Well, I guess I'll start with the basics, although I'm sure you all know this already. Here goes, rEalm's sampling tips:

1. Always sample at the loudest level possible without clipping the signal. Unless of course you're after that type of effect, rough and dirty samples work good for drum loops.

2. Retrigger loops every measure, instead of letting the sampler loop them continuously. Makes things tighter, and prevents drift over time. Also, this way you can leave the sample a little bit longer than it has to be, and not worry so much about setting loops points exactly where they should be.

3. Even though your sampler may be able to sample at 44.1 or higher, you don't need to use it. Some instruments like synths, brass, even woodwinds sound just as good at 22.05 or lower. This will also help you to free up that precious memory too. Save the higher sampling rates for things like cymbals and pianos.

4. Organize your samples wisely right from the beginning. Setting up folders or partitions ahead of time will save you hours renaming and reorganizing samples and programs later on. I categorize my samples/programs into the following partitions:

5. Save constantly! There's nothing worse than accidentally hitting the power button on your sampler in the middle of a time consuming process. I back up frequently to a ZIP drive as it's faster, and then once I'm done, I save to floppy too. That way I always have two copies of my important samples.

6. Drum hits in your sampler should have their gate time set to maximum. In the Akai, this parameter is called "PLAY TO END" that way, you only have to have a short note in your sequencer trigger a much longer sample. It'll save you oodles of polyphony in your sequencer.

7. You can get that weird Fat Boy Slim effect by setting a loop in the sample approximate to a 1/16th note in length, then manually scroll the loop start point while recording to another sampler or recorder. Might take some practice to get the timing right though.

***Let's take a break and do some math, shall we?***

First, if you want to find out the millisecond equivalent of a BPM, you would divide 60,000 by the BPM, right? So for example, let's say you wanted to set up a delay in an effects unit that doesn't sync to MIDI clock, and displays it's delay settings in Ms. We'll assume our song is at 140 BPM. So that would give us a 1/4 note equivalent to 428.5 Ms. Now if you sample a measure long loop, and you wanted to set up the loop point to be exactly 1 measure long you would do the following. First multiply 428.5 x 4 to give you the Ms equivalent of one measure (at 140 BPM). This comes out to 1714 Ms or 1.714 seconds for a 1 measure loop. Now if you sampled the loop at 44.1Khz, you would multiply 44100 x 1.714 to determine the exact number of samples in a 1 measure loop. In this example it comes out to 75587 samples in length. Thus you can accurately set your loop length, or do things like timestretch to an exact amount to fit a particular song. Did I do that right? Ok, back to our regularly scheduled program.

8. Use your sampler to determine the correct pitch of a sample. Say you sample a vocal tidbit, something from a movie for example. You set it all up, get it to loop perfectly, but it still doesn't sound like it fits with the rest of the song. Perhaps it's not in the right key? Instead of blindly pitch shifting the sample until you get it right (pitchshifting is the longest DSP process in any sampler), throw it into the sampler, then just play up and down the keyboard until you find the correct pitch. Now you can throw it back into the 808 or whatever you have, and pitch shift to exactly where you need, and not have to worry about restretching it to fit your song again. Easy!

9. If you don't like it now, you'll never use it later. Don't save samples that really don't get you excited, be honest, are you really going to go back later and use it? I always delete the crap I end up acquiring after about a month. That leads me to another good point:

10. Once a month or so, go through all your samples and make sure everything is organized practically. Delete all of the crap you acquired over the last month. Rename your samples so that they are easily recognizable. Also make sure your files and directories are all laid out nicely. Basically it's like spring cleaning your sampler.

11. Hide it if it's not legal. The best bet is to pitch shift up or down, even a semitone can make a huge difference in masking a sample's origins. Bit reduction, distortion/overdrive, ring modulation, vocoding, and detuning all work well in this respect too.

/ Audio/ Other Tips