Crate digging and sampling
Buying my MPC One+ recently reminded me of how my first forays into music began when back in the 90s I bought my first expensive keyboard, a hardware sampler (earlier Akai) and a PC for running Cubase with. I had a lot of fun back then with those simpler less sophisticated versions of the products I now own. It also reminded me of the days I used to hang out with my DJ friends who taught various other friends how to mix but I was never great at that. However I could and still can compose music and mangle samples into my compositions using various techniques. I’ll share some of my ideas right here on Modulations with one in this issue and many more to come in the future.
The 2024 version of Modulations is going to concentrate a lot on samplers and the art of sampling.
The spark
I remember discovering back in the nineties via my brother who was usually more into his American rock bands. He was really excited by this album he’d come across called “Entroducing@ which was DJ Shadow’s (Joshua Paul Davis) first studio album, recorded in 1996 around the same time I was getting into electronic music study and creation myself.
Joshua has pretty much always used Akai and Korg gear to produce his music and is reported to own somewhere around 60,000 vinyls most of which are in storage across his home town of San Francisco with a smaller set being kept at his home. That is quite the collection!
The album cover features a man perusing a record store, looking for rare recordings of music to sample from, the process known as “crate digging”, to search for musical gold.
Sampling is a fun process and one that I’ve dipped in and out of over the years. I’ve got back into it recently, I’ll talk more about this over the upcoming issues of Modulations and share some great sounds and vibes with you. I think this will be a lot of fun and a new direction to take.
I had a little search for record stores nearby, there are so few nowadays and besides I don’t even own a turntable anymore. I used to have one and I loved having one. Maybe I’ll pick one up again.
I found some in the area and some online stores:
JCS Vinyl
https://www.ebay.co.uk/str/JCS-VINYL - no surprises that eBay is one of the largest record stores in the world with so many people collecting and selling some of their vinyls on to others, a great circular economy.
The Sound Machine
https://www.thesoundmachine.uk.com/
I have walked past this shop before in Reading town centre and it’s been running for a very long time, for more than 20 years. Good to see they are still going strong and have never missed a beat!
There may be others but these are the only ones I could find at the time, I was researching this newsletter.
However there are virtual options and this week I’ve come across a new one called Tracklib to add to the sources I normally use, Splice and Landr.
Tracklib
Check out my Tracklib profile to see what I’ve curated so far, you may only be able to preview short snippets of each track but I shall produce some demos soon to share here.
Splice
Splice has grown into a large sample library over the past few years and with tight integration on the MPC range, it is an indispensable tool since it’s very easy to load samples into slots, populate the banks of sounds and then make use of them for performances and recordings.
Summary
There is no substitute for creating your own samples though and we shall look at ways of doing this. One easy way is to use a device you probably already have, a phone running a sampling or recording app. I’ve used Ferrite for this or Koala Sampler on the iPhone. Great tools for gathering sounds out in the field.