Alright, I’ll check them out. Thanks for the recommendations!

I forgot where I heard that tip about finding samples separately, but once I started doing that I never went back.

TIL about the term, crate-digging. I guess that’s what I tried doing fairly recently when I visited a Goodwill for CDs. That said, I didn’t buy any CDs when I felt it would take too long to find something useful.

samplette seems like a good resource for this style of sampling, thanks for sharing.

That reminds me, have you listened to the album Endtroducing… by DJ Shadow? Pretty much the entire album is composed of samples through crate-digging.

No, just Serum (with Yabridge) and Sforzando

How I find samples:

Usually I just watch movies/tv shows/ play video games and if it sounds cool I just sample it:

• From youtube: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp. I can share some CLI commands I’ve written, if people are interested.
• If I want to record from my computer, there’s Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/
• Also, if I like the sounds from some media, I google the sample CD’s they used. (for example, that’s how I found out Skinny Puppy had an official sample CD, which was used in Rayman 3)

If you want something that’s royalty-free:

• https://freesound.org/ --free, usually royalty-free. Check the licenses
• https://splice.com/ --not free, royalty-free
• https://samplefocus.com/ – never used this, but free and seemingly royalty-free. Use with caution

Where to use them:

Honestly still experimenting myself.

1. Usually, my process for making music is to focus on structure first, add details later (this includes samples)
2. While working, I just put time markers where I think a certain TYPE of sample might sound good (e.g. add vocals at 1:28)
3. Once I get the structure of the song down pat, I come back later and add the samples (among other details).

It helps to have your samples organized, so that you can just search your harddrive for “vocal” or “drum loop” and quickly find what you want.

Edit: One more thing: I usually consider “finding samples + synth presets” to be a separate exercise from making music. So I’ll allocate about an hour a week to just finding cool sounds and organizing them for later. The point is, I do not do this while actually making music; in theory the sounds should all be ready for me by that point.