In this article I am going to tell you what an audio sample is. I’m also going to tell you some of the pros and cons of using them.
Let me start by explaining what a sample is. Technically, a sampler is any piece of sound. A drum beat, a guitar strum, a bus going down the street and any other noise you can imagine, and some you can’t. These are all samples. You can use them to put together your own music.
However, I; personally, separate sounds that you have purchased or recorded yourself, from what is normally considered sampling. Likely born out of early hip-hop artists, the act of sampling is taking parts of other people’s songs and using them to build your own. There are several reasons for doing this, the most obvious being that if you have no way of making your own songs, sampling allows you to avoid this. Another reason is that all recordings have a unique character, depending on the instruments used and where they were recorded. Sampling allows you to get a part of that character.
As far as I can tell, those are the benefits of trying out other people’s work. The cons of sampling; In my opinion, it far outperforms the pros. It is copyright infringement. If you want to get an idea of how that can get you into trouble, look up Vanilla Ice and The Verve. In the case of The Verve they had permission to use the sample, but the owner decided that they had used too much.
That’s why I distinguish between anything you buy, or record yourself, and sampling. I only call the first few loops, and anything taken from someone else’s song is a sample. For obvious reasons, I never use samples. Unless it’s something in the public domain, and even then I don’t put it up for sale.
So now you know more about sampling and why you might want to do it, but really shouldn’t. There’s a whole world of sounds around you to explore, so why risk the potential trouble of a copyright lawsuit?