Secret Hints Of Sampling ________________________ The main instrument of every tracker is the sample, so why not go for some tips to take your sounds to the limit. There are so many sideways to funk up your samples, perhaps I just need to stick your nose on those. Let's start quickly and don't mess around with sensless phrases. --- Try equalizing, good for your ears and health Tracked music always sounds a bit dull and the mid-range is over emphasised. The different sounds have to stand out from each other, every sound in a different frequency range for example. It's sad that no Tracker has built in functions to manipulate a sample this way, but you have to get some Windows program like Cool Edit or Soundforge to do this. With the new Impulse Tracker version and a MMX capable processor or an AWE32/64, try out the new cut-off filters and the equalizing possiblities to see how it changes your track. Whenever you think the final mix is perfect, put it on a portable medium (tape, minidisc, cd) and listen to it wherever you can. A good car stereo always proves if the bass frequencies sound fine. --- Cut 'em into pieces If you got a nicely sampled drumloop, make sure to cut it into logical parts you can arrange with. Shareware programs like Wave Surgeon can do this for you. --- Pitch-bend and legato ehrm, better not. Guess this effect has been used in so many old Amiga modules, the experienced listener can't hear it anymore. Do it the way that it's not obivious, try it on sounds it's normally not used on. Pitch-bend on percussive sounds may still work very well, a lot of strange sounds are achieved this way. --- Use filter sweeps So you can access the whole modulation of a sample without having the possibility to do so in realtime. Just use some sample offset commands or a notorious ping-pong loop. --- Make multilayer samples Why have one crytal clear pad sound when you can spice it up with even more strings? try to mix sounds as best as you can, to make them sound wider and fuller. Be careful here to not overdo this - a single sample which fills lots of space in the frequency spectrum contradicts the "try equalizing" point. It may sound impressive as single sound - that doesn't mean automatically it fits into your song. When you think that it takes up too many channels, just hit record as .wav file in FT2 for example and then use the result as your pad sample. This method also works fairly well with drumloops, but better start experimenting yourself. --- Reverse Take your favourite Cymbal crash and reverse it, now you have one of the most used samples in tracked music. Actually, this is not what I intended to suggest. There's so much more which can be done with reversing samples. If you have a Snare sound and reverse it, don't forget to cut the intial attack at the end of the sample, it may sound as a silly click or pop otherwise. Another interesting trick to achieve some sort of ambient samples is to put reverb on the result, reverse it again, and keep going on until you think it sounds good. --- A bit of clipping or distorsion is nice Give your sounds the extra crunch they need. It will make a soft drumloop more crisp and punching. Take care when you overdrive the volume of a sample, too much sounds worse. ---- Stereo samples Experiment with Stereo samples before you convert them to Mono for use in a Tracker. Perhaps reverse one channel or try effects on it while leaving the other channel completely dry. If you can handle the extra time effort, waste 2 channels and use the stereo sample as it is. Well, you may try to emulate a stereo sample with playing a pad with different sample offsets + pan positions and envelopes in multiple channels - but often enough you just can't emulate a good stereo picture this way. --- Get some Sample CD's Before you go and spend all the money you have for that new Pentium 2 processor, think of what might help you much better in your musical development. I hear so many complaints of people who don't have any sounds to work with, but who have an excellent computer setup. Perhaps the money was spent on the wrong end? One thing, if you have the possibility to sample from original sources, do it at once. There's nothing better than having unique samples. If you're still at school, there's maybe someone playing in a band, talk it over with that guy, I'm sure a little sampling session can be arranged. ---- Hope some of the hints were new to you. I'm off. Peace. Simon "Vivid" Jarosch - vivid@gmx.de - http://www.simonv.com (with extensions by MAZ)