Fun With Samples

The keyboard and the computer are wonderful tools for you to write with. Unfortunately, if you read most keyboard magazines, many seem to think that, unless you are using the newest patches and samples, your music can sound dated before you even get it out to the public. You could spend hundreds of dollars buying equipment and/or software to keep the newest sounds, but there is an easier way to do this—make your own samples and use them in your songs. All you need is a microphone and a cord and/or connector to hook your mic up to your computer, or even a sampling keyboard or tape recorder. Now you just need to put your grey cells in gear, and off we go to conquer another facet of songwriting. Here are a few ideas to get you going….

SAMPLED VOICES

This is one of the most common sampling uses. You could have a gal giving a sexy spoken tidbit like “Ooooh, yeah!” or some other sounds, like Jeff Beck does in his new song “Dirty Mind.” In a few well-known songs, Like Guns and Roses’ “Civil War,” the artists had a sound bite from some celebrity—a speech or a familiar line from a movie or TV show. You can also take snippets that someone like you have sung—notes or phrases—and play with the pitch and/or use various voice effects to make it sound better (or worse) or different. On some programs/instruments, you can even enter these as notes on your keyboard or as samples on your drum pad, and trigger them at will, just as if they were notes to be played. In this way, you could have an entire chorus of you at your disposal, or just introduce your song with a moving speech from a favorite person. A person making various noises, too, can always be used, along the lines of screams, laughs, animal calls and whistles.

If you decide to use material that is not your own, though, make sure that you get permission to use it in your song, first, before you try selling or pitching the piece. That person may not want to be associated with what you are doing, or they may expect a cut of the profits or at least a licensing fee. Better to be turned down than to find yourself in court, so do your research first and avoid the hassle.

SOUND EFFECTS

There may be lots of spoken effects, but then there is the ever-popular sound of broken glass or a metal pipe being hit. Some of these may already be loaded as samples into equipment you have, but it’s also fun to do these on your own, and use them just as if they were instruments or notes from an instrument. You may be able to create a much better handclap sample than is loaded on your machine, for example, and could load a bunch of handclaps at varying pitches enough to create all the notes of a song if you like. Adding the sound of a tire screech instead of a cornet note in one spot could really set off the words of your song if that is something you are writing about at that point. I personally love the way that Supertramp opened their song “Even In The Quietest Moments” with a bunch of bird calls—it really gave you the feeling that you were in the woods just trying to enjoy that point in time. Billy Joel’s “Allentown” does the same with some nice percussion sounds that give you the feeling of being in a steel mill. Who says you have to actually pull out that chainsaw on stage? The important idea here is to use these just like you would any other instrument you’d like to add to your mix. Let it add to the song and emphasize the word pictures you are trying to create, and blend in smoothly with the other elements to create a richer whole.

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