Transcripts
1. Introduction: Sampling is a very
integral component to the part of hip hop. There's many different
ways that it can be approached and achieved. We're still discovering new ways that sampling can
work to this day. My name is Dom McLennon, I'm a musician and
multi-instrumentalist. You might have seen my work from the boy band Brock Hampton. I've also been
behind the scenes, helping all of the musicians
and producers learn more about the ways that
they can express themselves as creative artists. This class about
sampling is exciting for me to teach because I know that there's still much to be learned and understood about
the art of sampling, the project that we're
going to be doing today is we're going to be
finishing your first beat. Well, that's going
to entail is pulling together a lot of the
things that we've been learning in Class 1 and Class 2, to be able to finish your
first musical composition. What we're here to do is
really get you to understand what sampling is and what sampling means and
how sampling works. I hope that you'll be
able to walk away with the knowledge and the
understanding how sampling works, but also be able to
put sounds together to make your ideas become a
reality. Let's get started.
2. Defining a Sample: I figured for the beginning of this class we'd hop out of
the studio a little bit. Talk a little bit
about sampling. What a sample is? How a sample work inside
of music composition, specifically in digital
audio production? Then we'll have a moment to
enjoy a original composition. Then we will sample
later in the class. What we've been able to
do is bring together a collection of incredible
local musicians from our communities so
that you can explore sampling with us inside of
this Skill Share class. Let me give them a chance
to introduce themselves. My name is Joel Hewitt. Most know me as Joel Baseboard. I am Tim Weisman. I am Jeremy Galloway. Anthony Carabello. Dwayne Keith. Hey. I am Jay Cattrell. What is a sample? A
sample is actually a recorded piece of audio
that they can be manipulated, utilized, distorted in
any way, shape or form. Samples can start from
things is one shots, which would be a single
sound like a hit on a snare drum or they can be
as intricate as full loops, patterns, rhythmic patterns,
compositions, melodies, harmonies, all those
types of things that you guys will be
hearing a little bit later from our band. Some of the misconceptions
around sampling can be that a song is a sample. Sample comes from a
piece of a song or selection of a sound that then you utilize to make
a new body of work. When it comes to sampling inside of digital audio production, you can start with your one-shot manipulating those
to be able to create your own new soundscapes
or new sound patterns. You can then listen to music that already
exists in the world. Find sounds that exist
within the world, compile them together and make brand new compositions
and bodies of work to be able to
re-contextualized the stories that you're
hearing within the music. That part of sampling is
really really interesting, really expressive, and sometimes a little
bit controversial. where you're probably
used to hearing about sampling is how songs in the past will get
re-contextualized and the presents to create new
stories in the future. For example how maybe like a really popular
Marvin Gaye song might become part of a
Kendrick Lamar song. We have Camp Lo
songs that sample turns of different relics
of the past and present to be able to create really really cool stories and soundscapes that
might not necessarily have originally existed. Essentially in digital
audio production, every sound that
you put inside of your digital audio
workstation is a sample. Visual audio workstations
are able to create completely new character with the sounds of samples that
you put inside of them. When our friends are
playing their instruments, essentially, if you were
to re-conceptualize that inside of a door, you'd have the stems for each of their individual audio tracks
inside of your workstation. You'd be able to select
between each individual one so that you can hear each
individual instrument. What we're going
to start doing is going through our
band a little bit, showing you guys how the audio that they are
creating, how the compositions, and the loops that they might
make in real time could then be sampled inside of a
digital audio workstation. We're going to start
with our base. That would be a
four-bar loop that you would put inside of your
digital audio workstation, that you would then title a base loop that you can sample inside of
your composition. Now, I'll show you
an example of how harmony and melody guitar
could be utilized. The first half of
that composition would be considered a harmony, the second half would
be considered a melody. You will be able to split them inside of a digital
audio workstation, even though it was
played in one take, to be able to identify each specific component of that composition and make
something new from it. With this new vocabulary
and this new understanding, we're going to have a brand
new composition being made by our band that we
will then be able to explore in the rest of our
lessons for this class. I'm going to let the
band play a song on to the next lesson. I'll
see you guys there.
