What is sampling?

Sampling is a technique of using short snippets of existing music as a part of new musical creations. Sometimes they last up to bars in length and are looped repetitively. Other times they’re milliseconds in length, being short, sometimes percussive bursts of sounds.

These recordings are often manipulated in a variety of ways and readjusted to fit the context of the new recording. Of course, some samples are a little more transparent – they can be whole loops taken from songs, using a great hook or instrument part and using reusing it’s effectiveness. Whatever the case, it’s entirely likely that you hear samples in music multiple times every day. It’s just a fundamental way of how many producers and musicians work, even if you can’t recognize the source.

If you want to know more about sampling, you should read the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Is sampling legal?

Sampling has been a controversial artform for as long as it’s existed. There have been many controversial tunes that “borrow” substantially from existing songs, effectively using a key aspect of the song’s success to leverage their own (a popular example would be “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice, which used the bassline from “Under the Pressure” by Bowie and Queen). Of course there are examples of the same happening with less popular songs that then go ahead to bolster the original artist’s success – Massive Attack sampling Billy Cobham on their essential 1991 album Blue Lines introduced the jazz fusion legend to an entirely new generation of listeners. Dodo can thank Eminem for his plundering of her song “Thankyou” on “Stan”, which effectively rescued her flagging career.

Sampling has become a widely acknowledged concern in the music industry. It can be a money maker: prominent samples in recordings are often cleared by the original writer’s publisher, giving them a cut of the royalties earned from the song. On the other hand, many samples aren’t cleared – being either modified to be unrecognizable or being a non-central part of the source material.

Some sample-based records (albums which are entirely built from samples of other music) have attracted much attention due to a few prominent samples and have ended up being required to give writing credits to the original artists. The Avalanches had to clear many of the samples on their seminal (and highly recommended) album Since I Left You. DJ Shadow, on the other hand, a key pioneer in sample-based music, had barely any controversy surrounding his (also highly recommended) Endtroducing album despite a large number of samples being quite recognizable.

All this being said, the answer to the above question of legality is ostensibly “kinda”. No one can deny that sampling has opened an entirely new palette to music. It’s fueled creativity and has often served as a way to bring new life into recordings and performances. The sampling that is largely frowned upon is wholesale theft: using an obvious, easily recognizable part of an existing song to profit from its strengths.

Jesus reinforced the Old Testament law of “do not steal” (Matt 19:18) and we want to stay true to that. However, given the place that sampling has found in culture today, it’s fair to say that there is a wide band of “fair use” cases that it can be used in.

So is sampling OK in church?

Well, now we’re getting to the heart of it! This is an issue that had a little debate when it was first aired. Generally, our congregation and musos were quite receptive to the idea. I was eager to explore it because I felt it opened a whole new possibility for creativity and new sounds. Here were my key concerns and resolutions:

• Sampling should never be distracting. No one wants to be singing praises to God only to have the atmosphere shattered by a loop from a prominent Top 40 song, no matter how great it sounds. If the sample in question is a central part of popular culture, it’s bound to have other associations in the listener’s mind. I remember hearing once about a worship band that decided to lift the bassline from “Groove is in the Heart” for an arrangement of a worship song, with uncomfortable results. We don’t want to be dragging that into our church meetings, and as a result I’ve decided to not go using popular hooks and melody lines.
• Sampling should be creative. Sampling shouldn’t be used as a crutch – so keep it interesting, and keep it creative.
• Sampling shouldn’t be used to create “noise”. Given the church band exists as a vehicle for the congregation to sing to, there still needs to be enough “space” for people to be able to hear themselves and enjoy singing. It shouldn’t be flashy or full of bizarre and disjointed fragments – keep it simple.

How does the Soma Music team use sampling?

We’ve done a fair bit in the way of sampling already, though we’re still exploring new ways to use it.

In many cases we have taken drum loops from old funk records and used them underneath our arrangements – they provide a wonderful, organic atmosphere that can’t as easily be reproduced with straight drum programming. Generally we’ve stayed away from extremely well-known drum breaks (a key exception being a time that we used Led Zeppelin’s ubiquitous “When The Levee Breaks” drum loop, which when slowed down had a wonderfully powerful dynamic.) Often these loops can be sped up or slowed down to change the emotional nature of the sounds.

We’ve also started splicing up some recordings and using strings sections and guitars from different places to add some interesting texture to our sounds. It’s generally very exciting and rewarding and provides a whole new dimension to the sound of what we’re doing!

Sounds interesting! Is it worth me exploring this?

Why not! Easy ways to play with sampling are to download trial versions of programs with sampling features like Ableton Live or Native Instruments Battery. Many advanced synth workstations (keyboards) also do this.

