Part One Of Three: One Free Shot

When I first heard KRS-One declare, "We need to bring sampling back!" in his cover of We Will Rock You I thought, “Back?  When was it gone?  Wouldn’t I have noticed?”

I don’t know exactly what KRS-One meant by “sampling” in this case.  Even just in the context of music the word has a range of meanings from the very specific and technical (the binary encoding performed immediately after A-D conversion) to the sweepingly broad (playing a digital recording).  Without trying to tackle them all I am going to discuss several of sampling’s uses in production.

These uses fall into three categories, each representing a very general way of using samples in music: as one-shots, as loops and assembled into multi-sample instruments.  Think of them as the badminton, rugby and Blernsball of electronic music.  Loops and multi-sample instruments will be covered in parts II and III of this series.

My examples will employ computer-based DAWs and plug-ins, but the ideas should equally apply to Akai or Roland style groove boxes, workstation keyboards or other samplers.  Everything is illustrated with screen shots.  I also provide a few audio examples.

The One-Shot Heard ‘Round The World

A one-shot is an individual sample that runs from start to finish once each time it is played.  In collections of samples this distinguishes sound files intended to be used by themselves (rather than layered or grouped with other samples of the same instrument) and not looped over multiple bars.  As a sampler setting "one-shot" means the sample plays through to its end each time rather than stopping at the end of the note that triggered it.

Preliminary Editing

Here I will prepare two one-shot samples and use the pair to create two different simple pieces of music.  First, I will use Audacity to cut an individual drum sound out of a purchased loop.

Audacity is a feature-rich, free, open source audio editor.  Its reputation is somewhat damaged by the fact that in the past certain versions crashed or refused to open on certain versions of Windows or Mac OS.  Download the latest version for your OS from SourceForge and you probably won’t have any problems.  It has a few eccentricities, but in many ways it rivals some DAW’s internal editors.  I mostly use it for small things, but you can actually do tons with it, including large multi-track projects.

I find a relatively isolated instance of the sound I want and select it.  I highlight from the transient where the drum hit starts to the next transient. 

I export the selection to a separate file for further editing.  

There is a bit at the end that needs to go and a click in the middle the needs to be suppressed, but which I don't actually want to cut out.

I'm going to use Audacity's Low Pass Filter and Amplify effects on the section of the file containing the click.  This lets me keep the ring and the other squishy goodness in this sample without shortening it.  

After removing high frequencies and amplifying the remaining low ones the sample looks like this…  

…and sounds like this…
    

• Before effects
• After effects     

Into The DAW

I'm going to load the sample into a sampler called apTrigga 2, hosted in a MIDI instrument track in Logic Express.  ApTrigga is technically an effect but it does play samples and can also be loaded as either an instrument or effect in Logic.  This creates the unusual situation of being able to load multiple instances of a sampler on the same channel.

By default apTrigga does not vary the pitch of the sample.   I can easily be set to vary the pitch based on velocity but not by note.  Separating it even farther from familiar sampling keyboards, it can also trigger samples based on audio input.  This allows it to be used for live drum replacement, among other things. 

The other sample I am going to work with is a spoken word clip of my older daughter.  I will edit it with Logic's built in audio editor.

Now I will both drop the spoken sample directly into an audio track in Logic and load it into another instance of apTrigga on another instrument track.  The “Trigger” setting in apTrigga is set to "one shot" for the drum and "gate" for the voice.  Thus, the drum sample will always play all the way out, no matter how short the MIDI note, but the vocal sample will be truncated if the note is shorter than the sample.  "Pitch mod" for the drum is set to .53 of an octave.  This means apTrigga will change the pitch of the sample based on the velocity of the MIDI note, up to .53 of an octave.  "Lev mod" is at 100% in both instances of apTrigga, meaning that MIDI velocity will be fully reflected in the volume at which each sample is played.

I'll throw some very simple MIDI files at the apTrigga instances and copy the vocal file a couple of times on the audio track.  It looks and sounds like this.

Logic Sample MP3 

It isn’t my most brilliant music, but you can hear what is going on with each sample.

What happens if I take exactly the same sounds into Ableton Live?  In place of apTrigga I will use Simpler, Live’s basic sampler.

I put an instance of Simpler on each of two Live MIDI tracks and load one of the samples into each.  I create two more simple MIDI sequences.  Here is what it looks like from session view with one of the MIDI clips selected, followed by a shot of the other MIDI clip.

Simpler and apTrigga are both relatively “simple” samplers but they could hardly be more different.  Simpler pitches the sample up and down the keyboard just as one would expect, by default; apTrigga does not.  ApTrigga allows multiple samples to be loaded in velocity layers or played in sequence; Simpler's multi-sample mode is limited to Ableton's own sounds.  The list goes on and on.

It should come as no surprise that the music I arranged in Live sounds quite different from what came out of Logic Express.

Live Sample MP3

I had different parameters to play with and the samplers in question lend themselves to different things.  Samples played out of apTrigga sound different the ones played out of Simpler and both sound different from an audio file laid directly into an audio track.   I like apTrigga for drums.  I like Simpler for melodic sounds.

The great thing about sampling is not that you can bite other people’s songs, although that seems to be all non-musicians think sampling is.  What is great about sampling is that any sound that can be recorded can be manipulated musically.  That is worth repeating.  What is great about Sampling is that any sound that can be recorded can be manipulated musically.  Any sound.

Even without a “full featured” sampler like Native Instruments’ Kontakt the world really is your oyster.  Armed just with Audacity and sampler like apTrigga or Simpler you can do a lot.

For Tastyfresh #19 I will be back with 101 Things To Do With A .WAV File Part II, an overview of loops and looping.