double-checked and decided it wasn't. Thanks for actually checking usefully!
(Synthet videos are almost always worth a watch even if you can't remember them a couple of weeks later. Old age, innit.)
It could just be its cultural weight has me hypnotized. But maybe its just that good
My take is, it was the first of its kind to widely circulate exhibiting desirable quantities for sampling, a combination of good enough and path dependency. After a certain level of saturation/entrenchment it carried an aesthetic compared to readily available samples (maybe this is what you meant).
Whenever I couldn’t find a breakbeat sample (or wanted some starting point at least) I’d default to it. When I did music production it was very easy to get your hands on a loop but obviously that’s much later.
The track you've mentioned is the prime example of the blend of those two genres. Before the term Eurodance caught on, this track would be referred to as hip-house (as in hip-hop + house). Chicago and the broader NY area did it first, but it was a Belgian track that first topped the US charts (Technotronic's Pump Up The Jam).
So any artist could sample something, do some paperwork, and send of a fraction of royalties. Rather than the current system where you need explicit permission from the recording artist and have no recourse if they say no.
So many music genres exist because of sampling, and the shit legal precedents set in recent decades ruined an amazing thing.
I’m a big fan of the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) and when the artist says “no”, I’m always reminded of this funny, surreal story about the KLF physically destroying their music: http://klf.de/home/the-abba-incident/
For example, if the sample's small enough to not be recognisable by algorithms, they often end up on Soundcloud with a free download via Hypeddit. Some even get away with charging money for their track with non-cleared samples via Bandcamp. Because those types of bedroom producers are almost always clueless about copyright, they often cite fair use in the description and choose a Creative Commons licence, which is not how anything works. Even some B-list celebrities that damn well know what they're doing still decide to do that when they fail to clear a sample. Soundcloud would be completely irrelevant if they did a good-enough job at enforcing copyright, so they do the bare minimum labels require of them to keep running, but that definitely kills their odds of ever competing with the likes of Spotify.
Then there's a whole "gray area" of online record pools where the audio preview and download links are hidden behind a $25/month or so paywall, so record labels can't scan it directly to even know about the infringement. Usually just listing the names of available tracks in HTML is enough to get them de-indexed from Google, but they rely on word-of-mouth anyway.
And, of course, even if all of that were to stop, you can never prevent a bunch of DJs and producers DMing each other tracks, hottest of which always end up getting shared too widely at some point and uploaded to Soulseek or something.
Meanwhile, streaming services are being flooded by unethically-trained, AI-generated music, which is actually incredibly easy to detect if streaming services actually gave enough of a fuck to do so. There is one that gives a fuck rather publicly (Deezer) and according to them, it's ~34% of everything uploaded as of a few months ago, may have passed 40% as of now.
What a wasted chance to say "Belgian techno anthem"!
While I’m certain they didn’t receive royalties from all artists, I heard many 80s artists did. And Amen Brothers took others to court. So they would have know about the use of the break.
I will admit I haven’t done any independent research into this matter personally. Just echoing accounts I’ve read and taking their reports at face value.
Who is "Amen Brothers"?
I didn’t say I knew they went to court. I just said I thought I read about it.
Looking into it again now, all I can find is a 10+ year old article about a crowd fund (eg https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34785551). So I’m likely misremembering what I read previously.
> when they don't know the name of the band.
I just got the name of the band muddled with the name of the song. I also sometimes get get the names of my friends and loved ones muddled. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know them either. I’m just shit with names.
I do however remember every useless number I learned as a child. Including phone numbers to kids TV shows. Human memory is weird :-/
Now, the connotation is different: saying "our X will be judged by.." spreads the responsibility among everyone and makes it too easy to shift the blame onto the next guy, while saying "your X will be judged by.." stresses on your personal contribution to the X, making it not that easy to shy away.
In your case, you seemed to be representing the common idea of a different culture, ie 'my society thought your society was this or that', eg 'Muslims think western societies to be greedy and unkind'.
Do you really think of yourself as one of many? If so, which type do you identify as? And then, do you think you are personally responsible for the actions of others of your type?
I personally think the general usage of a general collective pronouns to be inevitably misleading, but has the benefit of allowing one's preferred poor and unsubstantiated beliefs to be stated as indisputable fact.
