“It’s hard to clear samples. We’d have something in the track, and then we would have to take it out, and it wouldn’t sound as good”: Zeds Dead’s battle with sample clearance on their new albumZeds Dead reignited their love of sampling on their new album, Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness, but the historic production technique brought them face to face with the uncertain process of clearing samples – again.
One pre-existing recording on the album that members Zachary Rapp-Rovan and Dylan Mamid doubted they could secure was on A Million Dreams. The chilled-out drum ‘n’ bass track opens with the late piano legend Duke Ellington comparing playing music to dreaming. They grabbed the audio from a YouTube video, and after difficulties connecting with Ellington’s estate, his grandson reached out to Mamid and Rapp-Rovan with his approval.

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As two producers who started out making hip-hop, Mamid and Rapp-Rovan have endured the process of clearing samples numerous times over their 15 years of making music together. Many cases didn’t turn out as well as A Million Dreams.

“It’s hard to clear samples,” Rapp-Rovan said in a recent interview with MusicTech. “We would get to these places where we’d have something in the track, and then we would have to take it out and replay it, and it wouldn’t sound as good.”
The frustration surrounding this process led to them avoiding sampling for a while. Instead, they engaged in the challenge of making music purely from scratch. But when it came time to produce a new album, they went back to their roots.
“In the last three years, we’ve been sampling like crazy, and for this album, we just said, ‘Let’s just have fun with it and try to clear it at the end,’” Rapp-Rovan added.
Other artists and media they sampled on the album include Ella Fitzgerald providing her sweet vocals on Summertime by George and Ira Gershwin, and Al Pacino’s threatening speech in Scarface. The former is the hook for the electric dubstep tune One Of These Mornings, and the latter is the basis of their dark house track, Bad Guy.
Read more about Zeds Dead’s journey with sampling on their new album via MusicTech.
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