The Art of Sampling

Sampling turns existing recordings into new music. It built hip-hop, jungle and much of modern pop. This lesson covers where samples come from, how to chop and stretch them, how to "flip" a sample into something new, and the legal basics you need to know before you release.

What is Sampling?

Sampling means taking a piece of an existing recording and reusing it in a new track. A sample can be anything: a single drum hit, a two-bar drum break, a vocal phrase, a chord from a record, or a field recording of rain.

Producers use samples in two main ways:

• One-shots: single hits (a kick, a snare, a stab) that you play from a sampler or drum machine.
• Loops and phrases: longer pieces that you loop, chop or rearrange.

The tool that plays samples is a sampler. It maps audio to keys or pads so you can trigger it with MIDI, change its pitch, and shape it with envelopes and filters.

A Short History

Breakbeats and hip-hop

In the Bronx in the early 1970s, DJ Kool Herc noticed that dancers went wildest during the break: the part of a funk or soul record where everything drops out except the drums. He used two copies of the same record on two turntables to switch between them and extend the break. That technique is the root of hip-hop.

A few breaks became the most sampled recordings in history:

• "Funky Drummer" by James Brown (1970), drummed by Clyde Stubblefield.
• "Amen, Brother" by The Winstons (1969). Its 4-bar drum solo, played by Gregory C. Coleman, is known as the Amen break. Hip-hop producers sampled it in the 1980s, and jungle and drum & bass producers later sped it up and chopped it into countless new patterns. The band famously received no royalties for that use.
• "Apache" by the Incredible Bongo Band (1973), a favorite of early hip-hop DJs.

Samplers and the MPC

Digital samplers made this possible in the studio. The E-mu SP-1200 (1987) had only about 10 seconds of 12-bit sample time, and its gritty sound shaped late-80s and 90s hip-hop. The Akai MPC60 (1988), designed with Roger Linn, combined a sampler with a sequencer and 16 pressure-sensitive pads. MPCs became the classic hip-hop production tool, and the pad grid they made famous is now on controllers everywhere.

In the early 2000s, producers such as Kanye West and Just Blaze popularized chipmunk soul: soul vocal samples sped up so they sound higher and faster.

Finding Samples

Crate digging is the old-school practice of searching through second-hand record shops for obscure records with usable breaks and loops. Many producers still do it, both in shops and online.

Chopping

Chopping means cutting a sample into smaller pieces, then rearranging or replaying them. A chopped sample can sound completely different from the original.

1. Find the part you like: a 1–4 bar phrase, a chord, a vocal word.
2. Cut at the transients. A transient is the sharp start of a sound, like a drum hit or a plucked note. Cutting just before a transient gives clean chops.
3. Trim to zero crossings. Cut where the waveform crosses the center line, or add a tiny fade of about 2–10 ms, to avoid clicks.
4. Assign each chop to a pad or key in a sampler.
5. Play a new pattern using the chops.

Slicing to MIDI

Most DAWs can do steps 2–4 for you. They detect the transients, cut the audio into slices, and map each slice to its own MIDI note:

• Ableton Live: right-click the clip → Slice to New MIDI Track.
• FL Studio: load the audio into Slicex or Fruity Slicer.
• Logic Pro: open the audio in Quick Sampler and choose Slice mode.

Now you can rearrange a drum break just by moving MIDI notes. This is how jungle producers rebuilt the Amen break into endless variations.

Time-Stretching vs Repitching

A sample rarely matches your track's tempo. You have two ways to fix that:

Warping

Warping is time-stretching with markers. You place warp markers on the beats of a sample, and the software stretches the audio between them so every beat lands on your grid. This also fixes loops played by humans whose tempo drifts. Your DAW's stretch mode matters:

• Ableton Live: Warp modes such as Beats (drums), Tones (single melodies), Complex Pro (full mixes) and Re-Pitch (classic repitching).
• FL Studio: the sample's time-stretch modes in Channel settings, or audio clips stretched in the Playlist.
• Logic Pro: Flex Time, with modes like Slicing for drums and Polyphonic for full mixes.

Flipping a Sample

Flipping a sample means transforming it so much that it becomes a new idea, rather than just looping someone else's music. Ways to flip:

• Rearrange chops into a new melody or rhythm.
• Repitch up or down several semitones to change the mood.
• Reverse a chop for a swelling, dreamy effect.
• Filter it: low-pass for a muffled, distant feel, or high-pass to thin it out and make room for your bass.
• Layer your own drums, bass and chords over it.
• Resample: record your processed sample to a new audio file, then chop that again.

Filtering is one of the most common moves. Hip-hop producers often low-pass a sampled loop to hide its original drums, or high-pass it so the new bassline and kick have space. Try it on a sampled drum loop below.

Now hear how a sample-based beat sits together. This boom bap pattern is the kind of beat producers built on the MPC and SP-1200 from chopped drum hits.

The Legal Side

Every commercial recording usually has two copyrights:

• The master (sound recording): owned by the record label or artist. Sampling the actual audio uses the master.
• The composition (publishing): the melody, chords and lyrics, owned by the songwriters and their publishers.

Clearance means getting permission from the owners, usually for a fee, a share of royalties, or both. To sample a recording directly, you normally need to clear both the master and the composition.

Interpolation

Interpolation means re-recording part of a song (replaying the melody or singing the lyric) instead of sampling the original audio. Because you're not using the original recording, you usually only need to clear the composition, not the master. This is often easier and cheaper, which is why it's common in pop.

Lessons from famous cases

• Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. (1991): a US court ruled against Biz Markie for sampling Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" without permission. After this case, labels began insisting that samples be cleared.
• "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (1997): The Verve sampled an orchestral version of a Rolling Stones song. After a dispute, the songwriting credit and royalties went to the Stones' side. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards returned their share to The Verve's Richard Ashcroft in 2019.

Safe options

• Use royalty-free sample packs and libraries, and keep a copy of the license terms.
• Record your own sounds.
• Interpolate instead of sampling, and clear the composition.
• Clear the sample before release, especially for anything commercial. Some distributors and platforms will remove tracks with uncleared samples. Read more in Releasing Music.

"It's only 2 seconds" and "I changed the pitch" are not legal defenses on their own. Even short or heavily processed samples can infringe copyright.