Sampling as Storytelling Composer Steven Webb on Sampling Orchestras and Sound Design

Hi, my name is Steven. I'm a composer, producer, and sound designer. And I write music that's very eclectic and it comes from all sorts of different genres. I love writing music for orchestras and for choirs. I've done video game scores and film scores. And I produce a lot of pop music as well. And all of those sorts of varied musical worlds feed into my compositional practice and feed into that type of music that I love to create, which is just varied and draws from all different styles.

So sampling is actually very simple at its core. It's really just taking one piece from one musical recording and putting it into a different musical recording. So what musicians often like to do is they like to take a snippet, and that can be very short or sometimes a little bit longer, and bring that into their music and to enhance it in some way. Sometimes it's something rhythmical, like a drum loop. Sometimes it's something melodic, like a vocal sample or someone speaking. It can be a sound effect. It can be a particular instrument that you perhaps don't have access to and you wanna bring into your track.

I love to use sampling in two main ways in my music. The first one is to really create what I call a vibe or a feeling for the listener. And it's the more simple use of sampling. I often don't change the sample too much. I find something that's sometimes a little obscure and what I find interesting. And put that in my track to automatically transport the listener to a particular vibe that I want. So for example, if I wanted to create a song that evoked sort of beach, relaxing vibes, perhaps I would bring in the sound of waves or the sound of seagulls or something that sort of evokes that for the listener. And it immediately brings them to a place that I want them to experience my music in.

And the second way that I like to do it is to be a bit more creative and to take the samples themselves and treat them like instruments. So everyone knows what a piano or what a guitar sounds like. But I might find an obscure vocal sample that has this really, really interesting sounding that you're not gonna hear anywhere else. And so bringing that into my music and manipulating it in interesting ways is really what I love to do with sampling in my music.

Some of the techniques that I love to use when I bring in samples, the most basic is just chopping up that sample. So slice it up in some key points, usually on the transient points. And try and move those around a little bit, see if you can create something, maybe perhaps rhythmic with it. Another one is to layer that sample over top of itself, perhaps try reverse it, stretching and squashing it smaller can produce some very, very interesting results. Especially if you take a very short sample and stretch that out to an extreme length.

So in my track, *SunSetting*, I immediately wanna create this sort of retro vibe to start the track. So I pulled this 1950s vocal sample about dating. And the listener is immediately transported to this sort of weird retro future that I wanted to evoke by hearing this right at the beginning of the song. And so that's an example of a sort of a vibe-based sample that I would use.

Another example in my piece, *Breathing Room* for alto flute and live samples is I treat the samples more like instruments themselves. And so I really, really manipulate them to the point where sometimes you can't hear what the original sample is, but it becomes an instrument that interacts with what the flute is doing. So for that piece, I walked down Yonge Street and I recorded a street drummer, a street performer, all sorts of different sounds of the city. And then I processed that and chopped them up and stretched them out and make them feel as though those sounds that I recorded are actually instruments themselves playing off and with the flute player.

So something that I often encountered when I first started writing music, I was a little bit afraid of sampling. Part of me thought it felt a little bit like cheating, like I was taking someone else's music or sound and not really creating it myself. It didn't feel as authentic. And I thought as well it could be potentially illegal. I wasn't sure where those boundaries were drawn. And so I sort of shied away from it in the early parts of my career.

But what I have come to learn is that over time sampling has become a very rich and accepted tradition in modern music making. And it's something that musicians of all different genres use in the creation of their music. It allows me to bring in other composers and other musicians into the creative collaborative process. I really love to work with other people, but sometimes when you're working alone and just working on your own music, that other sound from a different source can really act as a sort of creative spark for you to build your own material upon. And it's something I would really encourage all young musicians and composers to really explore doing to bring in some other ideas into your own music. And you'll perhaps learn a little bit more about how that sound was created by someone else.

Another piece of mine that I used sampling in creative ways was my piece entitled *Plant Music*, where I hooked up a number of plants to wires. And so when you touch them, they would trigger a musical sample. And what I wanted to do with this piece was to imagine sounds that you would hear when you touched a plant, but then sort of magnify and grow that sound into sort of an extraordinary version of itself. That's so that the audience would be surprised when they saw the performer touching these plants, the samples that they would hear wouldn't necessarily correspond to what they were seeing with just a gentle touch. And then I got the performer to live manipulate and stretch and filter and add reverb and delay and all sorts of processing effects to these samples live that really sort of brought them to life and created this very interesting soundscape for the audience.

I sometimes go into a project knowing that I want to sample, but sometimes it's something that helps me get a very creative block. I will be creating a piece and not really sure where it's going or I'm not liking the particular sound that it's currently giving off. And so often sampling is somewhere I go to get inspiration. If you are thinking of producing and releasing your music commercially, you definitely want to get the permission of the copyright holder if you are using a sound from a copyrighted source. But I wouldn't let that keep you away from experimenting with samples. And I would really encourage you to bring in some sounds, perhaps things you don't quite understand of how to create yourself and really, really explore those, manipulate them and just have fun with them and see what they can add to your tracks.

You can find my music online at stevenwebbmusic.com. I'm also on Blue Sky at stevenwebbmusic and Instagram at stevenwebbmusic.