Paul White:  Hello, I'm Paul White and welcome to this Sound On Sound podcast. This time I'll be looking at ways of turning household sounds into musically useful samples. When samplers first came on the scene, everybody went around the kitchen banging things to see how they'd sound when played back chromatically or as part of a drum groove but today we've got far more processing tools and effects at our disposal along with vastly increased sampling time, so maybe it is time to revisit some of those old ideas. As a Logic Pro user, I can easily turn sounds into samples just by dragging them to the track header and then selecting a sampler option but there are excellent third party tools out there too, such as Sample Robot that will allow you to create samples in pretty much any of the mainstream formats. While I've used Logic Pro simple sampler for these examples, users of Native Instruments Kontakt can load their own samples using that and if you need a good time stretching tool, then check out the free PaulXStretch from Sonosaurus, that's really good. For these examples, I'm going back to the early days of sampling where it was common to take one sound and then spread that right across the keyboard. Back then it was often done using a Fairlight and that cost about the same as a small house but today you can experiment free of charge. For percussive sounds I'm using the sampler one-shot mode, which means the sound plays all the way through regardless of how quick your key press is. Use the envelope shapers within your sampler to get just the sound you want. In my examples, I've used the sounds without looping them, but if you do want to create a sound that can be played as a pad, you may want to utilise the looping features of your sampler. I make a lot of use of time stretching and reverb to elongate the sounds and for adding interest you can use convolution or granular delays. I'll start by seeing what we can extract from a simple squeaking hinge. That doesn't sound too musical right now, does it but you can probably isolate a section that has a fairly stable pitch and if that isn't long enough to work with as it is, it can be stretched using the audio stretch function found in most DAWs. Here is a short segment that I managed to isolate and here it is again, stretched and now I add a little pitch correction set to F just to nail that pitch. Obviously that's still not long enough to use as a sample, so let's stretch it out to a really long length by adding a long, wet reverb. I'm using Soundtoys Space Blender and this is set to 100% wet and about five seconds of decay time. Now, if we drop that into our sampler, we can play a tune on it and notice how the lower notes sound a lot more mellow, less strident than the original sample. Here's another example, taken from a different part of the same squeak. Or this from a lower creaking sound and of course you have the envelope shapers and filters within your sampler to reshape the sound so you don't have to take it just as it comes, you can turn it into anything you like. Another interesting source of sounds is your workshop, but power tools always seem to produce so much noise and harmonic content that nothing very useful comes out of them in the end, but I did manage to get something from the sound of a bench grinder gradually running to a halt after I'd switched it off. And here with that long reverb added again. Drop it into the sampler and again we can play a tune on it. Here's another sound created from the bench grinder, this time it's running quite slowly and I've applied an envelope to it to give it more of a percussive character. Or maybe flick a tin can, stretch the out to two or three times its original length, add some reverb, drop it into your sampler and you'll turn a simple ping into a gamelan. Here's a set of small bells from the garden. This time we'll take a short section, we'll pitch correct it, put it into quick sampler and give it a one shot envelope. And that old favorite, bamboo chimes. Let's just take one of the notes and drop it into the sampler, add a little hint of reverb and we have this. And of course you can go around hitting just about anything and turn it into some kind of a drum kit by adding a little tiny bit of reverb, some compression and maybe a little bit of gentle overdrive. And for the snare sound, I just dropped a bag of lentils onto the floor. And if the sounds lack weight, well just add a little bit of low frequency from a sample, a sine wave from a test oscillator, anything like that will do just add a bit of beef to the sound. And there you have it, a very simple drum kit playing a very simple drum rhythm. Or nip round to the local antique shop and sample one of the grandfather clocks there. Even accidentally recorded sounds like this bit of wind noise can be turned into a kick drum, just edit out the bit you want to keep and apply an envelope. Just stamping on the floor or hitting a door panel. Even the empty Coke can can be the source of some interesting percussive sounds. Here's the original and now let's stretch it to four times its original length. Now add a short reverb. We could drag that into the sampler just as it is, but this time I want to experiment by adding a convolution reverb, but rather than using the impulse response of the reverb, I'm going to replace that with the sound of me scraping a radiator, so when I feed in my Coke can sound, I get this. So now if I just drag that into Quick Sampler, well I'm sure that will come in useful for something. And if we take a simple wind chime from the garden, isolate a single sound, stretch it to around 16 or 20 times. Its normal length, we can get something quite exotic by loading that into a sampler just as it is. We can create a bell like envelope using the envelope shaper in the sampler. Here's another example, created from the wind mobile in my garden. I turned it by hand and then added a reverse version of it to itself and used that as my basic sound source, then I layered it with a really bland synthesiser pad and put it through a flanger just for good measure. In fact I rather like layering what I call ear candy sounds with bland synth pads to make them just that little bit more interesting. You can use the bamboo chimes in your garden, bells, scrapes run your finger along the top of a radiator, there are all kinds of little sounds that just add interest. If you do run out of things to hit or scrape, there's always a human voice. Try a simple bit of speech with no harsh sounds in it. Here we've chosen the phrase 'mellow rhubarb'. 'Mellow rhubarb'. And then I took the barb sound from rhubarb and used that to create my sample. Here it is stretched and pitch corrected and now with the obligatory long reverb. Drop it into Logic's Quick Sampler and here we go. So to finish off, here's just a little tune played using the samples that we've created so far. Well, that's all for now, but do check out our other Sound On Sound Podcasts on soundonsound.com.