The art of sampling...

[No name]

I thought it a good idea to start a thread that unifies all the pieces of info on sampling that have been thrown around here and there on the sampling forum. I hope everyone who is so kind to do so will share knowledge of their sampling experiences, and though I do wish to know personally, I also hoped that this thread will grow into a small wealth of sampling knowledge contributed to by all KVR'ers. So please, share your sampling tips and techniques. Example would be: How you cut pieces out of things and fit them to your music, how to you process them, certain techniques with turntables that people could use to sample something, even techniques to sample it in a way that would make it sound different. It really is such a general topic, so please be all means go ahead and pitch in anything you so desire to.

[vurt]

not a great tip for everybody i admit, but especially for ambient/noise makers...
record everything!
take yoour portable recorder and a mic everywhere you can.

[The Chase]

I sample from Vynil, CD's, and higher quality MP3's. If I here something i want to grab, (mostly likely drum hot(s) or a f**ked/random effect) I'll inport it into Adobe Audition (or record it from vinyl) and take out what I want, saving it into my sample folders. That pretty much sums it up for me.

[Distorted_Mastermind]

Record anything that makes noise from guitars to kids toys and everywhere between.
Record hifi on the computer and lofi on the sampler (a good hardware sampler is still well worth it especially for people that make hip hop, drum and bass,etc...)
Record through anything else as well such as guitar amps, different mics, etc...
Pitch way down, apply a low pass filter with high resonance.
Record from turntable without the motor on while spinning it with the hand in a way it sounds good.
Use a little longer attack, shorter sustain, and much longer decay and release (instant ambiance).
The possibilities are huge and pretty much only limited to the imagination.

[stale bread]

i know i'm gonna love this thread, anyway get yourself an app like 'silent bob', it's free, apps like this record constantly into a buffer. Have your television, radio, instruments and anything else you can think of pluged up into your soundcard and have silent bob or the like always running, you will never miss anything. silent bob gives me two minutes to catch what i want to sample after I hear it because its already recorded and all i have to do is click on 'stop' and that audio is captured to file. You can also set it so that its buffer is any amount less than two minutes also.

[stale bread]

this is a crosspost from the Live forum but it's full of great tips for samplist so i thought you'd be interested.

thanks to the phat conductor for this one:

like my cut up breakbeats to be not only well produced, but lavishly edited as a unit, as if i were listening to impossibly complex dj juggles. there is something about that chunky cut and paste aesthetic that i really can't get enough of.

if you love percussion like i love percussion, you're going to enjoy this routing concept: route your percussion into a drum bus not only for sound design, but for use as a musical instrument in it's own right.

the percussion routing of the nefilim

-----------making the drumkit

we're going to make what is called a 'stack' here. this means that each single midi note will trigger multiple samples, designed to be unified and percieved as one drum hit. this is a handy trick for breakbeat based music, but it really is universally applicable.

-----------drum texture

get some drum kit bits sampled from a real source. this will be your texture, what you percieve with your ears as the 'sound of the kit'. this kit can a studio drumkit, or even just pieces of an old drumloop sample from the 70's. what is important is the TEXTURE. load them into an impulse so you can control them with midi.

-----------drum impact

find some synth drum one shots to 'beef up' the kit. what is important here is the IMPACT. make sure these drums are clean, and hard. you can add distortion to the textural drum samples, but it's a good idea to keep your electronic impact drum samples clean and relatively unnoticeable if you don't want your drum stack to sound like more than one sample at a time.

load these into another impulse so that their slots correspond with those in the first impulse (ie kik slot 1, snare slot 3, hats slots 6-7-8, etc... think of a system and stick with it.

----------- routing the midi

route your midi from impulse one, to impulse two (set midi from to 'impulse one' on the dropbox of track two in the i/o editor and then move impulse two to monitoring 'in' status). ableton kicks so much ass in the department that it will even route the automation through. this means if you, for example: timestretch and distort your snare at the end of a fill, it will do this for BOTH impulses

-----------making the stack sit right

there are a lot of little tweaks you can do on a kit to make it sit right. here's a few:

-take the bottom end out of your texture drums, you might want to do this with the individual cell filters in impulse, you might want to just eq the whole output. you have to be careful here to make sure that your stack sounds like one kit.

-you should also mess around with the tunings of your impact drum hits until you find the 'sweet spots' where it all just lines up golden.

