I once saw someone on some website who made his own sample packs and used them to create music.

What are the advantages of making and using your own samples instead of buying commercially available samples?
Is it something that even a first-timer can make?

 

what are the advantages?

why don't you try making some and see if you enjoy it? see if it makes you say "gee golly, that was a lot more educational and fulfilling than if someone else had done all the work for me". then you can pat yourself on the back, knowing that you will likely make even cooler sounds the next round and continue to expand your knowledge of your tools and how to use them to get what you desire.

or you can decide that this is not worth mucking about with and you would rather like to make music quickly with materials that were created by some other person's initiative (an initiative which may be similar to yours, after all). there is also nothing wrong with that but it will develop different skills, ultimately.

eventually, if you follow through on the craft for long enough, you may find that creating a sound yourself is an important part of your music creation process, and that when you know what you want, creating it yourself can actually be a lot quicker, fulfilling, and potentially unique than scrolling through sample pack after sample pack.

 

Last edited: Mar 20, 2025

Stravisnky started off making his own samples. Material so good people bought it raw, no beats, no chopping needed. Ended up making the top 200 composers of all time. That good enough for ya?

 

It depends on your workflow. If you have hardware, but let's say you travel with a laptop. You can have a little access to your gear that way. The reason why they created the Montage software version.

Resampling. There are a lot of things you can do with rendered audio, which you can't easily do using real-time audio input from external hardware.

Keeping your sound design as its own production stage. Some people do this when they have time to work on something but don't want to make a track that day. You will learn more about an individual instrument than you will if you are just trying to make one part to fit into a track you are working on. Some people like to have sounds already made so it does not interrupt their creative stage of track production.

You could share or trade them with other people.

Selling an instrument, for whatever reason. People often wish they still had something they have sold. If they had a bunch of samples from whatever the item is, they could still use some of those sounds later on down the road.

It can also be a big time waster.

 

its fun

having your own sound

learning while creating, example recreating a classic motown style song from scratch. You can learn about the production techniques, arrangement etc, and then have your own "motown records" to sample and chop, WITHOUT the liability or hassle of sample clearance.

for a specific purpose. Maybe you have 8,000,000 kick samples from sister site, but you hate every single one. Why not make your own, or an entire pack of kick samples. Either synthesized or recorded.

plenty of other reasons.

 

Be an artist do everything yourself from ground up. Be creative. You'll have the unique sound nobody in the world has. Don't use any bits of other people work. Even presets. Art is not rearranging others people work.
It's not 70s-80s where you had to have costly hardware to get sounds. Thousands of free or low cost virtual instruments.

 

Ernst Horn of the band "Deine Lakaien" once recorded all the equipment in his house, like a kitchen mixer, a drill, anything that makes a sound.

Become creative yourself. If you only copy and don't record anything yourself, you'll become a slave to the data, becoming increasingly uncreative and dissatisfied. Remember, people have infinite creative ideas but a finite lifespan.

There's also a recorder for this purpose:
Zoom H4essential https://zoomcorp.com/en/de/handheld-recorders/handheld-recorders/h4essential/

Try recording the sounds you hear in the supermarket or car noises in your environment and incorporate these samples into your music or a radio play. You'll then interact directly with the real world.

I've attached a song with samples for inspiration:

 

own "signature" sound is nothing to you?

 

The sampling and editing process alone can be a very inspiring experience. Worth trying!

 

How do you figure by sampling copyrighted material yourself, that somehow alleviates any burden of liability on your part? I'm certain most any copyright attorney would beg to disagree with your statement above.

 

I'm pretty sure that's intended to be Motown-ish recordings which will give you the vibe of sampling actual Motown, and not actual Motown audio which is clearly copyrighted. That's why "Motown" was in quotes in the post of which you're discussing.

 

I'm too pretty sure that was the meaning.

I wish I had the resources of Jack Dangers (Meat Beat Manifesto) who went to the studio with the express purpose of creating sample material.

Imagine having somebody like Bennie Maupin creating your own personal rare grooves.

 

I should have said creating, and not REcreating. As in referencing a classic motown style song, copying the arrangement, instrumentation, hell even the progression.

 

It does not make a lot of sense to sample virtual instruments ahead of time. You are right in front of your computer anyway, when you are working on a DAW project. You can still resample and so on, but it even further reduces the benefit of doing any of it in advance. You will have more control with everything still as Midi until you want to bounce it. For people who are inexperienced with creating samples from hardware, it can be a hit to someone's "creative flow". That depends on your hardware setup also. Not everyone has a mixer and all of their synths are not "simultaneously connected" to the DAW. So for that producer to record any one of their synths; it's as easy as creating a new external instrument channel in the DAW project, and maybe changing some software routing. For someone else, it can be a complete halt of their work.

The benefits really have to be related to making samples ahead of time. Otherwise, it negates most of the value in making them. They have to be "good enough" to overcome the fact that they are made without any context to your current project.

 

Create your own big bang. Start from there.

 

I learned this from Lorn: grab your tascam/mic, record your sample pack drums/synths/whatever directly from your monitors. Mix them back together to taste. As long as you're having fun there are an endless ways of making your "own" samples.

 

Well, some folks in this industry actually have this rare thing people call "talent" and write their own material including knowing their instruments well enough they can create the sounds they want without relying on someone to do it for them.

 

The most logical answer I can think of, and there are plenty of good scenario reasons above for and against, is because they are sounds that you think or know you will use again, or that might inspire you to write something with, or reinvent with something like Serum if that's your thing.

I use mainly real musicians where I can, as well as playing the parts myself, but I certainly have used some synths and samples for sound effects where they matched the title of the project as an 'immersive' technique.

In a lot of modern electronic music which is not what I do, it makes sense to build up your own sample libraries. Some people also keep the real musicians recordings as potential samples, because a majority of the clever electronic composers chop audio up perpetually and create different rhythmical and melodic forms from them. As for the ethics in any of what I have stated, that's for another thread, I am merely stating what I have read a lot of people and producers seem to do.

 

Last edited: Mar 21, 2025

I inadvertently ended up with a huge collection of my own loops just because my workflow includes rendering tracks.

My loops can be my own inspiration now, sometimes. And If I get too broke. I can sell the crap to some Sample Library retailer, I hope.

"90's industrial and synth pop by SineWave" I can almost see it.

So, this workflow has many benefits. It could make you 10 quid some day. More than most musicians make these days.

Music business has gone from worth it for the plebs, to not worth it for the plebs, to completely not worth it for the plebs. Only the royalty makes music and profit these days and even them have troubles at times, and they're dying... Better just make it a fun hobby and enjoy it. It's good for the soul and even when you don't make any money it makes you feel better. I guess that's the point.

Back to disappointing opsix (better use FM8 instead)... wavestate and modwave mucho better. Maybe people have forgot how to make FM sounds?

 

Last edited: Mar 21, 2025

I'm planing to sample my Dad's silver flute that he played in his high school band which is now about 80 years old. I don't play the instrumet (nor any other valved woodwinds) but will look at fingering diagrams and sample all the notes that I can play and make a simple Kontakt instrument.