WHAT ARE SOUND PACKS OR SAMPLE PACKS?
A Sound Pack is a collection of sounds that producers and beatmakers can use to produce music. These sounds come in a variety of forms. Many musicians use Sound Pack as the basis for their tracks, or to find that extra sound that takes their track to the next level. The sounds can be of any type, from a piano melody, to a tambourine beat, to someone saying a phrase. In most of the Sound Packs, the sounds are sold in WAV and MIDI files, if the producer wants to open directly in some Software or Work Station like Ableton Live, Logic or MPC, and come with short loops of one minute or more and Samples One Shots lasting a few seconds. In short, it is a package of sound files, which contains folders organized according to the types of sounds (Instruments, Loops, One shots, MIDI's, etc.). Sound Packs, generally, are sold by musical genres (Afrobeats, Dancehall, Trap, etc.), by artists or even specific songs.
A LITTLE BIT OF SOUND PACKS HISTORY
Sampling is the reuse of part of a sound recording in another recording. The first sampling experiments were made in the 1940s by the French composer Pierre Schaeffer, who developed the theoretical bases of Musique Concrète, an experimental current that produced music based on montages with tape splices. Subsequently, this trend influenced some popular artists, such as Beatles and Pink Floyd. Initially, sampling techniques were restricted to a minority of artists who had access to studio equipment and instruments that reproduced sounds recorded on tape, such as the Mellotron, or the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, which had an integrated digital sampler.
SAMPLE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF HIP HOP
“Hip Hop didn't invent anything ... Hip Hop reinvented everything!”
(Grandmaster Caz)
In the 1960s, Jamaican Dub Reggae producers such as King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry began using pre-recorded samples of Reggae beats to produce new tracks, which were then played by the DJs. But sampling only started to become popular, in fact, from 1972, when Kool Herc, a Jamaican DJ based in the Bronx, disseminated in his DJ sets the techniques that became known as Break Beat and Merry-Go-Round. Herc realized that the percussive instrumental parts of the record (those with only drums and percussion) were what the dancers liked best. Then he began to isolate these passages, called Break Beat, and to prolong them, using the technique he called Merry-Go-Round, which consisted of using two record players with two identical discs. When one of the records reached the end of the Break Beat section, Herc released the second disc with the same Break Beat section from the beginning, allowing him to extend a relatively short section of the song as far as he wanted. Break Beat became the basis of Hip Hop, as it was from it that the dancers created the Break Dance, and it was it that served as the basis for the MC's to start rhyming at parties.
BREAK BEAT IN ELECTRONIC BATTERY
With the arrival of the 1980s, electronic drums became more accessible and started to play a fundamental role in the music industry, as they significantly reduced the cost of musical productions and printed an innovative sound for the time. In 1982, Afrika Bambaata & Soul Sonic Force released the song "Planet Rock", which has a beat inspired by "Numbers" by the German band Kraftwerk and which was programmed and recorded with the electronic drum Roland TR-808. The following year, in 1983, Run DMC released "Suckers MC's", a song that does not feature any harmonic or melodic instruments in its recording, just two MC's rhyming over a beat made on an Oberheim DMX drum machine. With the huge success of these songs and others made only with electronic drums and synthesizers, several Hip Hop artists started to produce songs using only these technologies, and companies started to invest more and more in electronic products in this line.
THE SECOND SAMPLING REVOLUTION
In mid-1982, Marley Marl, a Queens DJ and music producer, was working at the time as an intern at Unique Recording Studios and had the opportunity to try out expensive equipment like the Fairlight CMI. In one of the recording sessions, when trying to isolate a loop with the sampler, he accidentally hit a button and played only the first note of the loop, which was the bass drum. With that, he realized that he could choose minuscule parts of a Loop, like a club drum beat or a single bass drum note, and isolate them on a single sampler button, thus creating a kind of electronic drum with unique sound patterns. , which proved to be very advantageous, since most of the songs at the time used the standardized sound of electronic drums. With the launch of the E-mu SP-12, in 1986, the first commercially successful electronic drum and sampler, and the Akai MPC60, in 1987, the technique of creating beats from samples one shots only increased, thus creating a school of producers and beatmakers that would change the way of producing Hip Hop in the 90s.
