Whole track sampling: start again!

Let’s use the start of one track as the inspiration for a new sonic layer. Welcome to the joys of easy whole-track sampling

Most of the time, we reach for sampled instruments to form a single layer of a track we’re working on. We might want to load a sampled lead sound, or a cello section, or a snippet of vocal. But sometimes inspiration can strike when the source sound we capture and process is bigger. Whole track sampling is the process of taking the mix of an entire track and mining it for content. You might simply isolate a hit or a snare, or you might be interested to see if you can find a slow, industrial churning rhythm when a quicker track is triggered on a lower (and therefore slower) key. Through the following steps, we’re capturing the mix file of a work in progress, triggering a ‘version of itself’ alongside the original MIDI parts. This is quick to do and nearly always yields some interesting, ‘I hadn’t thought of doing that’ results.

> We’ve started a new track – a dark, moody tune from two loops – one a bassline, the other a tempo-sync’d collection of ‘noises’ and some drums. Rather than developing the track with ‘conventional’ MIDI and audio tracks, we’ll render this track start as an audio file. > Take the resulting audio file – ‘Moody Track’ – and drag it to Kontakt. We adjust the start and end points in the Wave Editor display to select one bar of the original loop, then set loop points around this. Running the loop with the click running lets us check our loop is accurate.

> Triggering the loop an octave higher doubles its speed and brings aim. Running it an octave lower halves its speed, adding a low quality. We do both, also inserting effects to rough the signal up. We run the resampled sound alongside the main track.