Sampling – NITELIFE Audio

We take a closer look at one of the simplest yet most effective sampling techniques to have emerged from dance music: the filtered disco loop.

Filters have long been revered by electronic music producers. Although they were originally designed as tone controls to address particular sonic problems, dance music producers came along and misused filters in ways that took them far from their intended purpose. It was Chicago producer DJ Pierre who first bought the squelchy delights of a decent filter to the attention of other beatmakers. His tweaking of the filter cut off and resonance controls on his Roland 303 on 1987’s ‘Acid Trax’ by Phuture created the new genre of acid house and filters have been used extensively in dance music ever since. Although the very first samplers had no synthesis functions at all, it didn’t take long for manufacturers to begin making samplers with filters, envelopes and LFOs, bringing a whole new suite of sonic possibilities to working with samples.

Music Sounds Better With Filters

The filtered disco loop is a technique that has been used countless times in dance music and which never fails to work on a packed dance floor. You can hear it used in Pete Heller’s ‘Big Love’, Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ or Pepe Braddock’s sublime ‘Deep Burnt’. Essentially, this technique takes a sample loop and then puts it through a low pass filter. The audio then sounds muffled, with no top and very little mid-range, as though you’re listening to it through a wall while it’s being played at a house party next door. Then slowly the filter opens up to gradually reveal the rest of the frequencies. Careful manipulation of the filter on a track can tease and tantalise a crowd before delivering a knock-out blow. It’s a simple but brilliant technique that has destroyed dance floors for years, largely because it is a hugely effective way of building and then releasing tension in a song. The use of the filter to tease an audience with a disco loop was so popular, it became the basis of an entire genre, in the shape of French house.

To get this technique working in your tracks, you’ll need to understand what filters do. Although they perform a similar role to EQ in that both adjust the tone, filters work in a different way. EQ boosts or reduces a range of frequencies, filters let audio above a certain frequency pass whilst attenuating anything outside those limits. So a filter doesn’t just either boost or cut a particular frequency like an EQ, it entirely removes all the frequencies below or above a certain limit. It’s the changing of this limit – the moving of the cutoff frequency by the producer during a filter sweep – that provide the characteristic sound of this technique. There are a few different types of filters, but here we’re going to be looking at the low pass filter, which, as it name suggests, lets the low frequencies pass whilst attenuating the rest of the frequency spectrum.

“None Shall Pass!”

One of the key things to consider when using filters in your productions is the slope of the filter. The slope refers to how – either gently or sharply – the filter cuts off the frequencies and is measured in decibels per octave (‘dB octave’). The filter slope determines the reduction of signals outside the ‘pass’ frequency and gives a filter its particular sonic character. Generally, this slope will range from 12dB to 24dB per octave. If a 12dB filter is set to 100Hz, then any audio an octave below that at 50Hz will be reduced by 12dB, and any audio an octave below that at 25Hz would be reduced by 24dB and so on.

For the purposes of making a looped disco sample into a fat pumping dancefloor destroyer, all we really need to know is that the steeper the slope, the more pronounced the effect of the filter and, when used in tandem with higher resonance settings, the more intense the ‘squelch’ effect of the filter. Essentially you would use a lower slope for gentle tonal shaping, and a higher slope for performing an ‘in your face’ filter sweep.

Your DAW will have a number of filter types available and there are plenty of decent filter plug-ins on the market, but in Logic and Ableton the auto filter defaults to a 24db low pass and in Reason, the ECF-24 standard filter is a 12db low pass. In Ableton Live you can drag an Auto Filter from the effects onto the sample you want to filter. In Logic, you can select the track you want to filter, re-route the audio to an empty bus and add the AutoFilter to the track that Logic will create. In Reason, you can just right click on the instrument you want to filter and add a filter unit from the menu.

If you’re after the true sound of French filtered house, you like the tactile interaction of physically tweaking the controls, and you’re feeling particularly flush with cash (or maybe you just hate money and you want less of it), then you could invest in one of the genuine filter units used by Daft Punk and their peers. Your choices are; The Mutator, made by Mutronics, based on technology originally developed for analogue synthesis in the 60s and which was the go-to stereo analog filter and envelope follower for many of the bands and musicians who shaped the 90s sound.

Another option is the MFC42, a true analog filter module designed by Akai for their MPC-series gear. You can use it to process any sound source since it has basic 1/4″ inputs and outputs and MIDI. It has genuine analog filters for that warmer tone with Lowpass, Highpass, Bandpass, and Notch filter types. You can find them on eBay from time to time for a price that isn’t too crazy (around £800) and they really do have a wonderful sound which instantly transports you back to the squelchy funk of the filter-disco-loop era.

Unfortunately, in the case of The Mutator, an important component was discontinued by the manufacturer which effectively killed production. Since then, it’s became very much a collector’s piece, and the only way artists/engineers can get their hands on it is via auctions or eBay. We’ve seen some go for as high as an eye-watering £2800. There is a Softube plug-in version, although as we haven’t tested it we couldn’t definitively say whether it’s an accurate recreation, but Softube overall are an excellent developer so there’s a good chance it’s very close.

