One of my favorite instruments is a sampler, ever since I watched music documentaries like lola da musica and read magazines with studio pictures in them I was drawn to these magical boxes which could record sound and then be worked into a completely different sound altogether. And make tracks with those sampled sounds.
Sampling is an art form in and of itself, finding samples or making your own as is more common nowadays is a real cool expression of someones insight into music. From the early days of making collages out of existing materials and making it your own with deconstruction and rebuilding out of existing materials has been a legitimate art form. The things you can do with sampling from an artistic perspective are endless. Everyone hears and feels something different and will go into a different direction with the same sample. It’s really intriguing.
Albums like Endtroducing by Dj Shadow is one of the most well known examples of sample based music (all done on an MPC 3000), but most electronic music and hip hop would not exist without samplers. For some reason, and this might be just a collection of nostalgic reasons, music from the late 80’s and early 90’s has some qualities which I attribute to the samplers and more specific the limitations of gear in those days. Maybe it’s the less boxed in way of thinking about genres or simply the case of “If it sounds good, it is good”.
Some of my favorite tunes made possible by sampling, many more can be added but that would make this blog extremely long ;-). So 2 well known examples.
Roger Sanchez – Another change
Dj Shadow – Stem (Cops & Robbers remix)
A lot of these devices are unaffordable these days, things like the Akai MPC 3000 & Emu sp1200, and the Akai S950 are commanding crazy prices. There are some very nice and in my opinion overlooked samplers which can be bought for less money, like the Emu ESI 4000 or the Akai S3000. Even the MPC 2000XL can be found a little bit more affordable. Question is, would you go down the route of these vintage tools or not?
Some cool documentaries
First off some inspiration which could sway you to go the hardware sampling route. Whether that be old school samplers or newer ones. Here is some cool documentary stuff which got me inspired, and still gets me inspired these days. Pretty old stuff from the nineties and some newer things as well.
Rogers Sanchez on making another change
Lola da musica (dutch) Drum & Bass
Lola da music sampling (dutch)
My sampling adventures
At that stage in my life these devices costs more than a couple of months of wages so these were out of reach. Stuff for future dreams.
One of the most intriguing samplers was the MPC, made by Akai. A lot of great music had been made with these. It’s a staple in many studio ever since its inception. What was so great about it, to me, that it was all about beats, rhythms and structures. This had a large pull for me and many years later I bought my first MPC, a 2000XL. By then hardware sampling had fallen to the wayside in favor of sampling with the computer. So this MPC was rather cheap at the time. And I loved it, then it died and I replaced it with another one.
Work & life got in the way and I didn’t have enough time to dedicate to music making so unfortunately I sold it. But it has always held a big place in my inspiration and I always missed it, even just looking at it gave me an urge to make music. The period after these last of the old school samplers died out and all the focus shifted to software in the industry I always looked at it as a missed opportunity. Akai kept developing the MPC’s with mixed success, the MPC-1000 was a nice one, the MPC-4000 was a bit of a miss. Both great machines to be fair. Just overlooked I think.
The last decade has seen the return of hardware sampling in many forms, mostly led by beat oriented devices, such as the Elektron Octratrack, Digitakt, things like the OP-1 (Field), Tracker based stuff like the Polyend, the M8 and so on.
There is a lot to be said for these devices. As you can create whole tracks with just the one device and some sound sources. Which can be as easy as recording stuff on your phone. Looking back at my days with the MPC 2000XL it was time to get a more modern version out of storage, in an effort to further simplify my setup.
Modern MPC’s
The current MPC line up is pretty much a DAW in a box. It’s much more powerful than the old MPC’s which has its downside as you can fall into the wormhole of possibilities just as with a DAW. For me I worked around this by only focussing on sampling sounds from my small Eurorack case and trying to create some grooves with it. Setting limits that way. Nevertheless the MPC one, which I use, is a lot of bang for your buck. Whether it’s a MPC in the classical sense is up for debate. And with the new 3.0 software approaching this debate is pretty heated at the moment.
But I am a firm believer of making a device your own in such a way it fits your workflow and with a machine which has these capabilities this is possible. Might not be for everyone, but there are lot’s of alternatives out there.
I love the new line of MPC’s, especially the one with it’s attractive price point and all the options, it even has CV/gate outs, always a nice feature if you have a modular or any other synth with CV/gate.
My current approach & future ideas.
My workflow is pretty simple, the MPC is there for sampling and editing sounds from the modular, then I make a program filled with the samples from one session. Which gives it an instant coherent sound and vibe, then I make some basic sequences and see what I can get out of it.
All pretty basic, but for now that’s just what I need, for the future the MPC will function as a hub between the MAX map world and the modular, but I haven’t completely worked this out yet.
This was a good week music wise. Hopefully I can continue this week.