3. Sampling and Time Stretching: Now that we're back
in the studio, what we're going to
do is take a section of the recording that
we got from our band earlier and put it inside of our digital audio workstation
and use it as a sample. I listened to the recording, took a couple of sections of
it that I thought would be great parts to use as
a sample for a record. Make sure that we had some
good four eight-bar loops. Now I'm going to
open up FS Studio. I'm going to go inside a
finder right now and open up this folder that has our Skillshare
sections inside of it. I'm going to take Loop A, drag it into our digital
audio workstation. Take Loop B to the entire
section of the recording, these two loops together. I'm going to put it inside
of the playlist view. What this does is it
creates an audio clip. You'll be able to edit this as an audio file in its entirety, rather than it being just
a simpler channel that has a one-shot audio
sample inside of it. This gives you a little
bit more control on things like time stretching, which we'll be getting
into a little bit later. Now, once we have our phrase, we're going to want to
listen through to it, give it a pass
through, and make sure that everything is operating. I'm going to open up the
audio track by clicking inside of this phrase on the channel rack where
it says Phrase 1, or double-clicking
on the Playlist. You can click anywhere in
the waveform where it says audio clip and you'll be able to listen
through your sample. Now that we know what our audio phrase sounds like and we're clear that it's
inside of the digital audio workstation properly, we can go ahead and
start editing it. I'm going to
right-click on "Audio Clip" inside of the channel. Go to opening audio
editor that will open up our onboard audio editor inside of FS Studio,
which is called Edison. You'll be able to get
a much better view of your waveform and have much
more control over cutting it. But for now what we're
going to be doing is finding the section
that we want to sample. As I'm listening
through to this, what I'm trying to do is get the time for the
beat in my head. Then once I can start
counting the beat, what we're going to do is count out a four-bar
loop that we're going to cut and put into our
playlist so 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3,
2, 3, 4, 4, 2, 3, 4. We know it ends around there if they want to
have a four-bar loop. I'm going to start
to highlight this inside of Edison and I'm going
to zoom in a little bit. You can zoom in by clicking and dragging this bar that is
underneath your waveform. You can get a little
bit more control and view over what you
have going on in here. What I'm going to be doing
is looking for the transient inside of our waveform to make sure that our cut
is as smooth as possible. What I'm going to do is cut
into this a little bit more. That sounds pretty
good to me for a cut. I'm going to turn the
loop on inside of Edison now to make sure that
this does loop properly. Cool. That sounds
pretty smooth to me. We got a pretty nice transition between the beginning
and the end of the loop. What we're going to do is now click "Drag Copy
Sample Selection", which is this button
right here and bring this back into our
digital audio workstation. Now, as you can see when
I brought the sample in and I look inside of our arrangement for
our playlist is not exactly on beat
for our four-bar loop. I'm going to use time stretching to make sure that this is on beat for the project
that we're making. When you open up your channel, you will see this window that is right above
your audio clip, the second panel above
your audio clip, it's called time stretching. When you open that up, you
have your pitch shifting, your time stretch multiplier,
your time stretch meter. When you start clicking
and dragging this, you'll see it changes the length of the loop
on your playlist. It can be a one-bar loop, it could be a two-bar loop, it could be a three-bar loop, or it could be a four-bar loop. Since we know it was supposed
to be a four-bar loop, we're going to bring
this back to four. Another way that you can
do this is you can also right-click and you have a
couple of preset options. You have one beats, two beats, one bar, two bar, three bar, and four bar. But if you wanted
to go beyond that, you would just use this
wheel and scroll up and down on it until you see that it's on
beat in the playlist. For example, this is what this sounds like at half-time, it's really stretched out. We don't want it to be
that stretched out. I'm going to bring this
back to four bars. Now I'm going to solo this track inside of our playlist
by right-clicking it. I'm going to listen
through it and see if it's on beat
with our metronome. I'm going to turn the metronome on. I'm going to hit play. That's pretty on beat to me. Sometimes when you're
doing a time stretching, you might have
some moments where the sample that you've cut up is a little bit out of
temple or out of sync, but that's part of the beauty of music making and using
things like samples, because you get to have fun experimenting with
the imperfections inside of these
audio recordings. Cool. What we've done now is we've made a sample and
we've time stretched it. We've put it inside
of our playlist and we can start
chopping the sample, which I think is
the best place for us to get into for
our next lesson.
