Three tips for sampling from full tracks

Here are three clever ways of taking and using samples from a full track to spice up your own productions

01 QUIET SECTIONS

A great place to start looking for sounds in any track is among the quieter parts of the mix. These bits will often not have the main beat rolling behind them, allowing you to grab handy vocal cuts, drum breaks, riffs or stabs that you can then easily repurpose in your own track.

02 EQ/FILTERING

EQing or filtering can enable us to remove unwanted instruments sufficiently from the mix to make the sample usable when layered alongside other elements – for example, a simple high-pass filter can remove sub bass at a stroke. After you’ve EQed the sample, try it in your track to see how well it fits.

03 SHORT SOUNDS

A snippet of audio can be easily transformed into something more substantial by loading it into any loopenabled sampler, then setting up a loop point to extend the sound indefinitely. While this doesn’t always sound seamless, it can help to create an interesting effect from an otherwise unusable audio clip.