Sampling

[spooKs]

i'm a uber-amateur producer. i've only just started attempting to turn my hand to dubstep styles (Step Off and Serengeti on myspace.com/spooksuk) and i'm interested as to how people get their sounds - is it 'creatively ethical' to sample guitar strumming from old reggae and dub tracks? sounds stupid i know, and i should make my own mind up, but i think actually having authorship over all the aspects of your songs is really important - so i was wondering really if other producers, especially people like Skream who use these sort of sounds a lot sample them like this or use synths - i don't imagine a great deal of live recording from actual people playing guitars goes on in the majority of dubstep production, though i plan to give it a try when i can...

any thoughts/feedback on this would be very welcome, also some advice on what i should use - at the moment the only synths i have are 3xosc and ts404 ...

[docwra]

It's about reprocessing your sounds. Ill'l make patches on a synth or take a phat bass patch sample, then i may twist it up in a sampler, layer them how many times i need to, add effects, distorion etc on the top end. Bounce it and reprocess it again. Then probably run it through absynth 3 and do some more processing till im happy(Not in that particular order). This is probably how a lot of producers will go bout things and how i work. But u can make very sick sounds on synths alone. I highly recommend absynth 3 if u can get hold of it. Is all i use now.

[shonky]

Don't personally see a problem with nabbing guitar parts, but it's probably better to go for individual chords rather than entire riffs. If you do want to take an entire riff, cut it up in Recycle or do it manually in your audio editor and play with the order of the chords.

Should be quite a few resources on the net if you want to download guitar chords and then sequence them yourself, add reverb, delay, phaser as appropriate - fairly traditional dub effecting if you want to make it sound authentic. Probably best to overdrive them a little beforehand and then low cut everything below 350 Hz to keep it toppy. You want to put them on beats 2 and 4 to get the upbeat skank too, but you'll probably want to swing the riddim a bit or manually put them a bit behind/ahead of the beat to make it sound more natural.

If you are going to make money on releasing stuff, you'll want to make sure the sample isn't too obvious in case someone wants their cut. Otherwise I wouldn't worry too much

Check out www.kvr.com if you want more synths/samplers/efffects - there's plenty of free stuff there if you want different sounds.

[spooKs]

thanks very much for the feedback...much appreciated - though maybe i exaggerated my noobness somewhat hehe, no probs

the site is www.kvraudio.com you meant? cool looks good, and i'm definitely interested in the look of absynth from the native instruments site: i'll have to uhhh *buy* that.