Sample Chopping (Old-School Technique)
Added 2025-03-24 17:00:16 +0000 UTCI was watching Marlow Digs last night & thought his video was highly relevant to this month's blog posts & upcoming Patreon exclusive video. ☞
Thinking like a Percussionist playing samples - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWFomNvnrk
I know not everyone reads these but for those who do, this is truly the key to unlocking old-school style sampling! 🥷
What he’s getting at here, is that when you’re adding samples to a track. You can use pitch to alter their rhythms by speeding up or slowing down the samples.
You can also control the position that you start it on a 1/16th note grid. By starting a sample at different points on the grid & changing the pitch you can develop loads of interesting rhythms on top of your drums. It doesn’t matter what BPM the sample is, it’s all about finding rhythms on top of your existing BPM.
Where this technique changes is after you’ve placed the first sample in, as all the new samples now have to match the key that sample is in.
You then control the rhythm a lot more by altering the sample start position & grid placement.
You can also still pitch +/- 5, 7 or 12 semitones and get great results. These intervals correspond to musically harmonious relationships: a perfect fourth (5 semitones), a perfect fifth (7 semitones), and an octave (12 semitones).
Also techniques like reversing, chopping the samples in various ways.
The heart of this technique is about not overcomplicating things by thinking about all the crazy processing techniques that are possible these days.
We're focusing on the core principals of sampling which you had on the old hardware samplers like the Akai S1000:
Sample Selection
Trimming and Editing Samples (Start and End Position)
Pitching Samples +/-
Note Placement
Layering Samples
Chopping & Slicing
I've got a video planned for later this week going over the last two blog posts on sampling so stay tuned for that! I'm also working on a new sample pack with Human Synthetics and will be filming some of that process of making FX & Pads etc. 🚀
Have a great week everyone. 😊
Cheers,
George ✌️
Comments
Found Marlow during lockdown and have been following ever since. Good to hear to you know of him too!
Fernando Martinez
2025-04-01 04:07:12 +0000 UTCI meant Todd was the equivalent of Dilla in terms of influence on other producers.
Daniel C.
2025-03-24 18:55:02 +0000 UTCInteresting topic. I will check out the video as well. Funnily enough I’ve just discovered Marlow Digs a few days ago while binging on some Dilla-related content. I also realised how underrated e.g. Todd Edwards is, although he's the garage equivalent of Dilla when it comes to sample manipulation. Obviously garage is a lot smaller genre than hip hop, but still. YT is full of videos on Dilla’s micro-sampling, swing, chopping, etc., but you’re pretty much the only YT who did a real deep dive on Todd’s sampling.
Daniel C.
2025-03-24 18:51:04 +0000 UTC
