Samplers

Samplers For Sale on Reverb

If you want to sample music or other audio to use in music production, then you'll need a sampler. Samplers work by capturing a moment of music or audio—whether a single word, a drum beat, a melody, or a whole song—and then letting users edit, chop, re-arrange, stretch, add effects to, and play back the original source material.

Sampling is a foundational element to hip-hop and many forms of dance music like house, techno, and jungle (aka drum and bass), but its possibilities are endless. You can use samples to add spice to your own original compositions or build whole new songs out of existing snippets of music. Everyone from Top 40 pop producers to experimental ambient artists use sampling in their work today.

What Is a Hardware Sampler?

While there are many software samplers available within DAWs and other music software tools, hardware samplers are physical instruments that allow music makers to get hands-on with their sampling. Roland, Korg, Akai, Teenage Engineering, and many other electronic music gear companies offer samplers with their own unique styles, workflows, and added features (like sequencing or digital effects).

Drum Machine vs. Sampler: What's the Difference?

Samplers let you record samples and play them back, and those original sound sources can be made out of anything, which means they may or may not include drum sounds.

Drum machines, on the other hand, primarily let you play back drum sounds. These drum sounds are sometimes created through synthesis—or through sampling. Many modern drum machines allow users to upload their own samples in addition to whatever sounds the device comes with. Which is all to say: There can be quite a gray area between what is a drum machine what is a sampler.

If you're not sure which is right for you, explore Reverb's drum machines category page too.