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 at 2:30 AM

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.