How to make samples sound better in your musicSampling services like Splice and Tracklib have made music producers more familiar with sampling than ever before. Many artists are still digging through crates for gems; Jamie xx, The Avalanches, TOKiMONSTA, The Alchemist and more are beloved for their creative flips, but the legal minefield of clearing samples is tough to contend for most beatmakers.

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So, Tracklib and Splice are most people’s go-tos — but that doesn’t mean that you’ll reach the top of the Beatport charts by just dropping a few Splice loops into Ableton Live and adding some reverb. We may be past the days of clunky hardware samplers with cryptic operating systems but there’s still an art to sampling, to getting unconnected snippets from different songs to sit well together harmonically and sonically.
Here’s an example of a song with samples borrowed from two different, unrelated songs with some additional instrumentation and production, including filtering, EQ and an LFO tool affecting volume.

One crucial caveat: sampling can be a legal landmine, with all sorts of copyright dangers just waiting to blow up in your face. The long and the short of it is: clear your samples before releasing your track.
Choose high-quality samples
There’s a phrase in computer science that goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” If your starting data is bad, your end product will be too. This works for samples as well. Always start out with the highest quality samples that you can. You can reduce the audio quality later artificially but if a dodgy YouTube rip is your starting point, it’ll be a dodgy end result too.
One way to make sure your samples are high quality is with a site like Tracklib. Essentially an online record shop for sampling, it gives subscribers access to full, high-quality songs to use in their own tracks. And, depending on your subscription tier, they’ll even clear the sample rights for you.To find a sample that gets you inspired, search by genre, year or BPM. You can then loop sections of the song and even audition it with a beat layered on top. This cut, Disco Blue by The Phantoms, has a funky beat and plenty of melodic content to play with.

Arrange the samples
When working with samples, don’t be afraid to use multiple sections from the same source song. Find two parts with some contrast and arrange them on your DAW timeline to create verse and chorus-like sections.
In this example, Disco Blue has been split into two parts with distinctly different energy quotients. The first works well for verse-type sections and builds while the second, with its more intense, horn-led energy, can function as a drop. Try chopping up and repeating certain phrases to create original melodies and fills to act as turnarounds to lead into song changes.

Transpose layered samples
One of the joys of making a sample-based track is finding unrelated samples that work well together. This can require some trial and error, but once you find two that gel, it’s like a strange kind of alchemy at work.
Although there’s something to be said for ignoring music theory and throwing caution to the wind, you’ll probably find that transposing samples to the same key helps them sit better together. It’ll also give you more freedom to add your own melodies and basslines later.
This rap acapella from the 1980s has a lot of attitude and works to some extent when layered on top of the disco loop. However, it’s in D flat minor while the main groove is G minor. To get them in line, you need to transpose the vocal from D up to G. Do this by counting the semitones between the notes (a semitone is every key, white or black). There are six notes between D flat and G, so raise the overall sample by six semitones. The two now work extremely well together, with a palpable increase in energy.

Achieve a cohesive groove
Another way to ensure that samples from different songs gel together is by imprinting them all with the same groove and swing.
Most DAWs can do this. In Ableton, for example, open the loop whose groove you want to capture so that you can see the waveform. Right-click on it and choose Extract Groove(s). The captured groove should now appear in your Groove Pool. Next, go ahead and drag the groove onto the target samples. Now the loops should all swing together. Feel free to adjust the timing for a looser feel.

Stay in key
Now that you have your samples arranged and sitting well together, it’s time to add some original music to the track. This can include basslines, melodies, pads and strings, or whatever your track needs to feel full and complete.
In this example, everything is based on the original disco samples, which are in the key of G minor. Accordingly, any new musical phrases should stay within these harmonic confines, so G, A, B flat, C, D, E flat and F notes are available for use. Although the original sample has a slap bass it could use something with a little more weight, so a synth bassline feels appropriate. An additional melody played on iZotope Iris 2 stands out due to having a very different sonic signature than the largely acoustic sounds of the original sample.

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