How do I make music with samples?

[HREQ]

Ok kinda dumb question, but like, I've never really used samples in my songs, always just used VST instruments (Kontakt stuff)

My daw even comes with abunch of samples loops arps etcs (cubase) but I honestly don't know what to do with them?

There's all these sample CD's (akai) out there and I think alot of ppl in the past in 90s and 2000s used akai samplers, and printed into DAW and cut and pasted parts together maybe? Or was the samples from those CD's automatically mapped, easy to use on the hardware sampler to where it was EZ to use?

Like, there's all these sample CD's out there that have loops on them of drum loops
then there's also chord progressions and rhythm stabbing saws or techno arps on the samples
then there's like some with just C1, C2, C3, C4, C5 BASS or SAW or Synth sound.....
Or if you wanted a jazzy brass horn, there's a sample of someone doing it (BUT how do you know the key/scale? how do you transpose sample?)

I'm thinking in terms of sample folders full of wave files, but I guess, you guys like take the drump loop, figure out it's BPM, cut it apart, use the few parts you like out of it?

and like, how do you figure out what key/scale the ARPs or chords are in? Alot of them don't label, do you use variaudio or something to detect them? then keychange them to suite your songs?

and for the single patches, you drop them in a software sampler to play as lead? I'm using CUBASE and it doesn't really seem to have something to map C1 to C8 of keyboard patches easily, maybe halion sonic SE?

[whyterabbyt]

Ok kinda dumb question, but like, I've never really used samples in my songs, always just used VST instruments (Kontakt stuff)

Kontakt is a sampler. So you are already using samples.

My daw even comes with abunch of samples loops arps etcs (cubase) but I honestly don't know what to do with them?

Whatever you want. Or delete them. There's no obligation to use them.

There's all these sample CD's (akai) out there and I think alot of ppl in the past in 90s and 2000s used akai samplers, and printed into DAW and cut and pasted parts together maybe? Or was the samples from those CD's automatically mapped, easy to use on the hardware sampler to where it was EZ to use?

Akai Samplers... the spiritual forerunners of Kontakt...

But they go back to when DAWs werent DAWs, they were sequencers, and only really did MIDI. Ataris and other things which ran off floppy disks. So not audio recording; so they sequenced them, over MIDI.

I'm thinking in terms of sample folders full of wave files, but I guess, you guys like take the drump loop, figure out it's BPM, cut it apart, use the few parts you like out of it?

Some folk might. Some might not. There are no hard and fast rules.

But you got a few approaches. Basically you'd

* Use the loop as a loop, either as is or edited into a new loop
* Cut up the loop into parts

If you've got a loop you can do looping in your DAW, if it does that, or some sort of looping sampler if it doesnt.
If you've got parts, you can assign each 'part' to a MIDI note, and sequence in your DAW.

Also; if you've got a loop, you can also drop it into a 'slicer' which will effectively divide the loop into parts so you can sequence via MIDI, but doesnt actually cut up the files in any way.

and like, how do you figure out what key/scale the ARPs or chords are in? Alot of them don't label, do you use variaudio or something to detect them? then keychange them to suite your songs?

Some folk might. Some might not.

and for the single patches, you drop them in a software sampler to play as lead? I'm using CUBASE and it doesn't really seem to have something to map C1 to C8 of keyboard patches easily, maybe halion sonic SE?

Well, if you have Kontakt...
However if that's too complex there are a few 'simple' samplers out there, including a couple of free ones.

[pljones]

Also...

"Sample" can be
* the finest grain your ADC is set to - stereo samples at 44100 samples per second, for example
* a tiny wave used by a wave generator to emulate an audio sythesiser oscillator
* a longer wave form used by a sampler to emulate the sound of an instrument
* a wave form captured from sampling an impulse in a space, used to recreate the audio resonance of that space
* a much larger sound file that actually has recognisable "music" in, maybe a short loop of bass line or someone singing "oh ooh, ah ahh"
* an even longer sound file that's pretty much part of a song, cut up into small pieces

And possibly other things I've missed...

[HREQ]

This whole soundtrack is samples I think. The guy back in 2000s said the video game company he worked for had abunch of sample CDs they gave composers to work with, like 50 of them, I'm guessing it was AKAI sample cds like spectrasonics and stuff

did the producers just use MIDI to sequence all that on AKAI samplers back then? Instead of dropping wave files to daw and cutting them apart
or would they have rendered akai samples to waves too?

This whole using samples thing is just fascinating to me. I knew kontakt already used samples but like, those are mostly trying to imitate playing real instruments pretty much. Seems like samples back then were alot of "hit this key, a jazz horn solo plays" and the jazz horn solo was a real musician playing the solo so it sounded legit, and then they transpose it or cut it up and stuff too.

It's a whole side of music production I've never looked into.

In some recent soudntracks too I was reading interviews of producers and the interviewer was like "The horn sound, you hired real players?"
producer: "Ah, no, that was a sample. lol."
"I see, it didn't sound like a vst, lol"

Also I just learned about the "amen break" had no idea most breakbeats were using samples like those... lol I had thought they sequenced them all in themselves before

[audiojunkie]

I agree with everything said above. I LOVE using samplers. The key difference between a synthesizer and a sampler is the origin of the sounds. Synthesizers synthesize the sound. Samplers manipulate existing sound that you have captured, whether that be by tempo sync'ing, transposing, cutting etc. To increase the quality and lower the aliasing of the transposed and stretched sound, often multiple samples are used to create a higher quality instrument--that's called multisampling--that's the C1, C2, C3.... stuff you mentioned. I highly recommend the dynamic duo of Tal-Sampler and Tal-Drum for handling 99% of most users needs in a very easy and straightforward way.

[saint_william]

Check out the album Entroducing by DJ Shadow. It is the first album to use only samples as its source material. That’s one way of using a sample swell. Also anything by J Dilla - (Doughnuts).

Mentioning only two artists seems fraught with risk. But those are two that helped me wrap my head around how to use samples. There are of course tonnes of others worth mentioning