The state of music samplers and sampling...??

Borrowing a lick still requires you to be able to play music. Sampling a musical phrase, in itself, requires no skill. 

If you assemble a bunch of borrowed riffs without talent, you'll end up with a lame song most of the time. A few very talented people can recycle stuff and come up with great songs though. Lennon did borrow in his time, didn't he? ;)

If you assemble stuff that you've just sampled from others, you're still lowering the bar (IMHO). Once again, there are exceptions to that rule. 

Or you can build your own music around samples. Reznor used to do that a lot. He built Closer over a kick drum lifted from a Iggy Pop record, but he used it for its own specific quality and built something completely different w/ it. Samples CAN be part of a musician's extended vocabulary, they can be used creatively.

I think real talent is rare, and will most likely shine through, no matter what's the medium. Sampling and loops and computers just made it so that there's a lot more means to express mediocrity.

Some time ago I started shopping for drum libraries and I was amazed to see that the vast majority of sample libraries - hundreds of them - were Hip-Hop oriented. Sort of a paradox there - I mean, selling drums sounds to emulate music that was originally made of stolen/recycled sounds. My first thought was - man, they're not even able to steal their own samples anymore. :s

Yea, I hate sampling too, only because I can play everything myself and it just smacks of laziness. 

Yes I would believe a lot of people that use Sonar are Hip-Hop orintated, this is due to two things one this is an American program and two look at the features and the new UI.

Finally yes all great artists steal from the best, this is called progession.  Mozart stole from Hayden and Handel.  Beethoven took it another step and you can hear in his early stuff a lot of Mozart.  And yes John and Paul were some of the biggest thiefs or another way to look at is they took recognizable material and devoloped it.  They stole from the best as well: Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddly and even Beethoven (ok a stretch) but have a listen to LSD and you can hear very old church music more akin to Bach.

Making my own samples..... no... not interested in doing that.


Using Sample Libraries... yes. The samples are strings and piano's and other instruments that run the spectrum from common things like I mentioned to Japanese, Indian, and African instruments that are very hard to come by.

Using these properly requires a bit of keyboard expertise as well as a knowledge of how the instrument is actually played to be able to realistically reproduce the sound in a convincing way.

Kalle Rantaaho

I doubt if it's very common that someone has a melody in his head and then he starts looking for a loop that fits the melody??

Not always in such an obvious manner. As an example, I wrote a song based on a melody that's been rolling in the back of my head for days, but the rhythmic part eluded me for some reason. I eventually stumbled on a sample of a somewhat percussive sound, which, once slowed down, detuned and eq'ed, provided the exact syncopated/dysfunctional rhythmic feel I was after. 


I never could have programmed that type of thing out of nowhere because there was something "accidental" about it - furthermore, it wasn't even designed as something rhythmic in the first place, more of a sound effect.

As much as I'm still relatively "proud" of that song, I'm particularly fond of that specific rhythmic sound effect, which somehow challenges the balance of the song but folds back in in extremis. Sure, I didn't sample it myself, but I think I've done a decent job sculpting it and putting it into that specific context. 

  I see that as arranging more than actually writing. Otherwise, I could just record myself humming melodies and tapping a beat on my desk. 

yer sampling bad m'kay ;-) . its what you do with the samples.. I grew up with breaks like the amen / apache to name to and where I am from is one of the pioneering area's of what became drum N bass. as much as Detroit / Chicago is to another genre of music. 

I think if folk spend a day with someone who makes music using samples a lot, it might be an eye opener.. it's really not a case of drag / drop a loop or play NO music .. it's no different to me than someone using a midi drum loop because they aren't the best drummer. in some cases it's actually the prep work with the samples to get them to sound different from other things.

 there is some stuff you can't humanly do without a sampler, same goes for other studio equipment.. more so now with software really. I have guitar rig, as part of komplete.. have I ever used it for a live guitar ? nah.. it can be used for drums and 1001 other things.. it's what you apply things to.. as much as using guitar pedals with a sampler back in the late 90's and recording that to DAT then bringing it back to the sampler.

Kalle , you can start a song ANYWAY you want more so now.. seriously it's been that way for years.. RX2 made that possible since hhm 95 ? etc.. you don't have to use a lot of effort to sit the drums on after you think of a melody... before rx2 it was always drums etc first for me but well audio is pretty much elastic now anyway...