I've started to get a bit more interested in sampling recently but one thing I'm curious about is how you "find" your samples. I'm sure everyone has different methods, and it will vary from happy accidents toa 24 listening marathon til you find the golden sample.

I'm just curious what approaches others music makers use to find samples for their tunes...

 

It depends if you want to find that totally rare sample that nobody has ever touched and/or if you have some weird requirement for the sample.

Given that people have already dug through countless crates before you and chosen the most obvious/usable samples then just refer to other sampled work and find out what they sampled. This is made tremendously easy these days by sites like whosampled.com and so on. Just because someone has already used it before doesn't mean there isn't another way to flip it. Most samples have been used multiple times. Hell, the Amen break has single-handedly built a genre itself.

If you want something "original" then you'll have to dig yourself. It depends on what you're looking for, but if you're in a hurry then you can listen just to the very start/end of a whole bunch of tracks. You can preview an entire album in a couple minutes to locate all the low-hanging fruit, as that is generally where the cleanest loops are going to be.

Also, search digitally first and then track down the vinyl (if you're a purist) once you've identified your targets.

The hardcore option is to just listen to music all the time and become an encyclopedia of different genres and acts. This is the kind of producer I respect the most -- someone that has a personal obsession with the music they are sampling from.

You know that an album like DJ Shadow - Endtroducing was a love affair because he had to sample that stuff old-school. Now you don't even really have to crate dig to "crate dig". With YouTube and all these sample packs / construction kits, etc. you don't have to even care about music to slap together a sample based song. Plus modern digital software provides the ability to shoehorn just about any sample into your song seamlessly. Back in the day, you had to be way more selective or creative to get something that fit well because time-stretching and pitch manipulation was so much harder. Now you can digitally re-compose a sampled melody or change its key, etc.

 

Last edited: Aug 24, 2016

Rasputin hit the nail on the head 100%

 

You can still sample hunt at its heart, even if it is online, there are a lot of archives... Ive been doing this since i started making trip hop. Some of the archives might be pay to get in and have rarer resources. There are a lot of music libraries used for tv scores and cinema that were recorded in the 70's by a label called kpm. So i would google up stuff for kpm as well as looking for vinyl "blogspots" that being the key google term. You can add modifiers to your search like genre or year but that should be enough to get you started. You will sift through hours of shit though to find something you like. What helps is looking for instruments specifically on an album for whatever you want to hear. There is pretty much an endless stream of stuff to find. The next step is flipping it into your own creation with more different vinyl sounds from different sources, although you might spend a bit of time trying to key everything together. Even if you added your own basses and stuff keying can be difficult. Its not like there is a beatport or that you can guarantee everything is in key, half of that is the beauty of it though.

Obviously doing it for real will require hardware for the vinyl and a decent ADC. Then youll have to take all the standard precautions of dealing with that format like warped discs, scratches, dust, damage etc. The availability of the stores around you might make it difficult too, as well as the money. I would say the first method is great, but if really wanna find something super obscure that isnt on the net, your best chance would be at a good store or online shopping, but tbh most of the stuff is on the net nowadays, available is some wav/flac format.

Another thing to note, if i ever rip or dl something ill always look for flac or wav or ape as a minimum. Obviously you can degrade audio further but cannot improve it, i would recommend always starting with good base quality.

If you want some more inspiration, there is a series by mass appeal on youtube called rhythm roulette, where producers blindfold themselves in a record store, pick three records from the dollar bin, and make a tune out of it. Its flipping so good!