Personally, I think samplists should adopt this ethic
(and this one won't make me popular):

I think if you sample someone playing and use their sample to make a piece of music,
you should be every bit as good a musician as they are.

Otherwise, I think it is ripping people off and intrinsically disrespectful to the
culture that you are appropriating.

Okay, you can flame the hell out of me now..................I'm prepared.........................lol

Thanks for the feedback Maduro.
I figure this would be a good time to test my ear on Maqamat!
Now, how much does a rebab stay in tune, or am I going to have nightmares of the old analog synth days? LOL

I love the raw sounds of acoustic instruments from the Middle East and I look forward to testing my knowledge of the theory and application, both on the street and in the clubs. Hopefully I'll be able to gain that realtime 'ear' that Western musicians seem to miss when emulating Eastern music. It's tough enough since I'm also a trained vocalist to sing in some of the maqamat. I'm not used to singing in quarter tones, let alone slightly sharping or flatting 'to Arabic taste'.

It will be lovely to take the recordings and clean them up to see what I can get from them. It'll hopefully help my mizmar skills, much to my dogs' dismay! LOL

So let's see - Things to spend money on in Cairo:
- Private Dance lessons
- Costumes
- Photo Tours
- Musicians

I should be using some of this info on some upcoming recordings. I've been working on learning to sing a few Farid al Atrache pieces, a few electronic explorations of classic Arab songs, and trying to compose my first piece for Raks Sharki. Oh, and a few remixes, just because I need to teach some American stuff when I'm in Europe. ;)

Fingers crossed!

well, it's refreshing to hear that you paid the person you sampled to perform.

I've just been around so many people who will sample people with talent and then
make really terrible garage band loop recordings and put them out, never really \
understanding the culture or the depth of aesthetics of the person they sampled.

and you are right, according to who is a pithy question, but I meant what I wrote in
a non-literal way...........I was talking more about the ethics and aesthetics involved
and not really lobbying that we should have sample police out there.

So, I'm probably not so far away from you, as it might appear, philosophically.

By the way, now a Zoom H2 (which you can buy for under $200) and a Sony ECM S907
stereo mic (that records flat and can, hence, use convolution impulse files representing
very expensive condernser mics that you'd never take into the field with you)
can yield recordings that could go on any album or soundtrack with impunity from
a purely technical standpoint.