The Art of Sampling: How to Sample Like a Boss
Sampling music in its essence is simple, but incorporating it into your music can be confusing and complicated.
Sampling is when you take a recording from another source, insert it into your track, and manipulate it to fit your needs.
Continue reading below to help better understand sampling and its uses in music.
What Is Sampling
As mentioned above, sampling is using another artist’s pre-recorded sounds for yourself differently.
What you use for your track from the sample taken is up to you and the project being worked on.
You can sample a song’s entire verse or just the kick.
After finding a sample, you can tweak it in ways like Equalization, pitch and tempo alteration, or time stretching.
Brief History of Sampling
The first real semblance of sampling came from the 20th-century jazz realm.
Artists of the time would sample each other while playing to pay homage.
Later, in the 1940s, led by Pierre Schaeffer, a new genre of music was formed using tape recorders, which were newly discovered at the time.
The genre known as Musique Concrète laid the foundation of sampling as it’s known today.
This led to the creation of the chamberlain and mellotron, which were electro-mechanical keyboards that triggered pre-recorded instruments when played.
In the ’70s & ’80s, DJs from the south Bronx decided to try their hand at sampling.
They would go on to create their samples with live vinyl manipulation, which would change the hip-hop style and culture moving forward.
In the 70s, the first monophonic digital sampler, the computer music melodian, was created.
The device was ahead of its time as a digital synthesizer, a DAW, and a Polyphonic in one unit with a touch screen controlled using a light pen.
With this came portable digital samplers, the leading cause of the boom in electronic and sample-based music production worldwide in the 80s.
Samplers like the Akai MPC series, EMU, and SP-1200 majorly produced countless hip-hop records.
Where to Find Samples
Before you can start manipulating samples of different kinds, you need to know where these samples can be discovered and downloaded.
Lucky for you, there are dozens of sites home to thousands of samples across the internet on both free and paid platforms.
Looperman: A website where you can join a community of artists and discover many free samples you can play with after creating a free account.
Freesound: A place beyond your typical loops, you can get samples ranging from random FX like police sirens and bird calls to acoustic guitars and drums.
After you create a free account, you can search, preview, and download as many samples as needed.
Cymatics: This site is home to a wide selection of free sample packs that contain thousands of high-quality presets, MIDI files, Vocals, and More.
Splice: Everything a producer needs in the modern world of music creation can be found on Splice.
It has a vast collection of royalty-free samples, a backup cloud for storage, a vast community, and a space where you can try plugins like Ozone and Serum.
Tracklib: A site where you can browse thousands of songs and alter them in whatever way fits your project.
As a bonus, you can get clearance quickly, easily, and legally from the site.
Sloopy: This website has a regularly updated sample library and a user-friendly interface, allowing for easy previewing and purchasing of samples at an efficient rate.
Reddit: This online community site is home to several subreddits that share and upload samples and loops that can be downloaded for free.
To name a few, there are r/Drumkits, r/FreeSounds, and r/samplesforall.
Sampling Techniques
Once you have a good collection of samples, you can start using different techniques on them.
The sampling techniques one can use vary in difficulty, with some being simple and others being more advanced.
Chopping: A commonly used way of manipulating your sample is slicing it at different points in time.
Looping: After you’ve made your cuts, you can loop these snippets and add other elements on top.
Re-arranging: An alternative to looping, you can rearrange these snippets to develop something new.
Transposing: This means changing the pitch of a sample up or down.
You can shift your sample up for a brighter tone or down for a darker tone.
Time stretching: This is when you alter the tempo of your sample without changing the pitch.
Resampling: Recording a sample into a different track after altering it at a specific time.
Reversing: As you can imagine, this is when you flip your sample around and play it in reverse.
A good use for reversed samples is emphasizing a particular beat in your melody.
Sample Mixing: The act of taking different samples and combining them.
You can then alter these samples with different FX to make them more unique.
Granular Synthesis: When you take a small portion of the sample (around 100 milliseconds) and use it to make a synth.
You can use a stock sampler from your DAW with looping or a plugin with a granular engine, such as Pigments or Astra.
Legal Use
Sampling your music legally is something all producers should strive for (unless you want to get slapped with a fine).
To sample a song legally, you first need permission from the copyrighted owners of the composition and recording in the form of licensing.
If you only want to sample one song for your track, doing this is relatively easy using a site like Harry Fox Agency.
However, if you want to sample more than one song at a time, you’ll have to ask for permission from the copyright owners directly.
If you intend to go to them directly, then you and the owners of the copyrighted material can negotiate the rates for the song being played.
The money it will cost to use the song will depend on the owners and license.
Failure to adhere to copyright laws could lead to fines, an injunction of your track, and even jail time.
Luckily, many of these troubles can be avoided with the help of sample sites like Splice and Tracklib.
Conclusion
Sampling is a creative way to turn something old into something new.
Whether you want to add some Fx-like reverb, delay to give an instant change, or alter your sample on a deeper level is up to you.
Just make sure you are using these samples legally to avoid any troubles down the road, and keep experimenting.
