A Day In The Life By Black Riot

A Day In The Life was released in 1988 on Fourth Floor Records by Todd Terry, using the pseudonym "Black Riot".

This track is a landmark track in the development of a sampling technique known as the rave stab. A rave stab is the technique of sampling a single chord, and then playing it as a melody. Another famous early rave stab is the Landlord stab.

I Like It (Blow Out Dub) By Landlord

By sampling a single chord and triggering it at different pitches, this moves the entire harmonic structure in parallel, breaking traditional rules of music theory. This is known as a rave stab, which was a characteristic sound of the rave era. In music theory terms, this is a parallel harmony technique. Traditional music theory frowns on parallel harmony because it interferes with voice leading, which is a way of moving voices independently in a natural and harmonious way. However, in rave music entire chords are used to play a melodic line, and this makes the line sound more powerful. "A Day In The Life" by Black Riot is one of the key records in the evolution of the rave stab.

Early 90s UK producers used samplers (like the Akai S950) to pitch these sampled chords up and down, creating a big impressive sound for the melodic hooks. Rave stabs became a staple of UK hardcore and jungle. Liam Howlett adopted this "stab" technique for The Prodigy, on tracks such as Everybody in the Place and Out Of Space.

Everybody In The Place By The Prodigy

While "A Day In The Life" (1988) is the most prominent early example of the rave stab, the development of this technique was the result of earlier experimentation by Todd Terry and other artists. The earliest common sampled chord stab was the Fairlight CMI's "ORCH5" sample which was originally from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. This was typically used as a single hit on the first beat instead of being played as a hook.

"Party People" by Royal House was released by Todd Terry in 1987 (the year before A Day In The Life). This uses a sampled chord from from Marshall Jefferson's "Move Your Body" to play a rhythm in a similar way to triggering a drum sample, but the chord sample in Party People isn't used to play a melodic hook. Kevin Saunderson also used the rave stab technique in the same year as A Day In The Life by Black Riot. "Big Fun" by Inner City plays a sampled chord as a melodic line. Kevin Saunderson sampled a chord from "Let's Get Brutal" by Nitro Deluxe to make the melody of Big Fun.

By 1987, it was standard practice to loop drums and rhythmic samples in dance music. Using samples for decoration and triggering them rhythmically was also not uncommon. By 1987, dance music artists in the UK used an everything but the kitchen sink approach to sampling, for example Paid In Full (Seven Minutes Of Madness - The Coldcut Remix) by Eric B. & Rakim, Stop This Crazy Thing by Coldcut Featuring Junior Reid, and Pump Up The Volume by Marrs. In Berlin, Westbam was also using the cut and paste style of sampling.

Monkey Say Monkey Do By Westbam

Monkey Say Monkey Do was a proto-hardcore record, but actual hardcore started to emerge in 1989 with tracks like Acid Rock by Rhythm Device. The UK took the Belgian hardcore sound, which had already incorporated rave stab sampling, and added breakbeats to make the UK rave sound of 1990 to 1992.

Frequency By Altern 8

The specific chord sound used in "A Day In The Life" was sampled from a dub version of Sequal's 1985 track, "It's Not Too Late". The chord sampled in Frequency by Altern 8 is from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.