"Change the Beat" is a song written and recorded by

Fab Five Freddy Fred Brathwaite (born August 31, 1959), more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown ...

, and one of the most

sampled Sample or samples may refer to: Base meaning * Sample (statistics), a subset of a population – complete data set * Sample (signal), a digital discrete sample of a continuous analog signal * Sample (material), a specimen or small quantity of so ...

songs in music history. It was recorded at

Martin Bisi Martin Bisi (born 1961) is an American producer and songwriter. He is known for recording important records by Sonic Youth, Swans, John Zorn, Material, Bill Laswell, Helmet, Unsane, The Dresden Dolls, Cop Shoot Cop, White Zombie, Boredoms, Ang ...

's OAO Studio in Brooklyn, New York, United States, (later, BC Studio) and released as a 12"

single Single may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Single (music), a song release Songs * "Single" (Natasha Bedingfield song), 2004 * "Single" (New Kids on the Block and Ne-Yo song), 2008 * "Single" (William Wei song), 2016 * "Single", by ...

on the Celluloid label in 1982. This release and all subsequent pressings of the single feature two versions of the song, one on Side A and one on Side B. The official length of the tracks varies depending on the specific pressing of the single, with some releases mislabeling the running times entirely. The Side A version is 7:40 minutes in length and features Fab Five Freddy rapping in both English and French. He also performs the chorus of the song, utilizing a

vocoder A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''voice'' and ''encoder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation. The vocoder was ...

with a white noise carrier to achieve a gritty, robotic effect. The version of the song that appears on Side B is considerably shorter than the A-side track, clocking in at 3:42. Aside from the chorus, which, like the Side A, was performed by Fab Five Freddy through the vocoder, the lead vocals are performed by rapper Beside and rapped entirely in French, making this single one of the first multilingual hip-hop releases. Beside was credited as 'Fab 5 Betty' on the earliest pressings of the vinyl. At the end of the Side B version, there appears the phrase "Ahhhhh, this stuff is really fresh", spoken through a vocoder. The first and last words are two of the most widely used samples for

scratching Scratching, sometimes referred to as scrubbing, is a DJ and turntablist technique of moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable to produce percussive or rhythmic sounds. A crossfader on a DJ mixer may be used to fade between two record ...

. According to

WhoSampled WhoSampled is a website and app database of information about sampled music or sample-based music, cover songs and remixes. History Nadav Poraz founded the site in London, England in 2008, as a way to track musical samples and cover songs. ...

, a user-generated website cataloging samples, Change the Beat is one of the three most sampled tracks in history, appearing in over 2600 tracks as of 2022. The earliest of which was the 1983

Herbie Hancock Herbert Jeffrey Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an American jazz pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, and composer. Hancock started his career with trumpeter Donald Byrd's group. He shortly thereafter joined the Miles Davis Quintet, where he help ...

single " Rockit", which featured scratching by pioneering DJ and turntablist

Grandmixer DXT Derek Showard, better known by the stage name GrandMixer DXT, is an American musician, one of the earliest to use turntables as a musical instrument in the 1980s. Early in his career, he was known as Grand Mixer D.ST, a reference to Delancey S ...

(then known as GrandMixer D.ST). Although most people familiar with the record believe the sample comes from the processed voice of Fab Five Freddy, that account is disputed by producer

Bill Laswell William Otis Laswell (born February 12, 1955) is an American bass guitarist, record producer, and record label owner. He has been involved in thousands of recordings with many collaborators from all over the world. His music draws from funk, w ...

, one of the musicians credited on the record. Laswell states that it was his manager Roger Trilling who recorded the sample during earlier sessions for another project. According to both Laswell and Trilling himself, Trilling was imitating a record executive who would reportedly exclaim "this stuff is really fresh!" whenever he heard a song he liked. The sample, then, is an imitation of this executive by Roger Trilling and spoken through a vocoder.

References

External links

Listing of sampling songs

Origins of the sample
{{authority control 1982 singles 1982 songs American hip hop songs Sampling (music) Song recordings produced by Bill Laswell Songs written by Fab Five Freddy