Nothing is more synonymous with Hip Hop than the sampler – a cornerstone on which Hip Hop is built. Without Kool Herc’s beat juggling of “breaks” from Soul, Disco, Jazz and Funk records there would be no Hip Hop and none of the countless breakbeat inspired genres that spawned off the back off its legacy.
A breakthrough for me as a musician, and particularly as a composer, was when I stopped imagining harmony in rigid frameworks. The first instrument I excelled at to some degree was the guitar (being a fairly average pianist), and that had a great impact on the way I thought about chords.
Quartal harmony is a system of building chord structures on perfect fourths. It’s been used by classical composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy and Bartók and innumerable jazz musicians like McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans and Chick Corea to name but a few.