During the making of Construction Time Again, Depeche Mode discovered sampling and immediately started looking beyond conventional instruments.
For “Pipeline,” Martin Gore, Gareth Jones and the group went into Shoreditch recording metal objects, pipes, steel plates and other found sounds. Engineer Gareth Jones recalls drumsticks and hammers striking objects around a disused railway environment. Gore’s vocal was also recorded outside beneath a railway arch.
The recordings were then brought back into the studio, sampled, edited and reorganised into music.
This is what I find interesting about early sampling.
A sampler did not initially mean access to an enormous prepared library.
The empty memory of the machine created a question:
What should we put into it?
Suddenly the street became an instrument store.
A metal plate was not valuable because it sounded like percussion.
It became percussion because someone heard a useful attack and resonance inside it.
Modern sample libraries reverse that process.
Search “industrial hit” and hundreds of professionally processed choices appear immediately.
That is convenient, but something disappears.
Going outside with a recorder means you do not yet know what the instrument is.
You have to find it.
The sampler then becomes less like a playback device and more like a way of listening to ordinary objects for musical possibilities.
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-depeche-mode-people-are-people