It’s not too difficult to play with sampling in a band situation – just make sure you’re fitting in with the group’s overall sound and that all the musicians can lock in with what you’re doing (and vice versa). If you’re playing loops, it may be worthwhile getting your drumming to wear headphones with a “click track” (metronome) so that he can make sure he’s playing in time.

Main thing is – be creative, and use your creativity to add to the vitality of what you’re doing as a band. And seek to bring glory to God through it!

Got thoughts? We’d love to hear them!

In many senses our song selection process doesn’t differ all that much from most other churches. There has, however, been some minor confusion over how it relates to the type of music we’re doing, so I thought I’d briefly spend some time highlighting our thinking and approach.

The songs

Let’s get the biggest point out of the way: we’re singing normal church songs.

We don’t have a special source of songs that already cater to our genres of choice, and we’re not writing new material just for our church to make Soma Music happen. We want music that people can connect with easily, and there is already a huge number of talented writers creating music for churches: we definitely intend to use their gifts!

While getting my head around the first stages of music for Soma, I began to build a master list of songs that I thought would function well as a staple selection for our meetings. It is by no means a list of the only songs we’ll be singing, but it represents the material we’ll draw from most frequently.

In keeping with Soma’s hopes to be doing something new, I set out to create a list that consisted of around 60% material that was at least new to most of our core group. In the end this probably became about 50%. Keep in mind that the new material is often by writers that have written other songs that we sing – it’s not completely new.

The kinds of songs we want to sing

What are the attributes of a great church song? Here are a few beginning thoughts:

• Lyrics that reflect accurately something of:
  • who we are as God’s people
  • who God is
  • who Jesus is
  • what God has done
  • what God is doing
• Lyrics that don’t just focus on the results of the above, but also the broader concepts behind them
• Interesting, engaging melodies
• Inventive yet accessible music
• Ability to be sung by a church full of people both with and without musical abilities
• Lyrics that can be backed up by scripture
• A realness tying the lyrical and musical content together. If it’s reflective, it should be really reflective. If it’s excited, it should be really excited.
  • Obviously this varies from person to person – in particular it varies by generation and cultural background. My idea of excitement might not end up being future generations’ ideas of excitement (I hope that I’ll still be able to relate to it though!)

What we’re leaving out

One of the most frequent comments I get about some church music from people outside the environment (often people that would identify themselves as non-Christians) is that the songs just aren’t that engaging, nor do feel like they’re getting a sense of “realness” from them. I think they may well have a point. Sometimes this might be simply due to execution – a lack of enthusiasm or energy coming from the musicians themselves (sometimes because social norms or constraints) – but often it can be the music itself as well. As a result, I’ve tended to apply a fairly heavy filter on songs that simply don’t musically and lyrically feel like they connect with people. This is subjective to some extent, but hopefully with enough feedback from our church we’ll be able to gradually get an accurate idea of how different people perceive different songs.

To put this another way: we don’t want to sing bad music just because it has great words (in the same way that we don’t want to sing bad content just because it has great music). If you think that’s heretical, why do you think hymn rewrites are so popular?

Generally speaking, I’m finding it very difficult to justify including songs that lyrically only deal with concepts at the surface level without fleshing them out. I haven’t made a hard and fast rule to exclude songs like this, but generally they get ranked lower if they don’t actually provide some substance with the content (if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, go find the lyrics for Neverending by David Crowder Band. there, I’ve slagged a song. that will be the only one!)

What about Hillsong?

Please, let’s find another war to fight! If the songs have great lyrics and music, why wouldn’t we sing them?

Some thoughts about content, directionally speaking

We’ve had some great discussions lately about the nature of the content in church songs, and in particular the ways we tend to favor certain lyrical outlooks over others. As I see it right at the moment, there are three main relational “directions” that church song content is usually written to represent: (there are probably more, but these are the main ones)

1. Songs written for us to sing to God
   • Prayer (e.g. for us, our church or the world around us)
   • Praise (e.g. thanking God for what he’s done)
2. Songs written for us to sing to each other
   • Declaring truth (e.g. proclamation)
   • Preaching to one another (again, often proclamation)
3. Songs written for us to sing to ourselves
   • Preaching to ourselves (e.g. exhortation)
   • Emphasizing personal resolve (e.g. indicating that we desire to change)

Generally speaking, I think the churches that many of us come from emphasize the second category, and lessen the attention given to the other two. It’s not that we only sing songs that address the second category, it seems to lie more within the attitude that manifests itself through the culture and execution of our church music. Why is that?