-distortion/saturation is a really nice tool for bringing out the oomph. there's a reason why each impulse cell has a seperate saturator

-----------supplemental percussion bits

it's always good to have a few channels of supplemental drum sounds, like a conga loop, some rides, or a nice shaker (the one from lyn collins - think about it comes to mind.) try taking these in and out of your drum patterns when your beat needs a little progression halfway through a long section.

-----------route the drums to a drum bus

route all of the outputs of your impulses (and whatever other percussion you are using, audio loops, other vsts, whatever) to a new audio track called 'drum bus' with monitoring set to 'in'. this is where you will unify your drum elements. maybe a fancy distortion/compressor would be nice here. filters/eq are a must, and a beatrepeater here is handy too.

-----------drum bus automation

arrange view - it is a good idea to leave some long continuous audio on the drum bus channel. you don't hear it, but it will be handy later if you want to copy and paste patterns of automation around.

dummy clips - in session view you can automate the drum bus with dummy clips. this is where an audio clip is placed on the drum bus channel and the drum bus is set to monitoring 'in' status. this means that the audio in the clip does not play, but the automation data still affects the audio coming through the drum bus.

beatrepeater -

unfortunately you can't turn a plugin on and off from the clip automation yet, but you CAN automate the wet/dry or 'chance' fields to achieve a toggle effect. the classic hiphop beat double up is: interval 1/4 grid 1/8, but you should really experiment and try to make as many different patterns as you can. the grid parameter is especially fun. when automated from a clip it sounds tighter than a nun's knees and will really turn some heads if you start doing it in a live band situation. next time you need a drum fill, trigger one and there you go...

filters, etc -

whenever i write i keep clips of stock filter sweeps on hand in the session window, there are many times when you just need a simple one bar highpass sweep or something and it's not necessary to program new ones each time if you just save them into a template you start all of your tunes from. they can always be edited in the arrange window later. it is handy to have a few delay bus send spikes as well. often you just need the last beat of a bar to delay.

-----------adding extreme/random mashes with control and precision

MIDI - it's important to keep in mind that the first impulse is the impulse you are going to be sending your drum performance data to. editing MIDI is much cheaper than editing audio, so it might be cool to toggle a midi arpeggiator to stutter single notes faster than your hands can manages. the randomizer is great too. use your imagination.

midi munching is something that a lot of producers ignore ("arpeggiators are for trance man") but if you creatively take advantage of midi plugins it can really make you stand out from the rest. midi processing is also ill as f**k in a live situation because then your frantic button mashing will come out quantized all pretty

AUDIO - automating the drum bus is a great way to get percussion edits, but it can take a while, and the effects might not be as extreme as you would hope. what i usually do is:

late in the production stages of a song, when i am sure than i have the drums just how i like them, i record a five minute wav file of completely mental drum bus mashery using a plugin like livecut, crazy ivan, dblue glitch, supatrigga, or some of the reaktor granular FX. this will generate a lot of extremely complex and modulated drum edits that sound awesome, but are complete gibberish unless edited. if you chop a few choice mashes into the drum mix on a seperate audio channel it will sound amazing.

***be careful not to layer the same drum ontop of itself and cause phasing problems. you should also make sure to keep it tasteful, it's really easy to lose the plot at this point (unless you're making breakcore).

-----------kontakt, battery etc...

You can use this same principle much more effectively in Kontakt, Battery, or any other sampler program. One of the many benefits of this is being able to seperate the kicks vs. snares vs hats before they go to the drum bus. I used to be somewhat hesitant about going to wild with multi-channeled percussion, but Ableton's routing abilities allow you a great deal of control over the entire drum submix so that really isn't a limitation anymore.

Have fun!

PS: If you want to hear some of this in action, you can check out this teaser from the album I'm working on with my band The Department of Motion www.thephatconductor.com/DeptOfMotion-Teaser.mp3

[stale bread]

it shows just a little of why i love Live and use it as my sampler/everything

[shamann]

it shows just a little of why i love Live and use it as my sampler/everything

That makes me wonder, what are everybody's favourite samplers, and do you use different samplers for different things?

When my head is clear tomorrow, I'll post some of the stuff I do, but I find I use several samplers for different tasks.

