Knowledge illustrates a bite-size history of the technique that changed the face of modern music production forever - sampling - from a 2009 viewpoint.

What is sampling?

A sample – in a general literary sense – refers to a smaller portion of a bigger whole. While the word sampling, outside of the music world, could refer to taking a specimen for scientific research or analysis, in this feature it's all about the live recording of a portion of sound being played or performed from a source, which could include, but isn't limited to, a CD player, computer, voice or instrument. That recording – or sample – can be relayed into a new composition in varying creative ways.

There are significant phases in sampling history, so let's look at the interesting ones, with a strong bias towards the electronic music that Knowledge stands for.

Analogue Sampling

It's difficult to pinpoint precisely the first example of sampling, but the most famous is undoubtedly evident in Etude Aux Chemins De Fer by Pierre Schaeffer in 1948.

 

Pierre pioneered this musical style, dubbed Musique Concrète, after high-fidelity tape reels (previously protected during WW2 for their value in enhancing military communication) became available to civil servants. The foremost form of sampling was achieved by butchering these super-sized cassette reels to create tape loops which could then be launched at the press of a button via a tape machine.

How did these rudimentary "samplers" work exactly? The electric current or "sound" being played across tape machines' tape heads polarized free-form magnetic particles coating the plastic tape reels. When a tape was played back, the iron oxide powder (analogous to binary data in modern-day computers) magnetised the tape heads, causing them to align precisely as before, resulting in identical playback.

Producers back in the 60s found a way to "fire off" these tape loops repeatedly by cutting samples of tape, creating a small infinity loop. To see this technique in practice – something that Ant Miles [the guy who co-created the hardcore anthem Valley of the Shadows] used to do in the beginnings of his career as a sound engineer – see the video below.

 

Eventually, machines were created to control more precisely when these loops were triggered – massive, unwieldy, expensive things – like the infamous Mellotron, that only top studios such as Abbey Road could afford, which you can hear in the intro to this classic Beatles track:

 

When you pressed a key on the original rudimentary samplers, a tape head would contact the tape and play a sound, although users at the time were limited to around three octaves (so you can imagine how complex the inside of a Mellotron was, with a playback head underneath each key). This level of control was the first domino in the chain leading to consumer samplers hitting stores – ones that offered highly precise levels of digital control at attainable prices. Sampling, in the years to come, would evolve into a technique so effective, powerful and lucrative that it paved the way for similar digital revolutions in the fields of movies and design. And whilst these early samplers might seem amusing by today's standards, their basic function hasn't changed a bit.

Digital Sampling pt. 1

When we speak of sampling in 2009, we think of software samplers but the predecessor to these was of course the hardware sampler. Mention the word 'Akai' or 'E-MU' – the two biggest hardware sampling brands of recent times – to veteran electronic music producers and watch them come over all nostalgic. Music production magazines in the 1990s often featured hardware samplers on their covers, such was their lure as holy grails of creativity. In looking at hardware samplers, we can easily illustrate how modern sampling works.

Once a sound has been crunched into numbers by a sampler – sampled – the user can control it with their hands via a keyboard, and also via the tools onboard the sampler. The benefit of digital technology, apart from saving space and money, is that one sample can be played across an entire keyboard. A side effect here is that the pitch and speed of the sample changes exponentially the further you venture from the root key, but this results in many unexpected creative applications. Producers like The Prodigy took advantage of this shortcoming to create their trademark helium-style vocals, for example. Kanye West, interestingly, built his name upon rejuvenating this out-of-date technique in his hip hop from early 2000s.

There are plenty of stories about the first hardware samplers containing unbelievably small amounts of onboard memory or RAM. According to Wikipedia, the first ever sampler, "was the EMS Musys system, developed in 1969. These had 12k of read-only memory, backed up by a hard drive of 32k."

As music technology advanced, samplers were able to store more samples, pull off complex effects and warp sound in ever more useful ways. And this brings us to the aforementioned Akai and E-MU brands that would become bitter rivals in the sampling boom of the 1990s.

Akai Vs E-MU

The Akai S3000 is perhaps the most ubiquitous hardware sampler of all time. After various incremental improvements, this two-rack unit became the de facto standard of sampling whose influence can still be found in the samplers of today. Akai is a Japanese company whose very core is hardware. Whilst other companies, approaching the software revolution, started to evolve, Akai stuck to its guns. Their MPC series is to sampling what Technics and Pioneer are to vinyl and CD DJing respectively. This year, software giants Native Instruments released some popular hardware clearly inspired by Akai products, such as Maschine.

 

 

E-MU, an American company, was around before Akai, and even though their samplers would never become as omnipresent as Akai's, they had a solid reputation particularly amongst technical producers, probably because of their unique filters. If Akai was the Ferrari, then E-MU was the Lamborghini. RAM Records still keep an E-MU sampler in their studio loaded with all of the classic RAM sounds over the years that helped compose anthems such as No Reality and Titan. DJ Fresh made Shot Down On Safari on an E-MU. The heavy, weighted sound of E-MUs and Akais were unique to hardware samplers, something that many top producers were loath to trade in for enhanced integration.

