Samples

Though its roots go all the way back to the 1940s, sampling was popularized in the 80s through hip-hop and its incorporation of bits and pieces of old funk and soul recordings. Since then, sampling has taken many different forms in several different genres. But what exactly is sampling? Sampling is the use of recorded audio as instrumentation. This can be done through the use of a piece of hardware, a physical instrument called a “sampler,” which stores and reproduces recorded audio with the press of a button or a key, or it can be done with software, directly within a DAW, for instance. Once the clips have been chosen and introduced to the composition, they can be synchronized to the tempo, looped, sped up, slowed down, pitch-shifted, or altered in any number of other ways. My first major experiment with sampling was Little Cricket’s recent single, “Bread.” During the writing of the song, I extracted the audio from a YouTube video of an old film score and sifted through the track for segments that matched the tone, tempo, and key of the project. This was a tedious process, but the results speak for themselves. Once I committed to a set of clips, I strategically integrated them into the composition, looping them where necessary and applying a healthy high-pass filter to blend them into the mix. This process can take place well into the composition of a song, or a song can be composed around a sample or set of samples. This is often the case in hip-hop music. A sample is first chosen and looped. The rest of the song is then constructed from that foundation. My favorite example of this kind of songwriting is Matt Mahaffey’s sElf. Many of sElf’s quirky pop songs seem to have been built around their samples, as opposed to the samples having been added after the fact. This makes for interesting, unpredictable music. Sampling is still somewhat novel to me, but it seems to be a great way to diversify one’s music, so I”ll probably continue to work on incorporating it into my own. Stay tuned for more of this kind of experimentation in future Little Cricket releases!