FROM SAMPLE LIBRARIES TO SOUND PACKS
When, from the second half of the 90s, computers became more accessible to the population, there was a significant growth in the creation of digital products aimed at music production. Digital audio workstations (DAWs) have come to dominate the market and change the way music is produced. Since the early 1990s, many large studios have used DAWs like Pro Tools. But it was with the launch of Fruity Loops Studio in 1998 and its subsequent dissemination among Hip Hop producers that caused the consumption of sample libraries to increase significantly. Today, any DAW, such as GarageBand, Logic or Fruity Loops itself, features an abundant and exclusive library of samples and loops, which in many cases is royalty-free and, therefore, can be used indiscriminately. But in the early 90s, the only options for those who made electronic music from samples were CDs with Sample Libraries, like Zero-G Datafiles 1-3 or Polestar Magnetics The X-Static Goldmine, which were disputed and they were very expensive. Over time, the popularization of Fruity Loops and music workstations caused the search for samples and loops to increase more and more, to the point that a new market for Sound Packs appeared in the 2000s.
BEATCLUB, OUTPUT AND SPLICE:
THE NEW AGE OF SAMPLE
In 2014, Splice was launched: a digital music creation and collaboration platform that integrates with the main audio workstations (DAWs) and that stores in the cloud a gigantic library of samples and loops, which can be purchased from a monthly or annual subscription. With the spread of Splice among beatmakers and music producers, several other similar platforms began to emerge and gain strength, such as Output, Beatclub, Beatstars and Artlist. These platforms, in addition to providing the raw material for many of the musical productions in the current market, are also social networks that connect and foster partnerships between producers and artists from around the world. Today, most of the songs produced, both underground and mainstream, are built from 100% royalty-free samples and loops. The beat we hear in the intro of the song "Umbrella," the hit singer Rihanna in 2007, for example, is Apple Inc's "Vintage Funk Kit 03" loop, taken from the GarageBand software. And many other successful songs have in their DNA samples and loops taken from Sound Packs or digital music creation platforms.
TYPES OF SOUND PACKS
CONSTRUCTION KITS
A construction kit is a set of loops and sounds designed to work together. The kit sounds are in the same key and have the same BPM. They are also based on the same harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structure. All sounds are connectable, and it is possible to assemble a beat or song connecting each element, like Lego pieces that together form an object. The beatmaker just needs to drag and drop the loops on the DAW or Workstation to build a beat based on the kit, and that is the great advantage of construction kits. Construction kits are generally divided into individual components. So, if you have a beat that consists of drums, bass, harmonic keyboard and guitar licks, in this construction kit, the folders can be organized in: - song.wav (all sounds played together); - drum.wav (drums); - bass.wav (bass); - keys.wav (harmonic keyboard); - guitar.wav (guitar licks).
LOOPS
Loops are melodies, chords, harmonic progressions or beats played continuously over a given period of time, thus creating a certain pattern. Loop Packs have been the most popular lately, and are usually crafted as Construction Kits.
ONE SHOTS
One Shots, as the name implies, are sounds fired with a single note. Assuming that a Loop is a phrase, a One Shot is a single word. And usually a well-emphasized word, that is, a strong note. It can be hammered on a single key on the piano or a single beat on a drum case.
MIDI'S
MIDI is a kind of musical score in digital format. The great advantage of MIDI is that it is not linked to a specific instrument. Using a MIDI on a DAW, you can apply the same MIDI pattern to different instruments. You can also set the tone and speed at which the digital score will be played.
SOUND PACKS STYLES
SOUND PACKS BASED ON THE TYPE OF INSTRUMENT
There are Sound Packs on the market that are focused only on a specific instrument, such as piano, guitar or bass. The development of Sound Packs of individual instruments has increased a lot, and many musicians have sought to produce this type of product.
DRUM SAMPLE PACKS
Drum Kits have always been very popular with Beatmakers and Hip Hop producers. Perhaps the main reason they are so popular in the Hip Hop market is because they are very versatile, have many Samples One Shots and this is very advantageous for beatmakers to produce spacious and heavy beats for MC's to rhyme with.
SOUND PACKS BASED
IN ARTISTS OR MUSICAL GENRE
In the beginning, Samples Library CDs and Sound Packs were directed almost exclusively to the production of electronic music (House, Techno, Drum'n Bass, etc.) and Hip Hop. Nowadays, Sound Packs are found in the market based on different types of musical genres, such as Afrobeats, Dancehall, Trap and even Sertanejo. Many producers and artists have also started to release their own personalized Sound Packs, either with songs already released or totally new material.