Digital Sampling pt. 2

It was some time in 2002 that Shy FX, when asked about whether to buy the new Akai sampler [the Z4/Z8 models … Akai's final ever rack units], told Knowledge not to bother and stick with a computer. This was coming from a man who had just completed Shake Ur Body with a software sampler – a track that entered the UK Top 10 pop singles.

Software samplers of the modern era still require a front end or physical analogue-to-digital conversion channel in the vein of hardware samplers. Here, all the processing is done inside the computer, and this has one gigantic advantage. The software sampler is fully integrated, meaning that when you save your composition then all your samples and their edits are also saved. On most hardware samplers however, there are no quick undo or save functions linked to your sequencer – the unit is alien to the computer for the most part. Therefore, those who've learnt the art of sampling on a hardware sampler will have plenty of nightmare stories relating to losing all their work.

The first famous fully integrated sampler was probably Logic's EXS24. Loved by producers such as John B, it is rudimentary today, but at the time was top of the range. It had no revolutionary stand-out features, but for functionality and integration, it was well received by music producers. Next came Steinberg's rival called HALion that was native to Cubase – a geeky play on the name of the killer self-aware computer from the Kubrick movie 2001. At this time (towards the end of the 1990s) Logic was renowned as unofficial "king of the sequencers", but HALion was much more advanced than Logic's sampler, and as such Cubase started getting a lot of love from critics and consumers again.

When German software designer Native Instruments released their own multi-format sampler called Kontakt, Apple and Steinberg were blown out of the water. Kontakt not only looked great, but also had extremely functional and powerful dynamics processors and effects. Most electronic music producers use Kontakt nowadays – ask anyone – rendering the native samplers of Cubase and Logic peripheral.

 

 

Other companies followed Kontakt's example, like E-MU with a new software sampler called Emulator X which was marketed partly on the strength of its front end, but Knowledge believes that nothing up to 2009 has even come close to matching Kontakt 3 in terms of functionality and power (and that includes MOTU's Mach 5 as well as other native sequencer samplers).

Pitch Bend

Whilst modern software samplers essentially have the same function as the archaic tape machine customs of old and similar features to the retro Akais and E-MUs, their credibility and worth is defined on something else altogether that its predecessors did not excel at – pitch processing. Native Instruments was the first software sampler to allow users to play sounds across a keyboard without altering their speed or pitch. Whilst technology such as time stretching and pitch shifting was possible on the older hardware samplers, Kontakt enabled users to do it automatically with ease. Just ask Goldie about his Terminator anthem – one of the first records to ever feature time stretching – and it's safe to assume that he was gnashing his gold teeth with frustration when trying to process its time-stretched drums.

Speaking of drums, the samplers of today now offer facilities to analyse drum samples and then either elongate or contract them, keeping pitch static, or to simply alter pitch without causing a length change. Whilst this idea is simple, just try either of these processes using native software of an older-edition sequencer. Rhythmic material is perhaps the hardest to preserve during processing because of its extremely dynamic wave shape peppered with all-important transients. Revolutionary software like Propellerheads' ReCycle and Spectrasonics' Stylus RMX, moving into the year 2000 and beyond, gave software-sampler developers a kick up the backside, forcing them to implement credible drum-slicing tools of their own, to complete the sampler package for the 21st century.

The Future of Sampling

Nowadays, the software with the best pitch shifting and time stretching tends to be the most popular, hence the recent explosion of Ableton Live users, and also the large amount of consumers who switched from Logic to Cubase. With the recent release Logic Pro 9, Apple's software is now up to speed in the technology stakes, but the "automated pitch" tug of war looks set to continue as developers jostle for bragging rights. Whatever the case, third party software samplers built solely for sampling, such as Native Instruments Kontakt, look strong coming into 2010.
 
As hard-drive space increases, so will the quality of music files, and so will the quality of sampling. It's difficult to see beyond sampling rates of 44.1 kHz for the next five years at least, but, think about this: when download speeds become lightning fast and HD spaces nearly bottomless, record labels will want to resell their entire catalogues as high-fidelity downloads. In this case, quality could become a determining factor in the samplers of the future. Of course, right now samplers support 192 kHz samples, but very few people actually use these, and when this rate becomes available to consumers (probably when physical formats are phased out, such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray, to make way for cloud technology), the sampling-rate ceiling will rise to at least double the current maximum of 384 kHz, which is a monstrous 768 kHz – more than 17 times the resolution of a compact disc.

 

• Akai
,
• E-MU
,
• Native Instruments
,
• Logic
,
• Cubase
,
• Kontakt
,
• ReCycle
,
• Ableton

Related Links:

• Akai Launch iPhone Synth/Sequencer
• Kontakt Instrument Balinese Gamelan
• Akai MPK Mini Keyboard
• Denon Launch DN-MC6000 DJ Controller
• ESI Release KeyControl 49XT Keyboard

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