Samples and Sampling — Making Music Out of Someone Else's Sound

In 1948 a radio engineer in Paris took a tape recorder to a railway station. He recorded steam engines chuffing, whistles blowing, wheels striking rails — then went back to the studio, cut that tape up, spliced it, ran it backwards, and made a piece of music out of it. Not one instrument was played.

That is Pierre Schaeffer's Étude aux chemins de fer. It sounds strange today, but this four-minute collage of noise is where one idea starts — the idea that hip-hop, EDM and K-pop all stand on: a sound becomes raw material the moment it is recorded.

So what is a sample?

A sample is a recorded fragment of sound. One snare hit, one bar of guitar, four bars lifted off an old soul record, a door closing. Length and origin don't matter. If it was recorded and became a file, it's a sample.

Sampling is the craft of treating that fragment like an instrument — mapping it across a keyboard so it changes pitch, stretching it to the tempo of your song, chopping it up and putting the pieces back in a new order.

In practice people sort them into three kinds:

One-shots — a single sound that rings once and stops. Kick, snare, clap, cymbal. These are what you use when you program a drum pattern yourself.
Loops — a bar-length chunk that repeats seamlessly. Convenient, but the tempo and the key have already been decided for you.
Breaks — the section of an old funk or soul record where every other instrument drops out and only the drums are left. This is the raw material hip-hop was born from.

Waiting for the machines to catch up

It took a while for hardware to do what Schaeffer did with scissors and tape.

The Mellotron (1963) put a strip of tape under every key. Press a key, that tape plays. The flute on the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever is a Mellotron — a recording of a real flute, played from a keyboard.

The Fairlight CMI (1979) made that digital. Record anything through a microphone, and play it back across the whole keyboard: the first commercial digital sampling instrument. It cost as much as a house, so at first only Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock got to touch one.

That's Herbie Hancock on Sesame Street in 1983, explaining sampling to a group of kids by recording their voices and playing them back from the keys. Forty years on, nobody has explained it better in three minutes.

Then came the Akai MPC60 (1988). Designed by Roger Linn, it put sixteen pads and a sequencer in one box and made finger-drumming your samples the standard way to build a beat. Almost every drum screen in every DAW today inherits that layout.

When six seconds made a genre

Enough about hardware. The real story is in which sounds got picked.

In 1969 a soul band from Washington called The Winstons released a track named Amen, Brother. It was a B-side. Almost nobody heard it. Partway through, the drummer G. C. Coleman plays alone for about six seconds.

Those six seconds have since appeared on thousands of records. Jungle, drum and bass and breakcore are essentially genres built by speeding that fragment up and chopping it apart. N.W.A used it. Oasis used it. British TV adverts used it. It has a name: the Amen break.

The Winstons never saw a penny of it. Band leader Richard Spencer only learned decades later how widely his record had travelled, and it took until 2015 for two British DJs to run a fundraiser and hand him something.

There's a second story just like it. Clyde Stubblefield's twenty-odd seconds on James Brown's Funky Drummer (1970) turn up on well over a thousand records, from Public Enemy to LL Cool J. Stubblefield was paid almost nothing for it either.

Which is how this ended up in court

Early hip-hop took other people's records without asking. That worked for as long as nobody cared. Then three rulings changed the ground entirely.

Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. (1991). Biz Markie sampled Gilbert O'Sullivan without permission, got sued, and the judge opened his opinion with "Thou shalt not steal." From that point on, a sample was something you cleared in advance.

Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films (2005). The US Sixth Circuit went further: "Get a license or do not sample." Even a two-second guitar chord was no exception.

VMG Salsoul v. Ciccone (2016). Over a 0.23-second horn hit in a Madonna track, the Ninth Circuit went the other way — too short to matter. So even inside the US, the answer still depends on which court you're standing in.

The shape of it is this. To sample an existing record you have to clear two separate copyrights:

The composition — melody and harmony, held by the songwriter and their publisher.
The master — that specific recording, usually held by the label.

Clearing one is useless without the other. The more famous the record, the longer it takes, and the more likely you are to be asked for an advance plus a share of your royalties. For someone making music as a hobby, that door is effectively shut.

This is exactly why royalty-free sample packs exist. Somebody has cleared both layers up front and sold you the result with permission attached.

The handwork

Once you have a sample, you don't just drop it in — you work on it. The moves you'll use most:

Chopping — slicing one section into pieces, laying them across pads, and replaying them in a new order. This is what made J Dilla and Kanye West's names.
Time-stretching — changing the length to fit your tempo while the pitch stays put.
Pitch-shifting — the reverse. Old samplers moved pitch and length together when you changed playback speed (hence chipmunk vocals); now you can move one without the other.
Reversing — flip it backwards. A reversed cymbal sucks inward, which is why it's everywhere right before a section change.
Filtering — keep only the lows, or only the highs. Useful for erasing the original song and keeping just the texture.
Layering — stack several samples. If one kick isn't enough, put a kick with good low end under a kick with a sharp attack.

So where do samples come from now?

Back to something practical. If you want sound that is definitely free of copyright, look for CC0.

The phrase "free samples" is riskier than it sounds. Most of the time it means "you may use this in your music," not "you may redistribute it." Some require credit. And packs with no clear origin are sometimes just ripped out of commercial libraries.

CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) means the author waived every right — effectively public domain. You can use it commercially, modify it, and you don't even have to credit anyone. Places worth your time:

VCSL (Versilian Community Sample Library) — a large CC0 library of real recorded instruments, with everything you need to fill a drum kit.
FreePats — an older project, but it has acoustic drums and a lot of percussion neatly sorted.
Freesound — filter the licence to CC0 and only the safe results remain. Quality varies wildly, but it's good for unusual sounds.

We went down that road ourselves

This isn't secondhand. All ten drum sounds you hear in the Rhythm Lab on this site are CC0 — though it took one failed attempt to get there.

We went looking through VCSL first, wanting an acoustic kit. It turns out the CC0 acoustic libraries have no drum-kit kick in them at all. What they have is orchestral concert bass drums, which ring for over ten seconds: huge and slow, and completely unusable as a kick. We cut one to half a second, stripped the low-end boom, pushed the punch around 60 Hz and lifted the beater click around 3 kHz. Half a day went by, and it still sounded like a symphony orchestra.

So we changed direction. What you hear now is the Roland TR-808 sample set Michael Fischer took off the machine in 1994, released CC0 — a thing that sits directly on the history in this article. Somebody sampled an entire drum machine back when samplers were becoming everyone's, and thirty years later we are using it. The attack is far quicker, too: the concert drum peaked 11 milliseconds after its onset, the 808 kick at 3.7. That difference was half of why the lab used to feel out of time.

The hi-hat was harder. A real hi-hat is one pair of cymbals, so hitting closed while the open one is still ringing has to stop that sound dead. Play two one-shots on top of each other and you get both ringing at once, which is simply wrong. We had to write a choke rule into the playback engine.

🎹Try rhythm dictation with those sounds — open the Rhythm Lab→

Which gives this article its last line. You can put a good kit together out of CC0 alone. What's free is the money, not the time. We knew exactly which sounds we needed and still burned half a day, and it only ended once we accepted that the acoustic kit we wanted does not exist under CC0 and went and found a different one.

We started at a railway station and passed through a courtroom to get here. Now that you know what a sample is, the next question is how you actually get them when you're writing. You can spend half a day shaping your own, or you can pick from millions that are already shaped.

→ Splice — Why and How to Use It, and What a Sample Subscription Actually Buys

If it's the beat-making tools themselves you're curious about, there's this too.

→ The Instruments of Hip-Hop — the Tools That Build the Beat