MIDI vs audio

Samples can be used in your productions in two ways: arranged on your DAW’s timeline as audio clips, or loaded into a sampler or step sequencer and triggered via MIDI.

Using MIDI to drive a sampler full of samples is the traditional way of working, recalling the days of Akai hardware samplers and Atari ST sequencers. You can take full advantage of your DAW’s MIDI editing capabilities for manipulating key parameters like note pitch and velocity. The sampler itself is also likely to provide plenty of sound shaping and manipulation options, and it’s easy to tweak them or even load different samples while the beat plays.

Arranging samples on the timeline gives you an extreme degree of precision, and you can adjust the levels, lengths, fade-ins/outs and often other parameters of the drum clips on a hit-by-hit basis. You can even ensure that samples are perfectly in phase with each other by lining them up just so.

On the creative front, you can really go to town chopping up beats, reversing segments, moving individual hits onto tracks that have different effects in place (eg, a reverb on one, delay on the next, etc) to easily create spot/spin FX, and so on.

Downsides are that DAWs aren’t designed for this, so it can be awkward to do things like quickly apply a velocity ramp for a roll, select all hits under a certain velocity, etc. In our tutorials on sequencing (p20) and using samples (p36) we explore the ways in which you can use both approaches in a variety of popular DAWs.