In terms of what you’re applying the filter to, you may want to process the entire track, an individual sample, or a group of samples. Some producers leave a hat or a clap unfiltered to hold the rhythm together and some leave the kick outside the filter sweep so that all the low-end energy doesn’t get over-amplified during the sweep. Other tracks feature filter sweeps where every single part is filtered – it’s a creative decision, depending on how you want your tune to sound and what effect you’re aiming for.

If you’re going to filter the entire song rather than just individual samples, in Ableton you can simply drag a filter onto the main outputs, and in Reason you can right-click on the hardware interface unit and drop a filter straight onto it. In Logic, you’d just select all the parts, re-route to an empty bus and add the filter there. Alternatively, you can use Logic’s ‘summing stack’ command. The Autofilter in Logic allows you to adjust the level of dry and wet signal and for this technique, you need to have the signal entirely wet. LIVE and Logic’s auto filters should default to 100% wet, and Reason’s ECF has no dry/wet controls at all.

Cutoff And Resonance: A Deadly Duo

Once you’ve got your filter in place (and you’ve remortgaged your house for the Mutator), you’re ready to get tweaking. Moving the cut off control anti-clockwise will slowly reduce more and more of the top and then middle frequencies until you’re just left with the lows and that characteristic muffled effect. Turn the control completely to the left and the sound will disappear entirely. Now you can start to increase the resonance whilst sweeping and you should start to hear some serious squelching as the filter moves through the frequencies. This is caused by the resonance control adding a little boost to the frequencies just above the cut off point. It might be tempting to simply turn the resonance up high but you have to beware – high levels of resonance can provoke extremely loud volume peaks as you perform your sweep.

This is a genuine health and safety issue if you’re working on headphones, and can also cause you to shred your monitors if you’re not careful, so we would strongly advise caution at this stage. We would also recommend using a compressor to reign in the inevitable peaks, and maybe also try adjusting the resonance up and down manually as you sweep the cut off to maintain a more even volume level. Depending on the audio material and the behaviour of the particular filter you’re using, you may also find that you need to turn the resonance down once the filter is fully open to avoid a drop in volume or an over-sizzled sample. In many cases, it works well to automate the resonance along with the cutoff for maximum character and vibe. It can also help your record to feel a lot more human and ‘Alive.’ That was a Daft Punk reference, in case you missed it.

The trick is to use the filter to give little glimpses of the sample and to hint at its existence to build tension. You can do this with smooth sweeps or experiment with more radical tweaks – experimentation is half the fun. The cutoff and resonance controls are a gateway into hours of filtering and squelching and can be a key part of a live performance too. It’s such an effective technique that entire records have been built around nothing more than a filtered disco loop and a beat. Hell, some artists have built an entire career from a beat and clever filtering of a choice groove. However, while sampling chunks of old disco records might have been the route to filter-house success in the past, major record labels now have entire departments dedicated to tracking down copyright infringements. Luckily, there are now enough high-quality royalty-free sounds on the market for producers to be able to build their own disco-style loops using drum loops and individual instruments. All you need are some keys, a guitar lick, some bass, and perhaps some strings and/or brass which you can ‘mix down’ or bounce in place to create a stereo file. From there you can add some tape saturation, vinyl crackle, and any other lo-fi style processing that your heart desires, in order to get closer to that ripped-from-your-record-collection feel. You can then resample it again, and filter it to your heart’s content. That way, you get to keep all the royalties and publishing when your filter-disco-house track goes global next summer.

Sampling is a significant part of the audio landscape now, but there was a time when it was utterly revolutionary. Indeed, there’s a strong argument to be made that sampling, and the advent of the sampler, was the most radical development in the history of 20th century recorded music. The ability to take a piece of someone else’s recorded audio and use it in your own composition completely transformed the process of making music and was a substantial contributing factor in the birth and evolution of dance and electronic music. Entire genres have been built around just a few samples and a drum machine or sampled drum beat – see French house, techno and hip hop. Jungle/Drum & Bass leant heavily on the use of funk breaks and the ‘Hot Pants’, ‘Apache’, ‘Funky Drummer’, and ‘Think’ breaks as well as the now-ubiquitous ‘Amen’ break – the origin and importance of which much has been written (including a couple of excellent documentaries)

Although artists like the Beatles and others had used tape loops on their records back in the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that sampling technology caught up with the desires of producers and artists. However, in 1980 you’d need to pay around £20,000 to buy a Fairlight CMI, a digital synth which also contained a rudimentary sampler. But hardware samplers soon dropped in price and increased in functionality. The Akai S-Series of samplers arrived in 1986, just in time to assist Techno, Acid House, Hardcore and Jungle to bloom and develop into the countless sub-genres we have today and it was quickly followed by the iconic MPC, famously used by J-Dilla, Pete Rock and DJ Shadow and responsible for many a hip hop anthem. Whether you know it or not, no matter what type of dance or electronic music you enjoy, Hip Hop, Techno, Jungle, UK Garage or House – you can be almost certain it’s full of samples.Sample It, Chop It, Loop It!