Let’s try and get some biblical perspective on this issue. References to music in the New Testament aren’t that frequent, but the ones that are there are worth pondering.

• It seems apparent that singing songs to each other is something we should do (Eph 5:19, Col 3:16), but…
• Paul and Silas also sang hymns to God (Acts 16:25)
• We’re encouraged to sing songs of praise (James 5:13), obviously about God, but it doesn’t specify who we should sing them to.
• 1 Cor 14 has some helpful discussion on prophecy vs tongues, which is relevant in that it discusses how we should hope to encourage each other rather than focusing on our direct line to God. Paul relates this to singing in verse 15.
• In the OT, the Psalms cover all of the above-mentioned territories. Some are deeply personal reflections, some are written to encourage the writer’s soul, some are intended to rally people to recognize God’s work, while still others are pure God-directed praise. A whole blog post could be written on this book and the ways it could be relevant to our perspective on church music, but I’ll save that for another time.

Attempting to put all this together

Most of the above passages don’t give a neat, prescriptive answer to the question of who our content should be directed towards – the Corinthians one probably gets the closest. What I’d take from that for church music is that it’s helpful to get amongst content that doesn’t have the effect of including some but excluding others.

For example, I think it’s less valuable to sing songs that assert where we are at emotionally. If a song said “I’m so happy because I’m praising you”, is that alienating to someone who is really having a hard time seeing God’s goodness? I suspect so.

Much has been said on this subject before, so let me get to where I’ve ended up in my thinking.

Teaching through words, encouragement through singing

My thinking at this point in time is that from a content standpoint, it’s best to sing songs that focus on absolute, objective truth. It’s fitting, right and proper to sing of God’s goodness irrespective of how we feel. It’s harder to sing about our emotions the lyrics don’t actually follow how we feel right at a given point in time.

Who we’re singing the words to is less of an issue. I think we’re staying true to the 1 Corinthians 14 model even when we sing content directly to God or to ourselves, providing we don’t intend to lose focus on the fact that we are all singing the same words. That means that as a community, we gain encouragement from the fact that the truth we are singing is true for all of us.

Fin.

This has ended up being a lengthier post than I originally intended. It’s a subject that I’m still getting my head around, and one that I’d love any thoughts on. Feel free to contribute them either by leaving a comment or getting in touch directly!

First up, a bit of dreaming about the future…

Genre by genre

Eventually – should God see fit to grow our little gathering and bring musos along for the ride - I’m hoping to run multiple bands on a rotating roster, which is not a new concept in itself! However…

Ideally, each band would represent a different musical genre and contain musicians for whom that genre most reflects their interests. This means that we’d get diversity from week to week at church, and hopefully we’d see the musicians developing a much stronger creative synergy with each other.

I’m aware that this is a little reminiscent of the way Mars Hill Church do their music. I’ve only heard about what they’re doing at a high level and haven’t yet explored the ideas behind what they’re doing, but I’m glad someone else has trod this territory before!

But back to reality…

Right now, however, we most definitely do not have enough musicians for multiple bands (we have 2 musicians total!) – and the concept of spanning multiple genres with our limited resources would keep us busy far above and beyond the workload of any sensible fulltime job! This left us in a position where we had to make the deliberate (and nerve-wracking) decision to focus on one genre only.

Here’s the thing though: we didn’t want to revert back and do yet another piano-and-acoustic-guitar driven band. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of unique, creative ways you can use these two instruments combined, but if we went down this route it’s more than likely that we’d end up becoming no different to any other church band.There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but it’s not the outcome we’re hoping to achieve for this particular project!

So – we wanted a genre that lends itself to a diverse sonic palette and was accessible to a wide range of people. Oh, and we still only have two musicians. What to do?

Electronic music in church

Electronic music, eh? In church, it’s exactly the kind of thing that could either be fantastic, or jaw-droppingly awful. But the possibilities presented themselves pretty clearly – it does have the potential to be exciting, dynamic music, and it seemed completely feasible that it could be carried out by two musicians (plus singers, of course)

The first problem with electronic music is defining what it is: “electronic music” actually isn’t a genre at all. It refers to the process in which music is made – by using synthesizers, drum machines, samplers and other technological gadgets to produce music. Anything made largely or entirely with these devices is electronic music – from synthesizers attempting to play entire orchestral works in the early 70s (they were generally awful at it) through to the hardest variants of dance music.

As a result, finding a genre within electronic music that is most accessible to a large number of people becomes a priority (this is all about serving the body remember!) I know plenty of people can’t stand Kraftwerk, and likewise even more people who find trance music utterly banal. That doesn’t rule out electronic music – it just removes two options.

