Midnight Oil - Beds Are Burning (Ellis Park - The Concert / 1994)

[Uncle Joe]

Midnight Oil perform 'Beds Are Burning', live at Ellis Park, South Africa in 1994. Originally featured on the album 'Diesel and Dust'. Written by Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie and Peter Garrett.

Having steadfastly refused to play in South Africa whilst in the grip of apartheid, this concert is a celebration of the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in front of a packed Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg during 1994.

[ProfessorGAC]

1. Covered This

As important as that sound effect & ticking clock is to the song's atmosphere, I sampled it right off the album.
What a great song to sing, too.

[Uncle Joe]

2. What does that mean Professor,

when you say you "sampled it off the album?"

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Using A Digital Sampler...

...effectively a digital recorder, the output of the CD player was recorded in my machine. Effectively, I'm recording a sound that can be played back at will, and in pitch.
It's basically the same way a CD or DVD works. The sound is digitized and stored as 8, 12, or 16 bit numbers. My sampler stored the data to both floppies & an internal hard drive.
Then I can truncate so anything "recorded" just before or after the album noise I wanted is clipped away. I then, on my rack mounted sampler, had the horn blast, the tick, & the tock as separate sounds assigned their own zone of keys on the keyboards I was actually playing.
So, when we played it, those sounds weren't "sort of like" what was on the record. They were EXACTLY what was on the record.
Rap artists did a lot of that, like the Van Halen "Jamie's Cryin'" riff on "Wild Thing" by Tone Loc. Lots of rap stuff was done with dedicated samplers, but plenty were done on laptops.
Here's another example of a song where I sampled the special effect right off the CD.
The whip like sound followed by the hammer on anvil that comes in at 54 seconds.
I thought that effect was important enough to sample that, too.

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[Uncle Joe]

4. Got it, thank you.

[Deuxcents]

5. I like this song a lot.. nice to see the video 🙏

Midnight Oil…