[Distorted_Mastermind]

On phrases something cool to do is section them in 1/4 notes rather than time stretching.
Cutting notes out rather than phrases, or cutting notes and layering with parts of the same phrase (easy to cover up by rearranging and filtering).
I too can tell this is going to be a good thread and that "silent bob" program is an interesting idea stale

[Krakatau]

This is, so to say, an early tutorial i wrote and already posted here once :


"let me share with you what is a major of my own personnal programming experimentation :samples of natural ambiances of any kind, that are to my taste an incredibly huge world to explore

First of all , let me just highly recommand to the ones of you who have any few experiences with samplers, to try a quite easy experimentation like the following one :
-1) Using a DAT or a MD, just try to make a good take of a natural soundscape like noisy wind (trought some trees for example) or rain, or a fire burning...
if you don't have the appropriate equipement, you can make a sample by CD extraction of some commercial CD's of natural soundscape )
-2) Then sample an single portion of 3 to 10 seconds in stereo (you don't really need so much to use a digital interface, just do your work properly),
-3) Within the sampler make a long, crossfaded loop on sample edit (or by default you can choose a loop point on a short silence..., you will notice that a long sample is needed by playing the highest key of your master keyboard : the artifact created by the loop getting shorter and shorter would be sounding too intensively on a short loop
-4) At least choose on program edit a very simple enveloppe: long attack, no decay, highest sustain and long release that you can reproduce wathever is the choosen sample (the only exception would be for staccato-like or explosive sounds like thunder or a single raindrop but right now i would be getting a bit off-topic !)
You may also if you want hadd some velocity sensitivity on volume and/or filter cutoff (some low-pass with no resonnance or modulations , just keep in mind that before anything else the resulting sound must be a main contribution of the original sample itself !)
Notice also that you don't absolutely need a stereo sample in a way that you can easily recreate convincing pseudo-stereo soundscapes that way :
-Make a copy of your sample
-reverse it
-route one of them completely to the left, the other one completely to the right
-then do both loops(at once if they can be recognise as a single stereo sample by the
sampler, you'll remember that they still have exactly the same length )
Because of the fact that both sample have exactly the same timbral content but inverted notion of time it will result with a complex and unpredictable mixing of travelling sounds from one side to another of the stereo image, you will notice that if the sounding impacts and the reverberations/early reflections (when it is a very audible component of the original take) change in nature completely when reversed, the other timbral characteritics still remains the same
Forget yet about this very last piece of sample editing for a while !
Now you that you've finished your progrm edit, just lay a hand from one side of the keyboard to another and listen carefully,

