Sampling in a nut shell is pretty much just taking a snippet of music, such as a loop that gets repeated throughout an entire song or a snippet could also be multiple notes takes from different a song or multiple songs and rearranged. A good example to compare this to would be something like making a collage in art class.
A collage consisting of different parts and elements combined together to create an image. Sampling is that but musically. Sampling is said to be one of the main building blocks to what hip hop is today.
Hip hop started back in the day from people playing records such as one drum break on a record back and forth on a turntable which is how sampling started and came to be in hip hop. Sound is definitely an art form.
Today the most convenient way of sampling music is to use digital samplers. These samples allow you to easily manipulate music from playing a song backwards, slowing it down, cutting up the sound and layering new songs over each other.
MIDI and sampling go hand in hand together. It’s best to know understand MIDI. MIDI allows your musical instruments to “talk”, communicate and be in sync with each other in real time.
What do you need to sample?
Besides the basic hardware such as a good MAC or PC, Midi Controller and a good recording mic you’ll also need software. Reason, Cubase, Sonar, Pro Tools, Logic Pro are among the most popular. Many include build in samplers or allow additional plugins to be installed.
We recommend if you are starting off and want to make your own beats and want to learning sampling to start off with software rather than hardware. It’s easier to start learning plus the price tag of software is extremely smaller than the actual real thing.