4. Chopping a Sample: Now that we've got
a side of our dar, and made a sample and
time-stretched it, what we're going to
do is talk about how chopping that
sample would work. Sample chopping is the art of
taking an audio recording, slicing it up in a couple
of different places, and rearranging it to
make new rhythmic, melodic, and sonic patterns. The way that chopping works is you would go inside of your
digital audio workstation, and you will start to find all the different little
sections inside of your sample that can
maybe potentially repeat themselves or jump from
one place to another. This gives you a
really big range of opportunities to
experiment with how you want your sound palette to feel as you're messing with
the music that you're making. We're going to go ahead
and open up our dar, and we're going to look at this phrase that we had before. Now that we know
that this is R&B, we can look at some
traditional sample chopping patterns that you might
hear in some records. We'll talk a little
bit more about how creative discovery works in
the world of sample chopping. I am going to open up the slice tool inside
of our playlist, and I'm going to cut up what we have into four
different sections. You cut by clicking and dragging upward inside
of your playlist, and it goes across
your audio file. The same way that you would in any traditional audio editor. Now that we've had this cut up, we can start moving these
things around the playlist. We can start changing
the size of them, and see how we can
start rearranging the way that this sample comes
together through chopping. What I'm doing is I'm cutting some of these sections in
half and then repeating them, and then I'm taking
some of these phrases and letting them stay exactly the same way that they
originally were inside of the normal way that
the sample was played. But instead of them
sounding that way, they sound a little bit
differently where you have this little alteration coming
before and after them. It's changing some things, leaving some things the same, this is where you
get to have a lot of fun really manipulating
your audio. What I'm going to do is add
a couple more patterns in, I've shown you guys the traditional cut-and-repeat
pattern that you would normally see in some of your more old-school
hip-hop records. We're going to start to
get a little bit more experimental with this, I'm going to show you
some things that I like having fun with when it
comes to this stuff, even using things like cutting
the sample out entirely, almost like a rest that you
would have on a regular band. I think that this is a really
fun way to learn how to appreciate and re-contextualize
audio as well too. I'm going to
continue doing this, and I'm also going to
mess with the pitch of the sound as well too, just to see where it
takes us musically. The pitch manipulation is
in the same place that the time stretching options were that we covered
in our last lesson. One of the things that you
can do with this pitch knob, is you can start to click
and drag it and move around, and you'll be able to control
things by the semitone on how you want your notes to sound
inside of your sample. It's a really fun
way to just start seeing different ways where your audio can be
recontextualized. You see a lot of
popular artists in the past used to use this
for very specific types of sampling techniques for really creating a character for
the music that they had. You would see people like
Just Blaze use this on soul samples and bring the
pitch up on things like that. Then you'd have even
guys like Clams Casino, taking more ambient records, and alternative records
and pitching them down to create these really lush and
wonderful soundscapes. We'll experiment with
this a little bit more. I'm having a lot of fun
going ahead and just cutting this stuff up right now and
messing with the pitch. This is one of my
favorite parts of making music, honestly, just going in and
editing the audio that I've been able to find or discover or even make
myself some time. There's a lot of different
ways where we can do this. You can even export
the loop that you've made so far and treat that
like your own sample. What I've done is I've
taken every, say, two bars or so inside
of our playlist and created a different phrase for how sample
chopping could work. The first part is a
repeating phrase. That's a simple
repeating phrase, and then we have it set up
so that that same phrase for the next set of bars repeats twice and then opens up
for the third section. That sounds like
this. Then next one does the same thing that
the first pattern did, which is the duplication of the loop so it goes for
a half bar two times. It's a half bar loop cut
in half to make one bar. Then our next one adds a little bit more sauce and
flair to it, if you will. Just going in and
cutting and shifting, and manipulating
specific quarter note patterns and moving them in the audio field between what
already exists in our loop. That sounds like this. What I did was I cut a
quarter note from the phrase that was ahead
of it and put it behind. So on the upbeat, you hear the downbeat so it
repeats the downbeat twice. Doubling up on the upbeat
to make it part of the downbeat is a really
cool way that you can use sample chopping to flip some more traditional
music techniques on their head and on
the air a little bit. Up next what we're gonna
be doing is putting it all together
inside of FL Studio.