We upvote comments that completely miss the point of how this algorithm works. We upvote comments that claim the algorithm does nothing at all. We downvote comments about how the creator of the original drum break died destitute.
great deep dive into the Amen break. this video is from the yt days of yore, nice to see the yt algo still propping it up.
We're dropping amen selections now?
Some classics that sound like what the app is sortin':
Remarc - Sound Murderer (Loafin' in Brockley Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUdpCVITxc
Splash - Babylon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vghx8SEeH8
DJ Krome & Mr. Time - The License https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPa5JBg8hZI
Source Direct - Secret Liason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfEWCVoB45s
Danny Breaks - Droppin' Science Vol 1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZT-Jse5rQ
Futurama theme! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz8HmN2uvuk
My particular favourite is in demoscene tracker music where Amen also went all over the place (and sampling more generally too!)
I'm not sure if the below is actual Amen-break (need to ask BrothomStates probably!) but it's certainly in the spirit of it and this is definitely near or at the top of my favourite demos ever, I just find it so damned cool! "The Day the Earth was Born" by TPOLM:
Absolutely love this.
That Source Direct release was out of this world... absolutely beautiful body of work
Nice pick! Above that same song but not compressed to hell
I like this one for amen stuff. Heavyweight Vol.4 - Untitled 7
THAT AMEN TRK !!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAY36F4u55Y
Because it only plays the samples being compared, it never plays the sorted chunks, so it's missing a "punchline" of sorts.
It wasn’t until I read your comment that I realised the sorting happened while you were listening rather than before hand.
Set it to 8 slices and it becomes easy to see what it's doing: look at the waveform and the now-playing highlight jumping around.
I would suggest the author changes the UI to just show a number instead of a bar, to make this clearer.
I don't understand the comparison function, but it's really enjoyable listening to the algorithm work out its logic.
Might I ask for the implementation of other sorting algorithms here?
I'd also add: It's like Aaron's whole career is slightly resting atop Amen Break, at least as far back as (first I heard and still my favorite) The Chocolate Wheelchair Album! Amazing detailed work with Amen and similar samples that's for sure!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4EMG63W388
Or types of sorts
A couple favorites from the 90s:
I have no idea why it works this way and it’s frequently annoying.
"Focus follows brain" is how everybody wants windowed UIs to work. When I type on the keyboard the letters go where my brain thought they should go - duh, but of course that's unimplementable, so the Windows UI provides "Click to focus" - if I click on a Window the typing goes there until I click another window, meanwhile some Unix systems do "Focus follows Mouse" - if I move the mouse over a Window then my typing goes there even without clicking. Neither is what we actually wanted, both are trying to approximate.
And I hate web pages making sound! But the UX is confusing, and it’s changed over the years, seemingly without reason.
Iphones now have a software toggle as well, which may have coincided with the shift from “mute ringer” to “mute (almost) everything” that came with the multifunction button.
Web browsers on desktop operating systems initially allowed any website to play audio without any interaction required. Some websites would blast annoying audio ads as soon as you opened a page on their site. So effort was put into making it so that web browsers on desktops would only play sound after user interaction via mouse click. Later, some websites were exempted from that by some desktop web browsers, for example YouTube I think.
Even without ads, background noise that starts automatically as soon as you visit a page can be distracting and disruptive.
I’m perfectly happy that Safari on iOS does not play background audio when I have my phone in silent mode. Even when I have tapped on buttons on the page.
Silent mode is not entirely only for notifications anyway. The built-in keyboard is also silent in silent mode, whereas when silent mode is off it makes an annoying click sound for every button that you press. Likewise the builtin camera app on iOS makes a shutter sound when you take photos with silent mode off. With silent mode the camera app is silent. Same with taking screenshots. I take a lot of screenshots, and prefer that people around me don’t think I’m taking photos when I am taking a screenshot on the phone.
Meanwhile, if I open a music player app on my phone and hit play, I have made a very deliberate choice about playing sound.
All of the games on my phone I can think of are also silent in silent mode. Not sure if all games have to be silent in silent mode or not on iOS (i.e. if “can play sound in silent mode” is a special permission in iOS and if Apple disallows apps categorized as games in App Store from having that permission or not). But I like that the games I play on my phone are silent in silent mode.
There is some inconsistency indeed about what is silent or not, but I am happy with the way that it is as someone who prefers surprising silence over surprising noises from my phone when it’s in silent mode.