Sampling to boost your creative composition

[avasopht]

I used to pride myself on composing tracks with just instruments.

But I've learned how much learning to think like a samplist has made me listen to my music differently.

As an instrumentalist, I had always focused on my composition, my harmonies and my melodies. I thought I was cool.

But there's a much more powerful space available when you look at your music like a samplist. You look for pockets and grooves within the groove and are much better positioned to find entirely new tracks hidden within your own.

I'm writing this because last night it happened to me in the weirdest way.

I was composing as normal, but bouncing everything to track and deleting the MIDI clip. Instruments would be reused for new tracks (with a different patch).

Cool.

Then the magic happened. I was supposed to bounce 2 bars to track but did half a bar by accident. Not realising, I then hit Ctrl+L to set to loop to the duration of the bounced clip.

And that half-bar loop was hotter than my entire sequence. So I duplicated it to a 4-bar loop and used transpose on the audio tracks to make a simple progression.

I also another layer of instrumentation to round out the loop and arranged the clips to have more variation and sound like a real loop.

And sure, there was nothing stopping me from doing that before, but after that happy accident, it made me very aware that I'd not been listening to my track the way a samplist would. Because a samplist would be looking for exactly that, and I can't help but wonder how many tracks I have with a much better song hidden inside of it.

I think I'm gonna have a lot of fun extracting juice out of old tracks of mine!

[Timmy Crowne]

Yes. Sampling leans into a big part of groove and catchiness that it’s easy for us to forget sometimes: repetition. Most tribal/folk music throughout history has a decent dose of repetition. Speaking for myself, sometimes I focus too much on variation and overall song structure because it’s so easy to stretch stuff out across sections now. Sampling kinda slaps me out of that, “Find something cool and loop it!”

[Quarmat]

The same happened to me. I hated using samples from other people's songs. I sometimes just sampled a particular sound, a one-shot but that was it. I admired daft punk but despised their heavy use (and somewhat shameless) of samples, sometimes coming from well known hits. But the technique of chopping and juggling samples was just to powerful to ignore. So I decided to sample myself. I'll write a 8 or 16 bar loop, sample it and then use it in Dr.Rex (back in the day) and Mimic (now. I'm in love with it!). It's just so much fun and so creative and I feel better because I am using my own stuff. Sometimes I have both the original loop and the sampled one in the same song. Roughly half of my production has this autosampling thingy going on.

[bxbrkrz]

Sampling is great, as long as I sample my own noise.

[PhillipOrdonez]

The same happened to me. I hated using samples from other people's songs. I sometimes just sampled a particular sound, a one-shot but that was it. I admired daft punk but despised their heavy use (and somewhat shameless) of samples, sometimes coming from well known hits. But the technique of chopping and juggling samples was just to powerful to ignore. So I decided to sample myself. I'll write a 8 or 16 bar loop, sample it and then use it in Dr.Rex (back in the day) and Mimic (now. I'm in love with it!). It's just so much fun and so creative and I feel better because I am using my own stuff. Sometimes I have both the original loop and the sampled one in the same song. Roughly half of my production has this autosampling thingy going on.

That bassline generator video of yours was and excellent look into this very production process you mention here. Did I tell you it was great? It was great.

[Quarmat]

That bassline generator video of yours was and excellent look into this very production process you mention here. Did I tell you it was great? It was great.

Phillip you did Thanks!

[bossa]

I would definitely like to bring up the VST plug-in Serato Sample [https://serato.com/sample] in the aforementioned context. With it, incredible worlds of your own resampling suddenly appear, which I would not have thought possible before. Here is an example song with it.