In this article I am going to tell you what an audio sample is. I’m also going to tell you about some of the pros and cons of using them.
Let me start by explaining what a sample is. Technically, a sample is any piece of sound. A drumbeat, a guitar strum, a bus going down the street, and every other noise you can imagine, and some you can’t. These are all samples. You can use them to put together your own music.
However, I; Personally, separate sounds that you have purchased or recorded yourself from what is normally considered a sampling. Probably born from the earliest hip-hop artists, the act of sampling is taking parts of other people’s songs and using them to build your own. There are several reasons for doing this, the most obvious being that if you have no way of making your own songs, sampling allows you to avoid it. Another reason is that all recordings have a unique character, depending on the instruments used and where they were recorded. Sampling allows you to get a part of that character.
From what I can tell, those are the advantages of trying other people’s work. The cons of sampling; in my opinion, it far exceeds the professionals. It is a copyright infringement. If you want an idea of how that can get you in trouble, look up Vanilla Ice and The Verve. In The Verve’s case, they had permission to use the sample, but the owner decided they had used too much.
This is why I distinguish between anything I buy or record and sample. I only call the first few loops, and anything that is taken from someone else’s song is a sample. For obvious reasons, I never use samples. Unless it’s something in the public domain, and even then I’m not putting it up for sale.
Now you know more about sampling and why you might want to do it, but you really shouldn’t. There’s a whole world of sounds around you to explore, so why risk the potential problem of a copyright lawsuit?