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Throwing a sampling party

edited October 2014 in General App Discussion

I’m throwing my first sampling party tonight. It will probably be a strange party, but other than that I don’t know what to expect. Winging it will be half the fun.

Dozens of musicians are coming to the party, along with their guests. Lots of people are bringing food, but foodless guests are also welcome. I’m sure that there will be plenty to eat. I gave up drugs and drinking years ago, but alcohol will be served to loosen up the people who want to be loosened.

Most of the crowd will be 30 or older so I don’t expect things to get too wild. After the sampling work is over there will be an informal line up of a band in the house, with any guests free to join in and drop out from song to song. I invited the nearby neighbors as a preemptive strike against noise complaints. The closest neighbors are pretty cool overall.

Many of the people are multi-instrumentalists, so there should be more than 50 instruments to sample. There will even be a lute and a bagpipe, which I’m psyched about for some reason. I’m not sure if the bagpiper will be any good. I’m not even sure if I know the difference between good and bad bagpiping.

For that matter I’m not entirely sure why I’m attempting the whole thing. I don’t really know all that much about sampling. I hope to keep everything in tune, but other than that anything goes.

I figure that experimental sampling is easily a good enough excuse for a party, and I’ll probably get some useful recordings from it, so it seems like it might be an above average Saturday night.

I’m currently woodshedding in the land of dirt-cheap real estate, which in my case means I was able to afford a big old house with a small barn ( former carriage house? ) in back that I’ve turned into a recording studio.

My mics are set up for piano and guitar. I hope that works well for recording a wide range of instruments. I’m sure some things will record better than others.

I’m going to transfer the raw recordings onto thumb drives for any of the musicians who want to mess with them. I have no idea if anyone other than me will ever be interested in working with the samples.

There are a lot of things that I want to test.

I want to find out if sampling a blend of instruments creates something different than individual samples blended together later. The same thing goes for sampling chords played from various instruments.

I want to find out if sampling entire scales from an instrument is a better idea than just sampling one note and shifting the pitches afterwards. I don’t mind multiplying the work if I can get better results.

I want to sample set-length phrases from a bunch of different instruments at specific BPMs, but only one instrument at a time. As long as they’re each in sync with a click track then hopefully the samples will be in sync in all sorts of interesting combinations later, even when chopped into slices.

Depending on the mood we might also try some vocal sampling. I want to break some of my songs down into word by word sampling from many voices. That could be tons of fun to play around with later.

One of my vague goals is to sample different tones. This sounds sappy, but I even want to see if the soul of the barn can somehow be imparted into many of the samples. I love the sound of the place and I hope to get some tones in the samples that I can’t buy anywhere.

I wrote this post to try to calm myself down, but that didn't work. I’m halfway into a borderline psychotic pre-party buzz. I’m about to be bouncing off the walls. I’ve never had a forum conservation in my entire life so I’m someone who should never be an OP, but I wanted to share the idea of throwing a sampling party.

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