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What is Sampling? A sampler is the only musical instrument that has no sound of its own. Sometimes it looks like a traditional keyboard, sometimes it an anonymous box with blinking lights and sometimes its embedded deep in the heart of a computer. It’s certainly an enigmatic beast and has had a huge influence not only on pop music but pretty much anything recorded in a modern day recording studio. At its most basic, a sampler is a recorder that can store sounds and then play them back at different pitches. Imagine a recording device with a microphone attached to it at one end and a musical keyboard at the other. Rather like this…
The sound that is recorded in from the microphone can be stored in the sampler and played via the keyboard. The beauty of this system and what makes the sampler so effective is that if you play a note lower down the keyboard, the sound will be played at a correspondingly lower pitch. Not surprisingly, if you play further up the keyboard, the sound will be played at a higher pitch. Sounds can thus be layered across the keyboard enabling the player to create a multitude of amazing instruments. One of the first experiments carried out by the pioneers of sampling was to record a dog barking…
...and then play a tune we all know and love (the Blue Danube) on the keyboard attached. It now sounds as if we have a dog barking the melody of Blue Danube! Groundbreaking this may have been but no one offered the dog a recording contract and Johann Strauss turning in his grave drowned out the sound of the barking mutt. When I bought my first sampler I repeated this experiment but replaced the dog’s bark with a well-executed burp. My whole family had much hilarity for well over 8 seconds and I was officially known as “that idiot upstairs” for years after.  the Akai S950 (my first sampler, ahh) The choice of source material is then very important when sampling. Rather more practical and certainly less offensive on the ear than a dog or a burp would be to sample say, a guitar. The sound of the guitar could then be played from the keyboard, especially useful for those bands that don’t have a guitarist (or do have one but don’t like him). Indeed any sound (and therefore any instrument) can be sampled. This has led to huge libraries of samples that contain pretty much every instrument ever created (go to the links page to find some of these libraries). Think back to the barking dog (sorry). At the time, (the mid 1970’s) computer memory was relatively expensive and the technology was in its infancy. Therefore only short bursts of sound could be recorded and stored. Early samplers often had a memory time of just a few seconds that meant sounds had to be edited down to get the essential tone of the sound and no more. However as technology has improved more and more samples could be stored which enabled different samples to be played on one keyboard. So for instance…
A whole drum kit could now be layered over the keyboard. Impossible drum kits could be created with Taiko bass drums, synth snare drums and tweeting canary hi hats! This is an important step as it takes the sampler into the realms of being multi-timbral (the ability to play more than one sound at a time). Polyphony (how many notes can be played at a time) was also greatly increased. In order to utilise these abilities, samplers are often linked to computers that run sequencing software. This enables all the different sounds in the sampler to be played at the right time (imagine trying to play 32 different sounds all at the same time). Sequencers record the notes played (often called MIDI information) on a keyboard, they enable the user to edit these notes and thus iron out any mistakes. So, you can play in your drum track , edit it and store it. Then go on to record a bass guitar, edited it etc. Then a piano, then brass, then strings, etc etc. A whole track can built up using one sampler to store all the sounds, one keyboard by which to play them and a computer to store the MIDI information. The set up looks like this…
Not only could sounds be layered over the keyboard but longer samples could be recorded which give rise to the idea of the loop. A whole phrase could be recorded and subsequently repeated giving the impression of a real musician playing the phrase over and over again. This was massively popular in the late1980’s when dance music was in its infancy. One particular drum loop was taken from James Brown’s “Funky drummer” song (which featured Clyde Stubblefield on drums) that was used as the backing to literally hundreds of records. Although extremely funky in its original context, this loop has now been heard so many times on so many records it has lost is “funky” quality. This is mainly due to the fact that the loop was repeated endlessly throughout many of these songs. When a “real” drummer is playing she will add sophisticated fills and rolls to give the beat dynamics and a sense of movement. If one bar is repeated over and over again however (as in the case of the “Funky Drummer” loop) the feel of the music soon becomes predictable and monotonous.  Akai S6000 sampler - one of the most powerful standalone samplers Samplers are therefore only as creative and interesting as the people programming them. This gives rise to the question of who should take the credit for a sample. Lets stick with James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” example. When Clyde Stubblefield played that beat few can doubt that he reached unheard of heights on the funky mountain, oxygen masks are most definitely needed. However what of those who have recorded/stolen/borrowed/massacred/ manipulated/reinvented/reworked Clyde’s great work? Should they be given credit for merely recording his work and looping it? Should Clyde be paid every time his loop is used? What about those people who have genuinely done something creative to it? Can I keep on asking questions like this without wearing out my ? key?  Halion software-based sampler (it lives in a computer) Sampling technology has now reached the level whereby there is virtually no limitation on the length of sample time (recording time). Many samplers now exist as software within a larger computer program (“sequencers, remember the program that can store the notes you have played) with the only restriction being the size and speed of the computer’s hard drive. The polyphony of these instruments (the amount of different sounds it can play at any one time) is immense. Whole orchestra’s can now be programmed into one sampler! Standalone samplers (normally grey or black boxes with blinking lights and strange words scrolling along tiny l.e.d. displays) are slowly becoming defunct, as the computer-based system is generally more powerful and flexible. Sampling then is a curious way of creating music. It can involve taking other people’s music and reediting it, it can involve taking instruments and replaying them. Or its a mixture of the two. For the masters in this field check out artists such as:
Those more classically minded could try: Jazz heads may prefer:
Glossary
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