One thing every electronic musician should have is a large collection of samples that they can draw upon when composing and quickly selecting a necessary one or to experiment with. These are my tips on collecting sound samples that can help you expand your collection, keep you organized. and create some cool results.
1. With samples, one of the most important things to do is stay legal and organized. An easy way to do this is to sort your samples into different folders on your hard drive by license type (for example, folders named Royalty Free, Free To Use Non Commercially, and Creative Commons Samples). Then within those folders, put the swatches in more folders titled by the source you found them in (for example, a folder called The Freesound Project). With this method, you can easily see the license and source of the sample when choosing.
2. Some days when you don’t feel musically creative, it’s much better to have a sample day. I have had many days where I sat in front of a synthesizer experimenting with patching or in front of a microphone recording sounds. Dividing the sample making process from the music writing process can really benefit both areas.
3. Experiment as much as possible with different sounds in front of a microphone. You can get great sounds from simple household objects. One of my favorites is pots and pans (now everyone thinks I’ve gone crazy!) But I ended up layering these sounds along with other drum sounds to create entirely new sounds. Try reversing them as well and you’ll get these pots and pans clanging whistles (I hear them in movies all the time). It seems that hitting cardboard boxes or slamming doors with layers of kick drums can create whole new sounding kicks. Go around your house finding different things to hit with different things. The list is endless, the family will think you’ve gone crazy, but the results can be amazing, interesting, and really add something different to your music. That band called Stomp with the metal containers comes to mind.
4. You can also make many sounds with your mouth, visit HumanBeatbox.com. Now you may be thinking, but I can’t beatbox like that Gavin TyTe (The guy from the videos). No, maybe not, but on that site there are some great tutorials on how to replicate kicks, traps and hats with your mouth that can be done on your own pretty easily and quickly (the hard part is putting it all together). Next, create your own personal HumanBeatBox drum kit in your favorite drum machine software or in Propellerheads Reason or Fruity Loops. The results can be very good, especially with some reverb, delay, and chorus effects turned on.
5. Keep an eye out for eBay and their charity shops, I managed to buy some cocktail shakers, tambourines for next to nothing. I tried them as much as I could and then got rid of by reselling them on eBay or donating to the charity shop.
6. Make cocktail shakers out of containers and those dried peas and rice you can get at the grocery store. Sometimes they might not sound like the real thing, but with a little reverb they can sound pretty good. Plastic drink bottles or those plastic yogurt drink bottles work great for this. Small gravel from the garden is good too.
7. If you have friends who are musicians and create their own samples, then maybe you can swap the ones you’ve made with the ones they made themselves, this can add to your collection and theirs very quickly.
8. Borrow instruments from friends or family, try them out, and then return them. Ask to go try your piano, guitar, or violin. Maybe you have an aspiring singer in the family, ask him to make some simple phrases to sing vowels.
9. There are some music creation magazines that regularly have CDs full of samples (be sure to check the license and put them in the appropriate folder (see tip # 1). I regularly visit my market where there is a magazine stand that sells magazines that are a couple of months old and I pick them up for £ 1. Libraries can have them too if they stock them.
10. Subscribe to our RSS feed or bookmark this site as we will be releasing many sample packs over the next few months that are free to use, as well as links to other sites with free samples.
Hopefully from this list of sample tips and ideas, you can go away and maybe introduce something new to your music or create some custom sound samples. I’ll be posting some of my own samples using some of the ideas in this article over the next several months, so keep an eye out for them.
