Today I’m going to show you guys everything you need to know about sampling.
As you know, there are a lot of ways you can go about sampling.
And in today’s video, I’m going to cover two general ways you can go about doing so, which are going to be straightforward looping, as well as chopping up your samples.
I’m going to go over both of these techniques and the important things that you should know.
First, let’s play the sample here.
This is a sample from a guy named Timmy Holiday.
He has a YouTube page where he just posts up all the samples that he makes.
And they’re just much better than the straightforward boring loops that you find on most other people’s websites.
He almost creates mini songs.
I just recently stumbled upon his page.
He probably has no idea who I am, but I thought I’d give him a shout out just because I think you guys will like his samples.
So his info is in the description box below if you want to check out his stuff after this video is done.
And by the way, guys, if you like my videos, please do subscribe.
And if you get bored of seeing my videos, it’s just one click away to unsubscribe, but it really does help me out.
So I would appreciate it.
In general, when it comes to sampling, whether you’re looping or chopping, you can break down the process into two separate steps.
The first one is preparation.
This is the step where you want to get your sample ready before you do anything to it and you start playing around with it; you want to prepare a few things about the sample.
For instance, one thing that you’re going to want to prepare is figuring out which part of the sample you even want to use.
So to do this, what are you going to do is drag your sample into your playlist.
With this sample here.
Honestly, there are just a lot of good parts I can choose from, so going in, it can be good to know which part of the sample you want to begin to work with.
For me, in my opinion, choosing a part of the sample that isn’t as cluttered, that doesn’t have as much going on with the drums and vocals playing all over the place is just going to make your job a little bit easier when you choose to sample.
But nonetheless, the choice is ultimately yours.
Find a part of the sample that sounds interesting to you and start from there.
Since in this example I’m looping, what I’m going to do is choose a part of the sample that I’m going to loop around over and over again.
So that little section of the sample sounds good to me.
And let’s choose that to be the loop in my beat.
I’m gon na start off by isolating that part of the sample by using the slice feature here.
And I’m going to hold down Alt and Shift to get a more accurate slice.
I’ll do the exact same thing as the tail end here.
So there you go.
I’ve isolated my loop.
Now.
The second step in the sampling process is manipulation.
This is when you start making adjustments to the sample itself to fit your beat.
For instance, one thing that you’re going to want to manipulate is the sample speed.
This will help you fit your sample to be the same BPM as your beat.
Otherwise, this will happen.
You guys can hear the sample’s speed is different from the speed of our overall beat effects.
This you will need to stretch out your sample.
To do so, you will select this option right up here.
And at that point, you can just go ahead and stretch your sample out.
You guys can hear the sample a little bit slower now.
And it also got pitched down.
And obviously, most of the time, you’re going to want more control over the pitch of your sample.
You might not want it to change, or you do want it to change, but you want to have control over what the actual pitch is going to be.
What you’re going to do is double All of these are just different algorithms that you can choose to stretch out your sample in different ways.
Most of the time, a three generic is going to be your best bet.
So now when we hit play, it’s back to its original pitch.
And like I mentioned, another thing that you might want to do is play around with the pitch of the loop.
And you can easily do that by playing with a pitch knob right here.
So if I pitch it up 100 cents or one semitone, you guys can hear it’s slightly higher pitch now, and there is no right or wrong way to repeat your sample.
Just choose something that sounds good to you.
Another thing that you might need to manipulate is the timing of the loop.
And this is something that’s really important.
This is a very common problem when it comes to looping.
What I did here was I just sat down a basic drum pattern, and you guys can hear what’s going to happen.
You guys can hear the samples timing is a little bit off.
You can more easily see this visually if I zoom in Here in the playlist here, the drums are perfectly quantized.
But the sample itself isn’t.
So right here is where the snare hits.
And in comparison, you guys can see how early this instrument is hitting relatively to my snare.
You can even hear it there; it’s a little bit early.
And this might be something that you run into where even though you loop something perfectly, the rhythm of the instruments within that loop aren’t perfectly on time.
And the reason why this might happen is because the sample itself contains live instrumentation, and the person who’s playing the instrument might be slightly off time, they might play some instruments a little bit early, a little bit late.
And this is a common problem that you’re going to run into if you try to loop.
So let’s go ahead and fix it.
This can easily be fixed by going ahead and right-clicking on the track, and you can consolidate it.
That’s going to be the first step.
So I’m gon na go ahead and press start here.
And you guys can see we have a brand new track here.
And the next step is going to be to go ahead into the new track, go into the sample setting up here and select the timewarp sample.
And you guys can see right here we have our loop.
Now just a heads up what’s going to happen if you don’t consolidate the track for us.
For example, if we went back into the original loop that we had here and tried to do the exact same thing, it would load up the entire sample here and not just that piece that we isolated for our loop.
So going back into our actual loop here, new time is basically a plugin that allows you to stretch out different sections of your sample at different rates.
So you can more easily control the timing of your loop, which is exactly what we need.
In this scenario, you might run into one common thing: it’s gon na play at half the speed.
You guys can easily see what new time did here: it stretched out over a four-bar loop, not what we want.
So I’m gon na hold down Control, select everything, go to the very end here and just compress it back into our two bar loop.
From here, you guys can see if I zoom in on the timing of our transients, these instruments playing are somewhat off here.
This instrument should be playing on this grid line right here, this one should be playing over here.
So what I can do to easily fix this is going to edit, select quantize time.
