What Is Sampling in Music, and How to Do It Correctly

Once derided as “theft,” sampling is now a foundational part of dance and pop music, and there are literally countless ways to do it. Let’s walk through the hows, whens, and whys.

If you’re a producer, there’s nothing quite like hearing a moment of a song that no one has ever thought to sample before, taking it, and making something new. The feeling often starts with wonder. You’re listening to a track and all of a sudden, at 0:03 or 1:29 or whatever the timestamp may be, there’s a sound or a melody or a few bars of rhythm that teems with its own possibility. Wow, you think, what’s gonna happen next?

Then, it’s gone. The direction changes. A verse starts, drums kick in, the vocalist starts doing miasmic runs over everything… Something shifts, and the particular mood you fell in love with disappears. But wait, you say to yourself, let’s run that back. 

With sampling, you can. And furthermore, you should. 

The intro to Chaka Khan’s “Fate” is too good to only be an intro. Thomas Bangalter (you know, from Daft Punk) clocked that, and then he turned it into Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You.” Why not turn a great song into two? 

David Axelrod’s “Terri’s Tune” is another example, a wonderful bit of orchestral psych-rock from the 1970s. But do I want Inspectah Deck to flip it and hear Ghostface Killah rhyming on top? Yeah, I do.

Sampling, or, the repurposing of previously recorded music to create new music, is an incredible, if sometimes maligned, art form. And in today’s pop and dance music landscape, it’s a dominant music-making tool that any producer should know how to employ. 

There’s No One Way, or Wrong Way, to Sample

Both of the examples above are relatively straight-forward loops. But there’s no one way to sample. In fact, let’s define a few: 

• Looping Take a measure or several measures of a song and repeat them. Often, producers will impart unique processing, time-stretching, pitch-shifting, or effects, or add other instrumentation. Drums and bass in older music just don’t hit as hard as modern listeners expect them to, so they’re often added to a sampled loop even if the rest of it remains relatively unchanged. But, hey, if a loop can stand all on its own, that works too.
   
• Chopping Start with a loop, find its accents (or transients), and then rearrange them. The two of the beat could become the four, or maybe the three repeats and turns back to the one. “Micro-chopping” takes this a step, or many steps, further, sometimes slicing each and every hit within a portion of a song, and then rearranging them into a brand new rhythm and melody. With this technique, you can make something radically different from your source material, something that even an astute, record-head listener may not recognize.

• Layering: Combine elements of multiple sources. For example, take a drum break from one record, bass from another, piano from a third, a vocal hook from a fourth, and a few sound effects to place on top. This, in combination with chopping, can and has been taken to acrobatic extremes. The Bomb Squad, The Avalanches, Prince Paul, The Dust Brothers, and many other hyper-talented production groups and producers have created unique sonic fingerprints by layering a frankly unbelievable amount of source material on top of one another.

• Using readymade samples: Sampling started from isolating moments of records, which can, of course, can have legal implications (more on this later). In our day and age, there’s no shortage of sample packs and libraries that contain readymade loops and one-hits for producers to use (sometimes royalty-free, sometimes not).

• Interpolating: While not technically sampling, interpolating is a sampling-adjacent technique very common in pop music today, in which producers will replay chord progressions, melodies, or other parts from songs that they, in all honesty, probably would’ve sampled if the original artist or rightsholder didn’t want an exorbitant amount of money to clear the sample. 

No matter how producers approach it, sampling has been a bit of a lightning rod for criticism over the years, and not just in the ways you’d expect. There are, of course, some musicians out there who think sampling is basically just stealing. They tend to be older, and, coincidentally, they are often the very same musicians who have recycled the same 12-bar blues changes for decades. 

But if you’ve ever actually tried to make a new song out of another, you’ll know it’s not so easy. If these critics were to make an effort to create a beat, it would… probably be trash. You need imagination and taste and a bit of luck to make a sample-based song really gel.

Unfortunately, hordes of IP lawyers in the music industry have taken their lead and in the process have made the act of licensing or clearing samples tedious and expensive. That is, if you follow the above-board process. (Not legal advice, but… if you’re an up-and-coming producer, your time may be better spent sampling and creating the music you want to create rather than worrying about clearing samples. If you get to the point where your creation has attracted the attention of publishers and IP lawyers, you’re on your way.)

But criticism can come from all sides. There are some sample-based producers who cringe at peers they see as lazy. Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” for example, is composed mostly of readymade loops from a Splice sample pack layered on top of one another. Go on the producer side of TikTok or Reddit, and you’ll see a lot of producers making fun of it. 

But you know what? Sabrina’s producer heard a hit where others heard nothing special. And there are many similar stories of songs that started from humble sample sources and ending up making huge impressions all around the world. 

The main part of Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood” is a stock loop from the Suzuki Omnichord. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” is built around a Logic/GarageBand loop, “Vintage Funk Kit 03,” that literally anyone with an Apple device could’ve found and used and ridden to the top of the charts too. 

Hearing the possibilities of a sample and then running with it is the art of sampling, no matter how much you chop it up. Again, it’s about hearing the possibility that a moment of music has, and then doing everything you can and need to do to bring that possibility to life.

How to Get Started With Sampling

Sampling is a trip, and it can connect the music you’re making with the history of recorded music in myriad ways. Its roots stretch back to early turntablism and the heady days of experimental tape manipulation, and literally any moment of recorded history can be made new again if placed in the fresh context of a new song. 

Accordingly, there are countless ways to do it. You could do it like they used to and sample vinyl records into an Akai S-series sampler, an Ensoniq ASR-10, or another piece of 1980s or ’90s gear with lots of mojo but limited capabilities (by today’s standards at least).

But if you are truly new to producing and sampling, you are best-off starting with a digital audio workstation (DAW) and a MIDI controller. Use Apple’s free GarageBand—the “Sampler” within the “Keyboard” virtual instrument is a surprisingly versatile tool that will give you a taste—or use the more professional but still very affordable Logic and its own Sampler instrument.

Ableton’s Live 12 Intro also includes a Sampler instrument, and if you’re at all interested in dance or hip-hop production, you ought to just jump into the Ableton ecosystem. 

Adding a MIDI controller is what is going to allow you to get hands-on with sampling (which is significantly less fun if you’re just clicking around on a mousepad). Your biggest decision is whether you want to go with a keys-based controller, with a traditional piano-style keyboard, or a pad-based controller, which will give you a grid of 16 or more pads to trigger different loops or hits. (Not sure which? Go with the keyboard. You can assign keys to act like pads, and you can play chords and melodies on it more easily, so it’s really the best of both worlds.)

Once you start to get your head around sampling, you can take it in a lot of different directions. The MPC workflow is world-renowned for a reason. MPCs of the ’80s and ’90s set the template for the 16-pad grid layout, and today’s modern versions like the MPC One and MPC Live II are basically classic MPCs with fully functioning DAWs inside. 

The Roland SP-404 MKII, the most recent iteration of Roland’s classic sampler line, is an incredibly affordable and versatile way to make sample-based music without staring at a computer screen. 

So if you’ve got the itch to start sampling, by all means, take one of these routes to make it happen. Even if your tracks don’t end up sounding the way you want them to, you’ll at least learn a new level of appreciation for sample-based producers. And you’ll be awed by other producers’ abilities in a whole new way.