Now, of course, software samplers are standard across all DAWs, and even iOS apps, and it’s an oft-quoted statistic that the processing power we all carry round in just our phones is way more powerful than the computers that got us to the moon and back. Modern software samplers are characterised by the ease by which we can sample any audio and incorporate it into our own work. Pitch, tempo, style – nothing is a barrier – the software will aid you in manipulating almost sample to fit in your track with the minimum of fuss.

All of this means that the landscape of music has altered significantly in the last 30 years, with new technology enabling musicians, producers and consumers to create and interact in new, exciting ways. Nowhere is this more true than in electronic music, where the DJs’ role has now fully merged with that of the producer, with DJs often making use of sampling, looping and re-edits in their sets and many of them releasing music largely based on the grooves and loops of older tracks. This is where legal issues become relevant.

The major issue around sampling is that using another person’s original recordings without their permission constitutes a copyright infringement, for which there will likely be legal consequences. Court cases and claims may well prevent you from ever earning a penny from the work containing the infringing sample if it isn’t cleared in advance. The central issue is covered by the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, and can be summed up succinctly as “If it’s not yours, you don’t have the right to use it without permission”. To understand exactly what we can and can’t legally sample, we need to look at this in a little more detail.

The Legal Bit…

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 is a set of laws that dictate how creators can control the ways their material can be used (in the UK, under UK law). When a producer uses someone else’s sound recording without their prior permission – ie: when they sample a loop, vocal, instrument, drum beat or even just a single note from someone else’s work – in legal terms it is considered to be:

A breach of copyright in the original sound recording,
A breach of copyright in the music (and lyrics, if lyrics have been sampled),
An unauthorised use of the performances in the original work.

This applies, in theory at least, in all of the following cases:

Even if you only used a tiny snippet.
Even if you buried it under other lots of other programmed parts.
Even if you reversed it, pitched it down and processed it through every single effect you own.
Even if you’re pretty sure no one will notice it.

In UK law, we use the doctrine of “substantial similarity”, which means that a substantial part of the copyrighted piece of music has to have been used in order for there to be an infringement. In practice, this might mean that if you sample a single horn hit from someone else’s tune and use it in one of your productions, you might get away with it – but you should know that all major record companies have entire departments, peopled by professional researchers, musicologists and lawyers, whose job it is to find sample infractions and to collect money for them. And if that horn stab was from a famous song, made a substantial contribution to your track, and you’ve not asked for permission, then legally you’ll not have a leg to stand on. There are also ethical and professional considerations too – we wouldn’t like it if someone profited from our work without crediting and remunerating us, so should surely show others the same professional respect as well.

Read The Small Print!

As a general rule of thumb, it’s very likely that any record contract you sign will require you to indemnify (protect) the label against any potential claims arising from copyright infringement. This means that it’s your responsibility to ensure that any samples have been cleared. So you’ll need the permission of the record label and usually the publisher too before you release any sound recording containing the sample. It might be that if the copyright wasn’t assigned to a publisher then you’ll need to track down the original copyright owners – or even their heirs – and bear in mind that some songs have more than one writer, so this can be quite a lengthy process.

It’s common practice these days to employ a sample clearing company who can negotiate a usage rate for you with the record label or publisher – and this is far more sensible than waiting until your tune blows up big and then asking for permission as you will have already broken the law. If you didn’t ask for permission and your tune blows up, it’s entirely possible that the record company legal team will attempt to get a higher percentage, perhaps even 100% of the royalties, than if you’d sought permission. There are also sample replay companies who specialise in uber-authentic recreations of pretty much any record you can imagine. Scorccio‘s recreations are so good, they often have the rightsholder going after the label because they are utterly convinced it’s the original recording.

A sample clearing company will charge you a flat rate and attempt to get you the best deal available. Remember, record companies want to make money, so it’s usually in their interest to strike a deal with people who sample their catalogue. All these considerations shouldn’t deter you from sampling – the big companies are set up for this stuff – you just have to do things the right way. The deal you get will depend on how much of the copyrighted audio you used, how well known the original recording was, the prominence of the sample and the likelihood of your release being successful.

Of course, none of these restrictions apply to legally bought sample packs. When you pay for a sample pack you are paying for a licence to freely use the samples in your own compositions. You can build a track entirely from legally bought samples and even if it’s a huge hit, you won’t have to pay anything provided you purchased the sounds legally to begin with. This is the big advantage of using royalty-free samples over other original published works – once you’ve paid for it, it’s yours.

There are some limits here though, and again, the law is very clear on this. Most sample providers will have some variation of the following guidelines about what you can and can’t do with the samples you buy: you can use the samples in your own compositions, but you can’t sell, loan, rent, lease, assign, or transfer samples to another user, or use them in any competitive product and potentially library music (although this varies between companies and products). So this means that the licence is non-transferable and you are not allowed to share your sample pack with the rest of the internet or try to sell them as if they were your own.

So that’s our basic guide to the legalities of sampling. We hope you find it useful. If in doubt, you should always seek the advice of the Musicians Union or talk to any of the sample clearance companies online and if you do choose to release a record that contains a sample, our lawyers have advised us to advise you that this article does not constitute legal advice and does not take the place of a qualified music attorney.

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