So how do we find out what people like?

A mixtape

When the ideas for doing church music with synths and laptops emerged, I sent a mixtape out to our core team. Along with it I explained that we wanted looking to try a new sound in church and that the mixtape contained music that I thought had similar stylistic elements to the music we could potentially pursue.

The mix contained secular music from my own collection – fairly diverse so I could gauge what people did and didn’t like. Here’s what it contained:

1. Gotye – Hearts a Mess (3am remix) – have a listen here
2. Parades – Invaders
3. M83 – Don’t Save Us From The Flames
4. Bjork – Unravel
5. Fujiya & Miyagi – Ankle Injuries
6. The Cure – Closedown
7. Underworld – Beautiful Burnout
8. Apparat – Arcadia
9. Frou Frou – Let Go
10. Talk Talk – I Don’t Believe In You
11. Matthew Dear – Deserter
12. Radiohead – Videotape
13. Qua – All Body, No Breath

(I’d love to post a link to the mixtape itself, but can’t for copyright reasons. you should be able to find nearly all of these tracks on iTunes or the artist’s Myspace pages)

FYI, the first track is one of my own (a remix of a Gotye tune). I added this because I figured the best way to give people an idea of what sort of music they might get is to add my own music. Also, a couple of the tunes aren’t technically electronic music – but they contain an aesthetic that I felt would be good to represent.

The result was generally good – people responded to some songs better than others, which was a positive thing. As a result, we’re hopefully fashioning a sound more around what people are more likely to enjoy and connect with.

The result so far

So what did we actually end up with? Thus far, we seem to have gravitated towards a downtempo, textural, beat-driven sound which has emerged organically from jamming – some might call it a synth-pop take on trip-hop (if that means anything…?). Thus far it seems to have worked well with the songs we’ve tried it on, but I’m sure we’ll be refining our sound and approach as time goes on. Already exceptions to the general sound have begun to appear – some songs have ended reminiscent of Berlin techno, others have turned into electro-funk groovefests, while others have discovered roots in hip-hop origins. Plenty of potential – and hopefully something for everyone.

Attempting to work with instruments and sounds like this, I’m fairly certain that there will be plenty of revision that needs to be done over time – adjusting the sound in response to feedback, in particular – bearing in mind of course that this is music that we want people to be able to sing to without inhibition.

And now?

Practice! Substantial amounts of practice – in some senses it’s a terrifying thing working in completely unfamiliar territory (for church music) and not having a safety net, but the signs at this point seem to suggest that there’ll be a good outcome at the other end.

I would ideally like to have 20 songs at least sketched out with the skeletons of the arrangements sitting on our respective hard drives and ready to pick up and massage into the structure of our services on a week-by-week basis. We’ll be adding to this over time, of course.

At the time of writing, we have 6 weeks until launch. There will undoubtably be some hiccups along the way, along with the wins. Hopefully we’ll be able to blog about both realistically!

A couple of FAQs

I’ve already been asked a number of questions about this, so I’ll try and answer them here:

• How do you sing to electronic music?
  Like any other church band, we’re having to build our approach to this music with the congregation in mind. For example, there are a few musical features that you’ll often find in electronic music that we’ve decided to limit use of as they can make the music more difficult to sing to:
  • A lack of clear cues that make the rhythm of a song ambiguous
  • Polyrhythms can confuse matters
  • Excess bleeps, bloops and other ear candy can detract or distract from lyrical content
• Isn’t electronic music just “doof doof” that you’d hear in clubs?
  In a word, no. Explore the mixtape tracklisting above if you’re interested, as none that music could really either be classified as dance music nor played in clubs (Matthew Dear being an exception maybe?)
• How do you include other musicians that aren’t into this kind of music?
  If and when other musos joined Soma, we’d go to great lengths to find ways to include them if they had interest in being involved. For a start, I would love to add a live rhythm section to this band, but the human resources simply weren’t there. I’m interested in exploring all sorts of interesting combinations for this – there’s nothing set in stone.
  Ideally, though, once we had enough musos on board we would switch to having multiple bands and styles – depends on what God has in store!
• Won’t this be a little like karaoke? Lots of backing tracks, little musician interaction?
  There won’t be any backing tracks, in the sense that there will be no predefined arrangements within the computer (i.e. it won’t be like most church overhead PowerPoint slides where the song structure is defined before the service) and most of what we do during the service will be completely live, including playing synths/keybaords, triggering samples and starting/stopping/interacting with loops. Oh, and there’ll be some guitar. Most of the preparation is creating beats, loops and defining our own sounds. Along with all the normal things church bands do of course!