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  • Writer's pictureJerry Growl

So... Samples?

Updated: Jan 8, 2021

All music heard on my personal website and my Soundcloud is original music, composed and produced using sampled instruments.


As it happens, there are still people who don't really understand what exactly is being sampled and what a composer is precisely doing when he 'composes' with samples.


To picture things right: I'm not making collages of pre-fabricated musical passages. There are dj's and EDM producers that work with pre-fab loops and complete music parts, adding little more then mixing and rhythmic variation... but that's not whats sampled instruments are about.


There is a misunderstanding because several music styles use the term 'sample' in a broad musical context, going from the smallest chunks of musical information to complete pre-fabricated arrays of music that can be used in loops. A sample is a part of a recording. It can be one note, but it can also be several minutes of a production.



The samples you hear in my production are 'note per note' sampled instruments. These are virtual instruments re-created by means of note per note recordings of original instruments. There are a great many samples for every instrument in different dynamic layers (soft vs loud) and different playing styles or articulations. Even different microphone positions are available usually. As a result most sampled instrument libraries collect tens to hundreds Gigabytes of data!


The object of producing music with sampled instruments is to create a convincing music production directly 'out of the box', but to still sound much like if it were recorded by live players. The result is immediate: a recording that is an identical duplicate of what the composing musician created, without interpretation by performing musicians.


The creative effort is immediately translated and it's quick and easy to surgically tweak or adapt any detail of the music.


If needed sheet music can easily be derived from the sequenced midi recording of the sampled instruments version. The next step in a professional production (if the budget allows) is to record the music with live musicians or at least add live musicians to the recording to make it more realistic and convincing.


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