5. Finishing Your Beat: When it comes to putting
all this together, it's just a matter of thinking about all the things that we've learned so far in this class, which revolve around
arrangement and production. We're going to start with where our arrangement is with the
beat that we've been making. I've muted the
sample that we were chopping in the previous lesson, so that we can hear our
original arrangement. As we listen through, let's
go ahead and take our time, make some minor adjustments, start moving some things around, maybe even repeating
some phrases and changing some sections so that we can really
start putting this together and making it feel
like a more complete track. Right now we have this. Well, I think it's
time for us to do is take the sample
that we've been working with
throughout the class and see if there's
a way where we can make it match inside of the music that we've
been making so far. We're going to put the
sample back in this beat, start putting this
together, see how it feels, put the time
stretching that we've done originally with it before. Then I'm going to start
adding some chops in, to make it match
with the feeling and the texture of the sound that
we've been building so far. I'm going to slice this. I'm going to duplicate
this slice, put that here. Now we'll see how this
sounds in the beginning. I'm going to use
that phrase that we've just chopped
up for our intro, I'm going to duplicate this and bring this over
to the fifth bar. Now from duplicating this and bringing this over
to the five bar, we've made this an
eight bar loop. Not really a fan of how the
chime sound with the sample. I'm going to mute
that chime sample instead of completely
deleting it. That way if I do
want to bring it back at a later point,
it's still there. Sometimes putting
it all together isn't adding more to the song, it's taking a couple
of things out of it. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to take
a second part of this loop and start the drum
pattern with that loop. That's going to sound like this. The pitch on these
are different, so I got to make sure that
these pictures are the same. I'm going to take this
pitch, right-click it. I'm going to copy value. I'm going to open
up our other loop. I'm going to
right-click that pitch and go to paste value. I think that this is
starting to feel like part of the beat that
is the hook now. We're going from the
introduction to the hook. What I'm going to do now is, I'm listening to all of our specific drum samples
that we've put into our beat so far as seeing if there's anything that I can
do to make some changes, to make those drums
pop a little bit more. I think that our kick and our hi-hat pattern sounds
pretty cool on top of this, what I want to do though is, I want to adjust what this clap sample
actually sounds like. When I go through the sample
inside of my drum folders, I'm going to go to my one shots. I'm going to go to
more snares and claps and this is the clap that we're using originally [NOISE], but I'm going to see what other sounds that we have in here that might
have some fun with. I'm going to replace
the clap with another percussion
sample actually. What I'm thinking
that's going to do, is just bring a
little bit more of an accent to the beat where
the clap normally would be, but it doesn't
necessarily have to draw as much attention from your ear. I'm dragging the shaker in
and I'm going to see how this sounds by just bringing it over to this pattern
and auditioning it. I feel like that's actually
a really cool sound and I just want to add a little
bit more character to it. As I've pitched
that up, I'm going to bring the volume
down a little bit and I'm going to
add a little bit of space to it with a reverb. I feel like that's
going to bring a really interesting character to the beat that
we're making so far. Now what I've done is I have double-clicked
our mixer track that I said was next
to our pitch knob before and above our
time stretching panel. When you double-click that and mix it pops up and
inside our FL Studio, you've got to go
inside of your slot. You're going to go
to more plugins and you got to
search for reverb. The FL Studio built-in reverb is titled reverb with
two Es, by the way, not just one E. If you type in regular reverb and it doesn't pop up, that's the reason why. Going to see what the
shaker sounds like, what this reverb on it by
soloing it really quickly. I just want to see if I
can get this character to sound the right
way that I wanted to. Sometimes this is the way it
should have to do what you have to solo a specific sound. Go ahead and make some
minor adjustments to it. See how it feels to you and then once you know
how that feels to you, then you'll be able to say, okay, cool, this
is the one I want. [NOISE] Now that I've gotten a better idea of what
this reverb sounds like, I'm going to un-solo this track again and hear what it sounds like in the context
