The current generation of software samplers and DAWs give us all the tools we need to manipulate, polish and play back looping and one-shot audio clips with incredible precision and cleanliness. In the early days of electronic music production, the crunchy converters, limited memory, relatively imprecise editing and entirely hands-on workflow of now-legendary hardware samplers by Akai, E-MU, Roland et al delivered a characterful sound and vibe that’s still highly valued by many. Here are some techniques you can draw on to bring that vintage quality and styling to your in-the-box sampling ventures.
1. Make It Sound Old
Perhaps the characteristic most defining of the hardware samplers of the 80s and 90s was the gritty sound of the DACs used to record and play back their stored audio signals. Operating at 8-bit/27.7kHz and 12-bit/40kHz respectively, the seminal E-MU Emulator II and Akai S900, for example, were fabulously rude and punchy, and you can easily bring that same quality to your own samples by dropping the internal bit depth and sample rate of your plugin sampler, if it allows it, or inserting a plugin dedicated to digital degradation into the channel in question. Your DAW will have a straightforward bitcrusher/downsampler built in, and notable third party options include XLN Audio’s RC-20 Retro Color, D16’s Decimort 2 and Inphonik’s RX950 Classic AD/DA Converter, the last emulating the full end-to-end signal path of the Akai S950.
Also well worth checking out by anyone interested in taking their samples back in time, Togu Audio Line’s TAL-Sampler is geared up specifically for the emulation of five ancient converters, and features various options for dialling in authentic fluctuations in tuning, filter cutoff and more.
2. Chord Sampling
Back in the day, when bedroom dance music producers had to repurpose single hardware synthesisers for multiple parts in a track, the sampler was a godsend, enabling synth sounds to be captured as audio in a keyboard-playable format. However, with early samplers being so short on memory, workarounds were required to make the technique effective, and chief among these was chord sampling, which, as the name suggests, involved grabbing full chords as single samples, rather than burning memory on sampling every note individually. A byproduct of this was that playing the sampled chord up and down the keyboard frequency-shifted the notes in the chord by the same amount, creating a strange linear harmonic movement that became a standard sonic fixture in techno, jungle and other electronic genres. And it still sounds awesome today – give it a try! Simply bounce a single chord out of a soft synth (or record one from a real one), load it into your sampler and explore the timbral weirdness.
3. Pitch And Time
The invention of sampling brought with it the advent of digital timestretching and pitchshifting. Nowadays, the ability to apply these two techniques completely independently is taken for granted, as granular processing empowers us to stretch and shorten samples without altering their pitch, and pitch them up and down without affecting their length. Back in the 80s and 90s, though, those two properties were essentially one and the same: speeding up a sample increased its pitch commensurately, and slowing it down lowered it, just like tape.
While there’s no arguing that the separation of time and pitch is anything but wholly beneficial in the broader music production context, their physics-enforced indivisibility led to many great sounds that have no contemporary equivalent and qualify as joyfully nostalgic today. Think the serpentine snare rolls of jungle, the bonkers vocals of rave and hardcore, and the whole notion of pitched breakbeats that’s played such a huge role in the development of hip-hop, dance, and pop music. And who knows when the now hilariously primitive melodic sample pitching epitomised by Art of Noise’s ‘Close to the Edit’ and Whistle’s ‘Just Buggin’’, to name but two, might find favour again – it could happen!
Once again, achieving any of these effects in your plugin sampler will be a cinch: just look for a ‘Repitch’ or similarly named mode – it’s quite likely to be the default.
4. Sample Flipping
Another multiple-genre-defining production technique birthed by the introduction of the sampler, sample flipping is the on-the-fly rearrangement of sliced-up full tracks and breakbeats, as most effectively and famously facilitated by Akai’s all-conquering MPC line of pad-based sampling workstations, under the command of a legion of hip-hop and drum ’n’ bass artists. It’s the conceptual origin of the sample chopping technology we all use to extract drums and other sounds from loops these days, but it remains the cornerstone of many producers’ beatmaking workflows – and is about as much fun as you can have in the studio with your trousers on.
The first step is to find a suitable section of your selected track for flipping – which will generally be something live, funky, and involving a full band (ie, not just drums and percussion) – chop it into slices, and load them onto adjacent MIDI notes in your sampler (or use your plugin’s built-in slicing algorithm to do it automatically). The slices can be as long as you like (eighth-notes, quarter-notes, half a bar, etc), but cut them at note divisions, not transients, as they need to play continuously when triggered sequentially on the beat, and you want to retain the human feel of the original loop in terms of its timing nuances, rather than ‘quantise’ it. Oh, and set your sampler to monophonic playback, as you should only ever hear one slice at a time.
With all that done, the actual flipping begins. Ideally, you’ll be using a pad-based MIDI controller, as targeting pads in a grid with your fingers is much more conducive to beat making than pressing keys on a keyboard; and once you’ve memorised the positions of the slices on the grid, you can set about triggering them (with or without a click track) to reconfigure the beat and its constituent sounds. If your slices vary in length, perhaps group different lengths on their own rows in the pad grid, so you don’t get any surprises from slices ending prematurely – you’re aiming for gapless continuity of slice playback, by and large, so that sustained elements in the loop flow smoothly from slice to slice.
Finally, while any sampler can be used for this, we’d be remiss in not drawing attention to Serato’s superb Sample plugin, which was built with flipping very much in mind.
Share your own retro-inspired sampling tips and tricks in the comments.