Sampling background
It’s important to realise the importance of sampling. Dance music would not be here today if it wasn't for sampling. It plays an essential role in dance music; just take a look at all the sample CDs available on the market. And not forgetting all the songs you have heard with a sample from another track used in a different way or lifted straight from the original
Over time samplers have evolved to become the most powerful tool in your music making arsenal. You can record whole sections of tracks, through to accapellas, instruments and Single notes.
In the 70s sounds would be recorded onto tape via a keyboard setup, in the 80s this developed into hardware samplers like the AkaiS900 featured here. In the 90s we now have a multitude of software sampling tools like the ones listed below as well as audio recoding software tools like Wavelab and Recycle.
The main hardware based players in the market are Akai and Roland but there are a number of software based samplers in the market including, Native Instruments Kontact, Steinburg Halion, Ableton, FL studio and Emulator X
Technique background
It doesn't just end at simply recording the sound into your hardware/software. If you have a MIDI keyboard you can plug this into your computers sequencing software, audio program or hardware. By doing this you can take one single note and spread that note over a number of keys on a keyboard to trigger the sample. I will cover this in more detail in latter blogs.
The pitch of each key can be changed by using a different frequency to imitate the different notes you would play on a keyboard. This is extremely powerful as you can take a short section of a sample and make it sound totally different just from one note.
This is however limited in the sense that it works best when spread over one octave (the seven notes listed below is one octave) at the most as the step between each key pitch can be quite high. To combat this the alternative is to sample a particular note at various root notes like A, B, C, D, E, F and G if you have them all available.
RAM (random access memory) considerations
A careful consideration when recording samples is the size of the audio file you produce.. If recorded directly into your computer the standard windows file will be WAV format. A 1 hour WAV file is likely to be about 650MB. A file 1 hour long will be around 100MB if in MP3 format. A sample CD full of WAVs can be around 800MB. If you have a number of sample CDs on your computer you will soon end up with a full hard drive so its important to bear in mind before saving everything to hard drive. I tend to keep my sample CDs and load them up when I am looking for a particular sound then save it to the relevant directory. If buying a new computer always bear this in mind and try and go for the largest hard drive. As mentioned in my previous blog, its also worth buying two and having a separate audio drive to your main C drive.
It’s important to realise the importance of sampling. Dance music would not be here today if it wasn't for sampling. It plays an essential role in dance music; just take a look at all the sample CDs available on the market. And not forgetting all the songs you have heard with a sample from another track used in a different way or lifted straight from the original
Over time samplers have evolved to become the most powerful tool in your music making arsenal. You can record whole sections of tracks, through to accapellas, instruments and Single notes.
In the 70s sounds would be recorded onto tape via a keyboard setup, in the 80s this developed into hardware samplers like the AkaiS900 featured here. In the 90s we now have a multitude of software sampling tools like the ones listed below as well as audio recoding software tools like Wavelab and Recycle.The main hardware based players in the market are Akai and Roland but there are a number of software based samplers in the market including, Native Instruments Kontact, Steinburg Halion, Ableton, FL studio and Emulator X
Technique background
It doesn't just end at simply recording the sound into your hardware/software. If you have a MIDI keyboard you can plug this into your computers sequencing software, audio program or hardware. By doing this you can take one single note and spread that note over a number of keys on a keyboard to trigger the sample. I will cover this in more detail in latter blogs.
The pitch of each key can be changed by using a different frequency to imitate the different notes you would play on a keyboard. This is extremely powerful as you can take a short section of a sample and make it sound totally different just from one note.
This is however limited in the sense that it works best when spread over one octave (the seven notes listed below is one octave) at the most as the step between each key pitch can be quite high. To combat this the alternative is to sample a particular note at various root notes like A, B, C, D, E, F and G if you have them all available.
RAM (random access memory) considerations
A careful consideration when recording samples is the size of the audio file you produce.. If recorded directly into your computer the standard windows file will be WAV format. A 1 hour WAV file is likely to be about 650MB. A file 1 hour long will be around 100MB if in MP3 format. A sample CD full of WAVs can be around 800MB. If you have a number of sample CDs on your computer you will soon end up with a full hard drive so its important to bear in mind before saving everything to hard drive. I tend to keep my sample CDs and load them up when I am looking for a particular sound then save it to the relevant directory. If buying a new computer always bear this in mind and try and go for the largest hard drive. As mentioned in my previous blog, its also worth buying two and having a separate audio drive to your main C drive.
