Musicians across all genres are familiar with the endless search for eclectic sounds. Those sounds that immediately command their listeners’ attention, piquing their curiosity and drawing them deeper into the track.
Even if you’re a musician limited by meager means, these sounds are often achievable through basic sampling – transforming organic and ordinary sounds into unrecognizable hybrids. This gives your music a unique edge, a sonic signature that’s never been heard anywhere else.
Yamaha, Casio and ‘80s Toy Samplers
Yamaha and Casio both produced sampling keyboards in the mid-’80s, either intended as toys or as gateway drugs to harder sampling. These models can work miracles for distorting organic sounds through the prism of lo-fi digital processing.
The Yamaha VSS-30 gained notoriety for its use all over Sigur Ros’s ( ) album. It can record up to 2.2-seconds through an internal mic or mono RCA input and smash multiple samples into a single 8-bit pancake that is automatically pitched up and down across the keyboard.
It also offers a rudimentary set of envelope, modulation and waveshaping parameters that can turn the human voice or a dog bark or the sound of two black holes colliding into patches variously creepy, retro or dinky.
I’ve gotten great results by taking pre-recorded vocals from an existing session, sampling them through the VSS-30’s RCA-in, and then crafting a patch from the same source material as the original song. The result is strangely processed and disembodied.
As the VSS-30 can’t save patches, I’ll sometimes resample them into Ableton or Logic’s EXS24 to dress them up with further synthesis and create a playable software instrument. In the session below, I ran the word “how” from the lead vocal through the VSS-30 to craft a pad distinct to the song:
In response to Yamaha’s VSS-30, Casio offered a similar keyboard in the SK-1. Casio’s model features slightly fewer sound-editing capabilities, but it does include portamento and some built in lo-fi drum sounds. Its successor, the SK-5, went further into drum sample territory by adding four trigger pads to the keyboard.
Any of these three keyboards can usually be found in the range of $100-150.
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8-bit Sampling, Synths and Sequencing with Nintendo’s Game Boy
If you want to simultaneously stoke your nostalgia and get down and dirty in the 8-bit mud, Nintendo’s Game Boy sound card offers a single sampling channel (in addition to 3 synth channels and a noise oscillator).
Chip musicians have long since hacked the Boy Wonder’s electronics with “tracker” software, such as Little Sound DJ. When used on an emulator or on your actual Game Boy, Little Sound DJ can load in your own samples, as well as a number of classic drum machines sampled through 8-bit goggles.
The learning curve is a bit steeper, but Chipocrite can get you started with his free course on creating chip music.
Using Software Samplers to Transform Sounds
Most DAWs feature a native sampler plugin, such as Logic Pro’s EXS24 and Ableton’s aptly-named “Sampler.” These can also be powerful tools for processing and mangling familiar sounds, whether used after or independent of the types of hardware discussed above.
Even before dipping into third-party plugins, the Ableton Sampler and EXS24 contain everything you’d find on a basic subtractive synthesizer: filters, envelopes, and LFOs as modulation sources. The difference is that, rather than using oscillators as your primordial clay, you can create interesting “synthy” sounds from any audio you feed into the sampler. Examples can range from a few chords played on your guitar to the voicemail your mother left you last week.
The tutorial below highlights some of the most powerful parameters in Ableton’s Sampler for making interesting sounds out of acoustic instruments. It includes a pitch envelope, stereo spread options, and even frequency modulation.
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Granular Synths: Shredding and Rebuilding Sounds
Granular synthesis can also be a fun way to distort and mangle sounds, from coating your sample in a slight film of digital blips to completely shredding it apart and reassembling it in an unrecognizable manner.
Granular synths (which are always digital softsynths) read different parts of a sample in tiny “grains” of varying sizes. You’re able to tweak which parts of the file are played back, the size and frequency of grains, as well as their envelope, pitch and playback direction. Using organic source material, you’re able to create wild sounds that are unobtainable by any other method.
This method is especially effective for pads and soundscapes, but experimentation and creative use of randomness can take you far beyond your audio source. German sound designer Simon Stockhausen offers a number of excellent tutorials to get you started tweaking, and Steinberg makes an easy-to-use and versatile software called Padshop. Padshop resembles a traditional synth and comes with an array of presets. At $50 for Padshop or $80 for Padshop Pro, it’s a reasonable and worthwhile investment.
“The Mangle” is an independently developed plugin for only $25 that offers surprising versatility but requires more granular programming know-how. Steinberg’s flagship – Halion 5 – offers perhaps the most thorough set of tools for granular sound design, though it bears a hefty price tag of $350.
On the other hand, SoundToys “Crystalizer” plugin and Red Panda’s “Particle” stompbox allow you to use granular methods as delays to dress up input signals without selecting a sample.
All in All, Make It Weird
Make sure to keep an ear out not only for what sounds good, but also for what sounds strange. Capitalizing on the limitations of technology can paradoxically add new life to sounds that we’ve heard a million times before.
In the words of Radiolab producer (and electronic music guru) Jad Abumrad, “[I strive] to create sounds that are drawn from the familiar but are then made strange because the world is strange. Human experience is weird. It’s full of wonder, but it’s also full of fear and oddness.”
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