I can’t remember who they were talking about now, but I was listening to a podcast recently that had Questlove (drummer from The Roots) and he was retelling about the first time he met someone. As part of the intro he said something like “of course I know you, you sampled me on <track>” and then he laughed at their shock because they absolutely had not cleared the sample and he was just “hey, it’s alright. We’re cool”.
But it was wild to me to think that in the middle of a track there’s like a 2-3 sec bit of percussion and he can (correctly!) go “hey, that’s me!”. It wasn’t some looping thing throughout the song. Just a single sample. And he knew it was him playing it!
because he probably sampled it himself from another source and spent hours researching the original source and similar breaks then spent hours piling layers of sound and effects on these 2s. So he knows exactly which one is theirs