you may have noticed that, just by using polyphonic transpositions of a lonely sample on all the keyboard, how all the timbral (and other psycho-acoustic) aspects may change deeply !
By experience i noticed many similarities listening to transposed soundscapes of, apparently, different nature
Examples you may easily experience by creating samples out on some commercial CD : Compare a children's diving into water played 2 octaves down with a thunder's sample...or a thunder's sample played 2 or 3 octaves up with the sound of a heavy footstep on a wet ground ,etc ,etc...)
Supposing you've got on your sample some overall, echoïng or reverberating sounds ...(it would be the case with any takes of distant sound's sources like ambient rain or thunder, in there you'll obviously hear some early reflections)... you will have the feeling of different "room size" by transposing the original sample up (smaller size ) or down (bigger size)
But the most amazing experience i had by comparing different sounding sources at the present time was this one :
-on one side : the territorial drumming noise on the trees of the woodpecker (Scientific name : "Dendrocopos major")
-on the other side : the noise of the stick before the curtain's opening and the beginning of the actor's performance of a comedy (...you know, right before the 3 hits at the very beginning !)....Both in one-shot mode
If you have a chance to compare them by transposing down the first or transposing up the other you will make a marvellous experience : nearly impossible to distinguish them , except maybe that at the same apparent speed, the woodpecker's sample would appear as using some more stength ! ..of course by reflecting a bit you easily notice that they both are bio-acoustic wooden and, repetitive noises
That general experimentation, on bio-acoustic sound especially, as left me with a strong feeling of relativity of time...
Again an example : if you transpose down, of about one octave or more, some bird's warbling, they will sound quite like tropical one's, wich are much bigger, that means with lower pitch and slower warbling's articulation; A similar observation that you can make with the preceeding example of both living forms of life, ( thought it compares a bird with a human beeing )
...as if it was reflecting of a time and space correlation
But this means in practive that it is a too easy way to do impressive and very versatile stuffs but much more difficult to optimise their use in a program flexible and versatile enough for a musical use in situation
Let see, except for a use as "new-age additionnal arrangement" that seems to me the most obvious, you would need some sound that can perhaps be quantised
(single raindrops or a thunder's impacts or any sounds that can be edited in one-shot mode )
...or maybe tuned
(some types of wind, i have in mind some takes of snowstorm in the ice barrier, can be described as having a well defined and quite stable fondamental frequency, also some natural reverbaration as described, like water trought a tube that has some raisonnant frequencies and therefore you can expect a tuned use in polyphony)
My experience in arrangement make me trust of a use of tuned samples of natural soundscape by looking for some common timbral aspects with instrumental samples or synth's patches in one hand and natural or synthetic sounscapes with no harmonical correlation in the other hand
(notice for example the similitude between the sound of a motor car, especially at constant speed that means with a stable, and therefore tunable fundamental frenquency and a "heavy metal" distorted guitar, their both easily blends together in a way that it would many times impossible to distinguish them in an good orchestration and at the meantime without loosing their own timbral characteristics !)
What i can say about experiences of quantised samples of natural sounscapes:
...that most of the time it is highly uncompatible with common actual musical beats .
For example i appreciate a lot to work in reason with REX files because it is a dead easy job to make some "techno-electro-trance-etc" types of beat but except if you expect tu use an industrial sample-based rex files like some automatic functioning machines or civil engieneering sounscapes, that can blend with those squary types of rythm,... i guess that you would be many times dissapointed with the result
You would need some swinging or groovy thing (can't tell...) that can would make an easier bridge between "rythmical" and "arythmiqual" music or soundscape,
I am sometimes working with African traditionnal musician and music..., and to my ears, those type of groovy rythms seems more adapted, but comparing to both african scales and rythms am a perfect stanger to their own musical ears
(I may define them as ternary types of rythms that have temporary tentancy to reach binary rythms, by opposition of a swing that, in an opposite way, are binary rythms that try to reach ternary rythm, as easy example 4/4 in pure binary 6/8 or 9/8 sounds more ternary) "

[syncopated_silence]

When I edit samples I find that running all my samples through something like the antares filter takes out all of the DC offset right down to 0.00000%, the Wavelab DC corrector seems to add artifacts in the bit meters after I use it.

[M.Dot]

not a great tip for everybody i admit, but especially for ambient/noise makers...
record everything!
take yoour portable recorder and a mic everywhere you can.

soooooo true

[Krakatau]

not a great tip for everybody i admit, but especially for ambient/noise makers...
record everything!
take yoour portable recorder and a mic everywhere you can.

soooooo true

I second,

...afterwards i can tell you by experience you may have a good use of audio editors almost only by using some quite basic fonctions...

High/low/bandbass filters with a good spectrum analyser can let you clean your sample and often choose a targeted signal when it strongest part is on a bandwith that is clearly distinguisnable from all the rest of the background noises, ... by cutting some of it hi and low frequencies it will colour the signal though, but still at a very acceptable degree for some background noise

Of course a denoiser can be useful, but i experienced that these first tools by themselves can already makes miracles in many cases

Mastering tools like mutiband compressors will give very convincing and still transparent enhancements to your soundtake, but you better have cleaned the unwanted noises previously

Sometimes expanders can be useful by changing the overall character of your soundtakes in an acceptable transparency when it sound too linear ( continuous winds. rain or seaside waves for examples )

I also make a great use of exciters with many kinds of sounscapes, but if you want to make a polyphonic transposition ( down transpositon of a soundtake with enhanced high frequencies, up transposition of enhanced low freq ) you'd need to be careful because the character of your soundtake, mostly the high and low-end part of it, may then have nothing more in common after transposition

[birrbits]

Sampling rule #53: More is not always more!:
Don't leave it Stereo if it is Mono!
(If you are recording with one mic, ITS MONO!!!)
If you think it might be mono, flip one side & sum...if it adds to zero you were right.
A 40 second tail after you hit your neightbors windchime with a hammer isn't necessary unless your neightbor is screaming.
A 24 bit 96khz Stereo Snare drum is an oxymoron.
Yes you have a 100 grazillion bit hard drive, but why waste it?
When in doubt...Trim it

[Krakatau]

eeee-aawwwww !!!!!!