Not gonna lie, a noob question. But then again it might help others in simmilar situation?
I get that by asking the question: "how do you find your samples?, I will get the response: “I sample everything”.
I wholeheartedly believe you can sample anything and everything, tweak it, slice it to oblivion… but it’s like I have this block: " no you can’t sample this song/part/instrumental"
How do you recignise what you want or need from a sample?
How do you get inspired to sample something?
With Digitakt, you don’t always want to work with just limitations, like, trying to create something only with single cycle waveforms, but at the same time it’s overwhelming that you can sample just about anything?
Having similar thoughts lately, a fav current artist of mine samples heavily to amazing effect, but a lot of it is from videogames originally. Doesn’t make me enjoy the music any less but when I think about my own music I just don’t want to sample someone else’s sound design work. Even sample libraries put me off.
Guess I need to invest a lot more time into sound mangling and sampling my own stuff.
I wouldn’t overthink it if you just want to mangle, just get on YouTube and see where it leads you. Or grab sounds from the world around you (see Dave Mech’s YT channel for inspiration). Also yeah, your own synths, or lots of very cheap iOS music stuff out there to record
I personally don’t grab samples from any existing songs or loops, I grab sounds from either my own gear or from generally non-musical sources, like field recordings, sections of noise and garbled speech from the radio, etc.
I think you need to establish how you want to make music with samples otherwise where you get them is of very little consequence. I only mean that collecting one shots may not be the answer depending on how you actually want to use samples.
A lot of times I’ll compose something very different from whatever I end up with by starting on and composing with another box and then use sampling as a means of further arranging, mangling or pitching, and as a way of gluing things together. Sometimes I’ll want to chop up the original phrases which are already a composition in themselves, but I don’t always hear my end result with the first couple notes that I put together.
If something inspires you then you can sample it but you aren’t going to hear a lot of babbling brooks and nature recordings in hip hop, or a lot of jazz records in ambient music, or maybe very occasionally but not a lot of field recordings of children in hallways and room mic’ed kalimbas in techno.
You can collect samples but having a use for them is better than just collecting them, so however you enjoy to compose music, I would treat sampling like looking through a file folder but just with your ears. The files are all around you, or you know, in sample packs.
I highly recommend checking out Aporee maps if you haven’t already -
70k+ audio recordings from everywhere in the world, you can contribute to it by uploading your own sounds. If you search for random keywords and filter by “PUBLIC-DOMAIN” you can find endless material that you can use without worry.
I love recording my own stuff, but I can’t afford to travel far, so it’s wonderful to be able to access soundscapes from very different parts of the world. There’s some real sampling gems in there if you keep looking.
I’ll do another recommendation for iPad apps. Digitakt connects seemlessly with an iPad (with USB-C at least) and there are lot of interesting and classic synth recreations out there, with tons of presets just waiting to be played and sampled.
Plus of course a number of radio and music apps, film, etc.
I “record” way more than I “sample” tbh. Mining long recordings for samples is where its at for me, I dont really sample records, radio or the internet as such; that’s something I used to do before I realized I prefer sampling self-made recordings…
this is my way too, I sampled bunch of things from websdr and some old documentaries on YT and with p-locking/processing you can get away with a lot of sounds from a single sample
That would be public domain sounds for ‘analog’ instruments and song/voices, and my own field recordings. For instance, some time ago I was at the coast, and I noticed a wind turbine having a different ‘swoosh’ on one of the blades, which made for some sort of a slow rhythm. Figured I could try and build something from that, and went back there at night. Alas, first time recording in the field, and I seem to need a windsock for that…not one usable recording. Oh well, it won’t walk away.
I’m a big fan of sampling from random obscure cassettes, like religious or spiritual, self-help, hypnosis etc etc which will often pass through a couple of samplers and a bunch of FX before they make it into a track. Mostly though I sample other bits of gear all the time, and resampling is one of my favourite things to do, I’ll record a sample on an cassette recorder, into an 80s kids sampler, out of that via some fx into a modern sampler and/or Ableton.
Sampling from feedback loops is immense fun too, whether a few guitar pedals or more complex mixer-based things, no-input/some-input, whatever, there’s lots of very unique sounds to mine.