Learning goals
- Learn how to incorporate sample playback into a composition
What to do
Your task is to experiment with sample playback.
You will need one or more 44.1 KHz WAV audio clips (mono or stereo).
The steps are:
- Use the
samplePlayer
method to create a sample player instrument - Create rhythms, melodies, and figures for your sample player instrument, and use them in your composition
I would suggest starting out with a single sample (played in its entirety), and then find places to add other samples (possibly using partial samples.)
See the Example section below for ideas.
Example
Samples — prerecorded audio clips taken from other sources — are a standard element of many genres of electronic music.
To incorporate samples into your composition, you just need to use a sample player instrument, created using the samplePlayer
method. Then, add samples to the sample player instrument. Each sample is associated with a note number. Unlike melodic instruments, where the note number indicates pitch, and percussion instruments, where the note number selects a percussion sound, notes for sample player instruments simply indicate what sample to play.
Let’s start with a very simple percussion and bass composition. Here is some code (to put in the sketch’s create
method) to create some simple drum and bass parts:
Here’s how it sounds:
Now, we need a sample. I used a brief clip from a 1950s instructional film. Here’s the clip:
You can download this clip from the following link:
Note that you will need to be logged into your YCP account to access this download.
I saved this clip in a folder called Samples
in the same place as my SoundFonts
folder. My sketch defines a SAMPLE_DIR
variable that serves the same purpose as the SOUNDFONT_DIR
variable, to locate files (in this case samples) needed to play the composition:
You should create your own sample folder — for example, on your H:
drive, as shown above — and define a SAMPLE_DIR
variable similar to the one shown above.
Once you have one or more sample files stored in your sample folder, you can create a sample player instrument. Here is the one I will use:
Here is what is going on:
- Note 0 plays the entire sample, using .4 as the “gain” (volume)
- Notes 1–5 play parts of the overall sample, indicated by a range of milliseconds (start and end), again using .4 gain
So, my sample player defines a total of 6 “notes”.
Let’s start out by adding a very simple figure to play the entire sample:
Let’s play this along with the drum figures (but not the bass figure):
Here’s how it sounds:
Playing an entire sample is fun, but we can have even more fun if we play only parts of the samples. One possibility is to play part of a sample repeatedly, creating a “stuttering” effect. Another possibility is to mix up the sample by playing parts of it in a different order. Here are a few figures that demonstrate both techniques:
Recall that the sample player “notes” 1–5 indicate parts of the overall sample.
Let’s play these new figures:
Putting it all together, here is the overall composition:
Here is the complete code for the sketch: