I’ve used sampling in some songs, but I often have a hard time finding stuff that fits, in that I just have a long list of songs in my library that I’ve downloaded in no particular order or category.
So let’s say I download a library of a bunch of random songs of mixed genres. How would you go about sorting these?
You could just sort them through genre and that’ll be that. You could also go through and prepare the songs, finding soundscapes, breaks, phrases, vox, microsampling stuff etc. etc. Eventually you’ll get your own library of things.
It’d be nice to sort of go through and get that done, having it ready when I’ve done some drums or need a perc loop etc. Although with this method I guess I might miss some things, that in the context of a song I’m working on might sound really good.
I’m on the electronic side of things btw, not hip hop.
It seems to me that a bunch of random songs are just … songs. Not samples.
If you want to sample them, sample them and store those samples. Keeping a bunch of songs is more like an iTunes library, not a sample library!
If you’re not sampling them, you’ll never actually use them. At least, that’s what I’ve found when I’ve downloaded a song planning to sample from it “later” and never done it.
So you go through and cut out snippets of songs beforehand, label and save them?
I’ve always done it the other way around, I mean the principle is the same either way, no? Either you do it beforehand or you do it once you need something. I get that breaks or percussion loops might be something you’d want to gather beforehand.
My thought is that if you do it once you’re in a song, you might find something really special, something you didn’t anticipate would work, but once its being accompanied it really shines through.
I maybe should’ve prefaced this saying it’s not really oneshots, which god knows I have enough of. I’d say sampling more along the lines of Burial or Fatboy slim.
Gonna check out some threads you mentioned as well, tried searching but couldn’t find the keywords!
I think I’m gonna go with the chaos/crate digging my library method someone mentioned in a thread!
I think I glue more with that, then sometimes take out certain things and save if I hear something that might work down the line in other projects. We’ll see how it goes haha.
If you’re talking about creating / using one shot samples, then that’s the kind of thing you can definitely chop beforehand and just keep in files of similar hits and stabs.
A lot of the time when I hear something that I want to sample, I hear that specific thing (like focus in on it) and it will turn into either the backbone for whatever I’m about to work on, or I can kinda already hear it (in my head) in the context of what I’m working on or what I’m wanting to work on.
I don’t discount the “cut up anything you find interesting and get rid of the rest” method but particularly with like, long theatrical samples or say, with anything which is very melodically distinct, it can be difficult to assess the value ahead of time because you’ll always position it as a part of what you’re working on currently and it’s value in future projects (which might not be missed anyways) is then null and void.
I think that a time consuming but probably ideal method is to start with some generic samples, then flesh it out with better samples and melody after you have the bones of it in place.
It will probably also depend on your process of composition. I do my best not to mix too hard while composing, but if you’re the “gets really ocd about shaping a sound during the composition process” type, I can see some of this not working for you.
typically if i hear a sample that i want to use from a song, i will sample the piece immediately and start working on a track with it. ive never had the drive to sample without the drive to do more with that sample immediately following. having a list of songs to sample later seems like it would throw me out of my groove
My version of chaos is to keep a big folder organised by year and month with all the samples and recordings I’ve done, do semi-regular clearouts of my 404 for anything I’ve been messing with. For me it’s too complicated to try categorising or super detailed tagging, but having everything accessible is a great resource to keep going back to. And given the kinds of library management tools that are out there now, it almost doesn’t matter that the samples are pretty much just dumped in there - the only tagging I really do is put the bpm and number of bars in the file name where relevant.
In the end, there were just too many samples, and the time it took to listen to them again often lowered my enthusiasm for composing, so I gave up on begging for samples.
Whether music, dialogue, or sfx I treat all sampling like a Vocabulary, it’s always evolving, growing, and shifting… I have a. Extremely detailed sample library but also a not so detailed library and I also leave repositories of samples wherever I go or markers, imho there is no reason to limit one’s self to one method or another when curating samples, the important thing to me is that i mark them, sample them, and prep them at anytime I wish to do so…
Having a sampling only session is a great use of my downtown, and as long as I wanted to sample whatever it was in the first place I never have to worry about whether I’ll still be able to see it’s value as a sample anytime after that, plus as long as I’ve sampled it myself I remember every sample the only samples I forget about are the samples given to me by others…
. The only trouble I really have is forgetting where I stored certain samples for example if you’re a friend who’s let me use your computer or somebody i used to date or family there are likely sample libraries on your computer
…i also don’t see any point in having a bunch of songs and asking how to sort them for picking samples…
if ur into cutting out phrases of existing songs to use them as samples for ur own creations, at least make some curated art form out of that process…fall in love with some particular edges, hunt for inspiring parts but having a bunch of songs from other artists on hold in staples to strip them for their details leaves the impression to me, of not much personal inspiration at all but heaps of pretty much nothing but furthermore sonic inflation instead…
