What sampling actually is in musical instruments

Sampling, as the name suggests, is the use of something as a reference, and there's a word for it in statistics. 10 randomly selected people out of 100 is called random sampling, but what's the point? What's the connection between sampling in statistics and sampling that we're talking about? The great masters of arranging over there can't sit still and are ready to give me a lesson ...... Don't worry, this is just an opening chapter, the focus is still to make clear the ins and outs of sampling.

According to the above logic, if applied to music, sampling is the process of taking a portion of a lengthy piece of music, not all of it, and using that portion as a reference for us to work with, which is the definition of sampling.

With this sample in mind, how does the arranger go about working, in other words, what can be worked on a piece of music that is already there?

Below I'll describe several arranging processes that take different approaches to the sample.

First, there's the loop sample, which, for those of you who know a little bit of bird literature, is a loop. what's a loop sample? What is a loop? It's a sample, usually a whole number of bars, or more accurately, 2, 4, 8, 16 bars of phrases composed of a piece of sound material, and there is no tempo changes, very stable, it will be repeated indefinitely head to head, and will not be too hard to listen to the feeling. This kind of sample is usually the intro part of the song, that is, the beginning or the door, but it is not absolute, do not rule out the chorus or the main part of the song can also be used to loop the sample material. And they are also characterized by the fact that they are usually not complexly layered, there is usually no multi-instrumental sound superimposed, just piano, saxophone, fiddle, drum kit, etc. However, this is not absolute, but the principle is generally that it sounds like there is still quite a lot of room to be processed and transformed, for example, it allows us to add drums, add chords, add the main theme, and so on. Looped samples may be sped up, slowed down, transposed up, down, pitch transients modified, etc., but essentially they will be used to play back over and over again, like a repeater. If one hears an arrangement in this form, one could say that the arranger used a loop sampling method in the arrangement.

The second method is also very common, especially in hip-hop arrangements, and this sampling method is called chopping, which can be called slice in English, but hip-hop producers prefer to call it chop. or writing it out in a staggered fashion. This type of arranging can be said to have made its name with the famous arranging machine mpc in hiphop history. Sometimes the processed sound is as magical as a DJ rubbing his hands together, making all sorts of big pearls falling from a jade plate, and sometimes it's like an old phonograph with a few jams and a smooth flow, which makes people feel refreshed. It's not uncommon to cut a sample and loop it at the same time, and it's not uncommon for both to be used in the same song arrangement. The ultimate goal of cutting samples is to reshape them, to create new melodies and rhythms by imaginatively reorganizing them with limited sound resources, and this is the primary method.

The third method is very close to the second, but its definition is broader and more precise: monophonic sampling. What is meant by monophonic sampling, is that the sampling is only to pick a single tone, a sound, from the waveform of the sound is a transient wave, and then gradually with time decay to no sound, of course, does not have to be so strict, because usually this decay or transient can be processed through the processing of the way to be created. These samples are usually percussion instruments such as drum kits, hand claps, ringing fingers, etc., and can be taken from existing songs, or recorded with a microphone. These samples are then arranged in a rhythmic and groovy way, just like cut samples. By the way, theoretically all software virtual instruments generated by non-waveform generators and noise generators belong to this category, so when dealing with such monophonic samples we can turn a monophonic sound into an instrument to play the melody by means of pitch shifting, but we don't usually call it sample arrangement, because the way the samples are utilized is very different from the original purpose of what we talked about before. It's very different from what we were talking about.

There's a fourth sampling method, and many people in the industry may wonder what it is that has a fourth method. Right, and I still firmly believe that this way of arranging music we can also call sampling. This method of sampling is melodic sampling. A melody is produced by a certain instrument in a certain song, and this melody is repeated with any instrument, adding more material to turn it into another song. Many people think that remixes are more suitable to be the title of this method, but I think that there is still a difference between melodic sampling and remixes, as melodic sampling's point of interest is more focused on just a melody, and is not interested in the melody of the whole song, the style, etc., and the melodies will often go through a complete change of appearance after they are sampled. After the melody is sampled, it is often processed in a completely different way, through instrumental changes and even the notes of the melody itself, and in the end, the sample may be looped in the work, or it may appear in the work as a chorus or in some other form, but in any case, the song that utilizes melodic sampling has no relation to the original song structure. This method is widely used in arrangements in the sense of remix, retro, hommage, and so on.

Many people who don't know much about sampling and sampling arrangements think that sampling is a form of plagiarism, copyright infringement, or a lack of creativity. In fact, those who have some understanding of arranging know that compared to the sampling method, which is still relatively laborious and hard to arrange, it is still easier to code notes. Sampling this kind of arrangement method, especially cut samples, these arrangement methods are completely test the arranger's music appreciation and the ability to change the limited into the unlimited superpowers. The back and forth chordal accompaniment of pop songs is not really a test of the arranger's creativity, and a pattern can be written for 10, 100, or 1000 songs in a certain style. And from the legal and international copyright **** knowledge, no matter sampling or copying the melody, no complete continuous eight bars of the same phrase in the work is not plagiarism, and in addition in the arranger's death 50 years after the copyright of his work is no longer protected, so in the scope of the law and **** knowledge of the arrangement of all the way is reasonable and legitimate, will not be subjected to the law and should not be subjected to the moral judgment. judgment.

And sampling is a form of wisdom and spirituality. It appeared widely in the era of hiphop, when the status and economic conditions of the black people in the United States are relatively poor, no instrumental conditions, no recording conditions, no mixing equipment, so they use their own wisdom, from a variety of records to find material to put them spliced into the rapper's accompaniment, and also accepted by the majority of the audience.

This is sampling, and as time progresses the process of sampling tends to be careful and delicate processing, chord and melodic reshaping, etc., in fact, the dependence on existing samples is gradually becoming smaller and smaller, and more inclined to produce a greater contrast and change, so sampling is not a very low-tech work, but also requires a lot of knowledge of the audio and music

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