And now it’s going to be perfectly on time.
So once you’re satisfied with your loop, you can go ahead and go up here and select Send to playlist.
I want to point out that you might end up with a little silent section at the end of your tale in the very last section.
And you guys can hear the problem that this is going to create.
If I loop it, we get that tiny little pause at the end.
Before you export this out to your playlist, you’ll want to take the very last section here and drag it out a tiny bit.
And then again, you’re going to go to send the playlist.
And again, at the very end, we have this little tail created that we want to get rid of.
So I’m going to turn off stretch mode here and just go ahead and truncate this loop.
And you guys can see the difference between our original loop right up here and the time-adjusted loop right down here.
So if I hit play, you guys can hear the difference.
The timing is perfect now.
And one last thing I want to show you guys.
Make sure you go into your mixer and turn off new time here.
Now, this isn’t something that you might want to do every single time.
There is something to be said about introducing a little bit of sloppiness into the rhythm of your beat.
But if things are too distracting, if things are a little bit way too off-grid, using new time can really help you solve this issue.
So now that this loop is sounding on time, I can go ahead and make a beat out of this.
At this point, I can go ahead and use wave candy to figure out all the notes in my loop here.
This is a potent tool in FL Studio.
So if you guys want a full tutorial on how to use this thing right above my head, and using this information, I can easily go ahead and come up with my 808 pattern now.
Now it’s off to the races, I can go ahead and make a full beat out of this.
So that was a more loop-focused type of sampling style that I just showed you guys.
Another sampling method is to chop up your sample and the two-step process would be the exact same here.
First, we’re going to prepare the sample, and then we’re going to manipulate the sample.
The first thing that you’re going to want to do is use a sampler and the preparation phase.
This is how you prepare your sample and a lot of different ways a lot easier.
If you want to go down the route of chopping up your samples and FL Studio, we have slice x, a stock sampler that comes with FL Studio, which is a little more elaborate than the alternative.
If you prefer to use slice x, I did a full video on the most important things to know if you want to use it.
So that’s right above my head if you’re interested.
The other option that comes with FL Studio is a fruity slicer that is far more of a basic sampler.
It’s a lot more minimal, and it has a lot fewer features.
This is something that I like to use whenever I have fundamental sampling needs, like if I have a drum loop.
For instance, one that I like to use is momentum, which is a free third-party sampler.
I just enjoy using this much more than the ones that come with FL Studio.
Fundamentally, they all do the same thing.
But momentum allows you to do some extra stuff a little bit easier, which is why I prefer to use it.
And again, step one is preparation before with the looping method; this was a little bit easier where we only had to select one section of the sample that we wanted to use.
And we could go ahead from there here; it’s going to be slightly more complicated because fundamentally, what we’re going to be doing is choosing multiple parts of the sample that we want to use.
And we’re going to create chops there.
And then we’re going to try to rearrange those chops into something that makes sense musically.
And there are a lot of different chopping methods, different techniques.
When it comes to sampling and chopping up your samples.
I did a video a little while back on some more advanced sampling techniques right above my head.
But here, it’s sort of hard to advise on the things that you should do because, fundamentally, this is where the creative part comes in when it comes to sampling.
Like I mentioned, I prefer to use parts of the sample that are a little bit more open, a little bit less dense because they allow for manipulation a little bit more easily.
Generally speaking, sometimes I’ll leave the shops as they are, after the auto chopping.
I’ll try to discover some arrangements here and experiment with the different shops here, and I won’t bother moving the chops around.
And other times, I’ll be very deliberate with my chops, and I’ll move them to a particular part of the sample.
If I have an idea in mind, in my opinion, sampling is a skill on its own.
And for me to sit here and say this is something that you should do every time you sample B, leads you guys down the wrong path.
I feel that it’s important to experiment and try out different methods, different styles of sampling.
So you can learn different ways of sampling and ultimately make better beats.
I think one universal statement that’s true when it comes to sampling and chopping is to make sure you come up with something that makes sense musically when you’re chopping up your sample, unless when you’re done preparing your chops like I am here.
At this point, you can move on to manipulation.
So again, I can stretch out the sample if I want to.
I can also play around with the pitch.
You guys can hear, since I pitched on the sample a lot, something happened with my loop that I came up with just a lot more low-end tones, which is something that I don’t necessarily want, especially since I plan on coming up with my baseline, especially with these two notes here.
So I can manipulate the sample by using some effects to clean it up.
So here, I’m going to use an EQ to get restrictive with the sound frequencies.
Overall, a lot of the time, when you sample, it’s going to essentially become a game of problem-solving.
When you stretch out a sample.
When you play around with its timing, when you play around with his pitch, and you manipulate it in a bunch of different ways, problems are going to arise.
You might end up with gaps in between your chops because the timing of your sample has changed, you might end up with some new unwanted frequencies in your There are just a lot of things that can happen and go wrong.
So you have to understand and use your tools to fix those problems.
That’s going to be something that’s key whenever you’re sampling.
So those are two different ways you can go about sampling again.
There are just a ton of ways you can go about doing it, so I did a video a while back on some advanced techniques that you might want to see if you’re interested in sampling and learning how to do so better.
So if you feel like this is some pretty straightforward stuff, that video might be better for you, and it should be appearing on the screen right now.
If you guys have enjoyed this video, like and subscribe to my free job kits available in the description box below as well as a link to the discord if you want your beats reviewed live.
I do that every two weeks, and I’ll see you guys next time.
