Sample Focus

Inspiration doesn’t wait for you to walk into your recording studio. It comes at the most unexpected (and often inconvenient) moments, and as a creative person, you have two options: you try to keep those ideas in mind for as long as necessary and hope for the best, or you build a system that allows you to sketch those ideas out on the fly. Today we’ll focus on the tools you can use to build a portable recording studio to draft ideas, or even to produce a full song.

The virtual instruments we use make a huge difference, and we tend to assume that they’re all that matters. But there are certain filters that can bring any sound to life, and one of them is Filterverse, the latest plugin from Polyverse. We used Filterverse for one of our Sample Focus challenges, where we asked producers to create their own sounds with it for a chance to win the full Polyverse bundle.

The secondhand market is full of audio equipment that became obsolete – but is now being reborn into a second life for modern production. Think of consumer cassette decks with poor frequency response and breakable parts, or early digital processors that are noisy and bandwidth-limited. If you really want to bring sounds to the table that no one else has, you need to think out of the box – and some of these cheap hardware pieces are the way forward.

Magnetic Magazine recently interviewed Sample Focus founder Daniel Trostli about what prompted him to start SF, producers' struggles with traditional sample libraries, and the importance of the human touch in the modern music ecosystem. Read the full interview below. Marco Sebastiano Alessi is a writer and music producer. He's the founder of Naviar Records.

Time stretching allows you to adjust the BPM of a sample without changing its pitch, which means you can make basically any loop fit a project. It is one of those things that seems so simple at first, but the more you look at it, the more convoluted it becomes. The main problem is that time stretching can ruin a sample really quickly; stretch it too much and you’ll get weird digital artefacts that have no place in a record.

Sound design is the funnest part of making a song. If you could just tweak cool sounds for days instead of finishing songs, wouldn't that be wonderful? You, of course, need more plugins that'll make that problem much worse, in a very good way. They'll give you a whole new sonic universe to make sounds no human or other entity has ever heard in history. And that, after all, is the real differentiator your music needs – food for your brain and your music.

Drum and bass covers a lot of ground, and each subgenre shares a set of technical demands, with tight drums and well-mixed bass that deliver weight and precision. However, creatively, it’s extremely diverse, and you need to fill your lockers with some of the best DnB plugins to achieve the creative depth and sonic potential you need. Read on for 16 DnB plugins that earn their place, what each does, and how they fit into different DnB subgenre production techniques.

In this day and age, nothing stops you from making music. From the dozens of DAWs out there to the powerful and often inexpensive plugins, you can wake up one morning thinking you want to have a crack at music production, and have a fully functional audio workstation by the evening. What a time to be alive! And yet, with so many options available, comes confusion; how do you choose your first DAW, one that wouldn’t cost you a fortune while giving you everything you need to get started?

I might be biased, but I think sample libraries are a godsend. Thousands upon thousands of sounds you can access in no time, all polished, copyright-free and ready for use. What else can you possibly need to make music? Here’s the thing: if you want to make music that sounds truly unique, you have to use samples no one has. And the rarest samples are the ones you create or record yourself.

This week, Sample Focus is partnering with Polyverse to offer our community some of the most innovative plugins for sound design, mixing, and deep real-time modulation. 🏆 SF Contest: Filterverse Sound Design Challenge Create a short sound design piece using Filterverse and show us how you made it. Make it 30 seconds long or shorter. Use any SF samples or sounds you want.