of the rest of our beat. I'm going to add one
more sample in for this that I think will help put this together specifically
for this hook. Sorry, I'm pattern one. I'm going to add
this clave sound in. I feel like this is a
really nice texture to add for where our snare
should be at least. One of the important things
about putting it all together is figuring out
exactly what the pocket is. I think that for example, one of the things that I
identified about the pocket and this beat that we're
working with right now, is that it didn't
necessarily need a texture that felt like
a clap on top of it, it needed a texture that felt
a little bit more subdued. That's why I went with
our clave sample, doing things like that
can really accentuate the pocket that you're
trying to develop when it comes to finding the
core components of what your favorite parts or the unforgettable parts
of your music will be. The part of the sample that we have with this hook right now, I think what's defining the
pocket a lot is the fact that there's this little
guitar section from Germany where he's
shredding a little bit. I'm trying to accentuate that as much as I can
within the production. That's one of the reasons
why I took the clap out. This is our next section. What I'm going to do is
inside of this section, I'm going to put loop A in here. For loop A, I'm going
to treat this like our verse since
loop B is our hook. In loop A I am going to
make a new drum pattern and on that new drum pattern that is going to
accentuate our verse. I'm putting this new pattern in, drawing it out right now. Then what I'm going to do is, I'm going to loop this back
by clicking and dragging our play point to the
ninth bar and that will. Bring this altogether. Now we have our two
sections of the beat. We have our hook, we have our verse. I'm going to take our hook and I'm going to duplicate
it after our verse. Then we will have two sections of our beat that is repeating. After that, we can
technically do this one more time with our intro at the
end and that would become our outro and you have a full arrangement in the first beat
that you have made inside of your digital
audio workstation. When you're at a place
where you feel like you're happy with the beat
that you've made, you can export it by
going in FL Studio, going to File, Export. Then there'll be a series
of options for you here, wave file is your uncompressed. You most traditional raw file
that you'd be able to send out if you want to have
it a little bit more compressed and little
bit more optimized, easier to share with your friends and
things of that nature, you're going to want
to export an MP3 file. We're going to go in
here, pick wave or mp3. I'm going to pick wave for now and then I'm going
to save this as, Skillshare Class 3
Beat Put Together. Then you pick your folder
where you'd want to save it. This window will pop up that gives you your
rendering options. You can just use the defaults
for now, it's totally fine. Once you get more intricate, once you get more into how you actually want your
stuff to sound, you have more autonomy on exactly how you want to export
and render your tracks. But this is how you would do it. You'll hit "Start". Then when the file is complete, [NOISE]
you'll hear that noise. Now you've put your
stuff together. You've exported your first file. You can go ahead and play that beat back for your friends, play it in the car, put it on one of your
favorite streaming platforms. Now it's time for you
guys to just have some fun discovering
and exploring with any loops that you can
find as well as the loops that we're going to be having
in our resource gallery. I'm really excited to see
what you guys come up with. I'll be in the discussion
boards as well too. Ask me any questions. I'm really hyped about seeing what you guys
do with sampling.
6. Final Thoughts: So you made it to the
end of the class. We've gone through so much today about sample composition, learning more about the
history of sampling as well, and then going into our
digital audio workstation, taking some of the
music that we've gotten from our band, and
cutting it up, making a sample out of it, and putting it
together inside of your own digital
audio workstation. I'm really excited
to see what you guys have to offer to us. In the project gallery you guys can upload your own
versions of it. If you guys have
any questions for me about how I'm putting
things together, I'll be in the
discussion boards. Also I'll be checking
the project gallery out. I'm really excited to see
what you guys have for us. Really looking forward to
see what you guys do with all the information that
we've had in these classes, looking forward to taking
you guys on another journey when it comes to musical production in
the very near future. Thank you again for your time.
Dom McLennon, Producer, Recording Artist
