Sampling is the practice of recording or reusing existing audio and treating it as new musical material. Samples can be chopped, looped, pitched, layered and processed to create rhythms, instruments, textures and entirely new compositions.
Roni Size made some of the music that helped move drum and bass from underground clubs toward a much wider audience, but the studio behind New Forms was surprisingly restricted. One of his main tools was the Roland S-330 sampler. It gave him only around fourteen seconds of total sampling time. Fourteen seconds. Yet Size…
The Fairlight CMI helped change recorded sound from something musicians played back into something they could play. Developed in Australia by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie and released at the end of the 1970s, the system became one of the first commercially influential digital sampling instruments. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia describes…
Boris Blank of Yello has spent decades recording sounds that were never designed to become musical instruments. His enormous personal sample archive has included voices, percussion, broken instruments and ordinary environmental noises. One particularly good example is almost ridiculous: Blank recalled throwing a snowball against his studio wall, recording the impact and eventually transforming it…
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…
M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” takes its central instrumental loop from “Straight to Hell” by The Clash, but the sample does not behave like a nostalgic quotation. It is pulled into a completely different musical and political environment. Gunshot sounds and a cash-register effect punctuate the chorus, while the track’s lyrics turn attention toward migration, suspicion, money…
Fred again..’s Actual Life records are built partly from material that normally disappears into the endless flow of phones and social media: voice notes, FaceTime conversations, videos and fragments of everyday speech. On “Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing),” for example, words from The Blessed Madonna originated in a FaceTime conversation about the disappearance of communal dancing…
Susumu Yokota’s Symbol is assembled from fragments of classical recordings by composers including Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, alongside material connected with John Cage and Meredith Monk. Yet the 2004 album rarely feels like a demonstration of clever sampling. The fragments are transformed into an atmospheric world where the historical source can become difficult to…
Creating a soundscape that transports the listener to the heart of a rainforest can be a challenging task. However, with the help of electronic tools, it is possible to recreate the natural sounds of the jungle. We need to identify the different elements that make up a rainforest soundscape. The most obvious ones are the…
