A sample is what is in music?

Everyone who is more or less familiar with music programs has repeatedly met with sampling and sampling concepts. True, not everyone is fully aware of what it really is. Now we will try to figure this out.

Sample: Basic Concepts

Translated from English, the word sample means "sample". In the case of sound and musical sequencers, a sample is a digitized fragment of the instrument's sound.

If we talk about the concept of sampling, it boils down to creating new sounds based on the application of various filters, envelopes, etc. At the dawn of the synthesizers with the sound transformation function, special devices that later became known as samplers began to be used very actively.

As is already clear, with the help of many actions, any initial sound fragment could be changed beyond recognition, up to the creation of futuristic sounds that do not exist in nature, and then save it for further use.

Most of all, KORG, Roland, AKAI and many others have succeeded in this. It was then that the very concept of the sample changed somewhat. Now you could say that the sample is any "native" sound of a synthesizer or a sampler used to create a specific musical part.

Sound characteristics

Only the "iron" synthesizers and samplers could not do it. With the development of computer technology, many virtual instruments, sequencers and even entire virtual studios began to appear for the creation of music, sound recording, mastering, and so on.

However, in the earliest versions of such software, only sound fragments recorded from "live" instruments were used. As a rule, they were initially saved in the .wav format, and a bit later the .mp3, .aiff, .ogg and some other formats came to replace it.

Each such sample could be represented in the form of a wave and proceed from this to distinguish them by characteristics such as the sampling frequency, sound depth (signal amplitude level), bit rate, etc.

In modern computer sound, the standard is 44100 Hz, 16 bit, 128 kbps. But this standard has long been outdated, although, for example, some samples for FL Studio still have such characteristics. This is only related to the size of the sample, because with higher parameters, the file weight, naturally, will be much larger. However, now almost all music has characteristics at the level of 320 kbit / s, 48 kHz, 24 bits.

Samples for FL Studio

As for one of FL Studio's most popular musical sequencers, it, like any synthesizer, has its own set of samples. Here they are divided into groups and types. You can view them in the left pane of the sound browser.

You can immediately notice that there are also wav-files, and the format .ogg, and samples such as. Fsc, and .sf2 (Sound Fonts). The latter were once quite popular, but because of their low frequency characteristics are practically not used. It is better to use AKAI format.

By the way, if anyone does not know, originally the program was called Fruity Loops and was intended to create loops (loops) of percussion. Loop in English - "loop". Just at that time, the concept of the sample was again transformed somewhat. Now it was possible to consider that a sample is even a musical fragment: whole or repeated several times, or even representing a whole batch for a certain track.

Today, single samples and loops are distinguished. An example of the first can serve, say, the sound of a blow on a working drum or a bass drum on a drum set.

Samples for virtual synthesizers and samplers

Today, you can find quite a lot of tools, in which there are free samples in the form of collections or libraries.

An example is the powerful popular Kontakt, developed by Native Instruments. For him on the Internet laid out so many sounds that you simply marvel. Yes, take, for example, trap-samples. On a variety of Internet resources, they are represented in huge collections, and from different manufacturers, but in universal formats .nki, .nkr, .nkx and .nkc.

Naturally, each software synthesizer or sampler has its own sets of sounds with original formats. However, some developers come in such a way that they store libraries in a generic kind of .fxb library type, which allows them to be loaded into different virtual tools.

Practical use

If to talk about practical use, the same trap-samples are simply loaded onto the selected channels or tracks in the studio program.

Of course, if these are normal audio files like .wav, you can not really work with them. In principle, you can even change the tempo or the basic tone of the sound only if you have special tools. You can achieve a certain result by using slicers (from English slicer), in which you can edit the original sample to create a sound loop.

But "native" samples of synthesizers or universal libraries in this respect look very interesting. In each instrument, as already mentioned above, there are own means of signal processing such as oscillators, filters or LFO envelopes. If desired, even in the "native" sound, you can "wind up" so many changes that the creators themselves do not recognize it.

Instead of concluding

It seems that now it becomes clear that the sample is not only a single sound of the instrument, but even whole complex combinations obtained by mixing several initial sounds and a mass of effects, not to mention the fact that under this definition there are both loops and Even entire vocal parts. And their diversity today is such that it is simply unrealistic to use absolutely everything when creating a musical composition.