Hot One Shots – Making new sounds from Sample Packs

Finding a unique sound is not the easiest task to achieve especially with the vast array of synth presets which come as standard on most synth plugins. The way around this is to use a sample pack or sampled sound, but in a unique way.

Take any sound, put it in a sampler and then play the sample. Sounds familiar right? Well how about going an extra step or two further.

Try mangling up the sounds in the sampler to make a new sound? This week I was lucky enough to be given a sample pack from In Your Dreams called the Big Box Of Hot One Shots.

This contains drum kit one shots, a cymbal pack, also a few SFX that In Your Dreams typically uses for live shows and productions.

I didn’t want to go down the route of popping these samples in a drum machine. I wanted to try something else. This is what I did.

In Bitwig, I loaded the sample in to the Sampler plugin and got busy with LFO’s and mapped them to the pitch, repitch and textures options trying various settings.

Using the repitch, I was able to take a small amount of a snare hit and pass various parameters through it. This would loop and cycle the small amount of the wave form.

In turn it would get it looping and repeating the same part so quickly that it made a keynote. Hey presto, a keyboard note.

The next point from here was to select the keyboard icon at the top of the sampler. This made it playable on the keyboard. So now I have a synth from a snare, what’s next?

Rest of the band

Pads I guess. Same story, whack a kick drum in the sampler. Stretch it out so that it repeats the wave form over and over but at a longer intervals. Add some delay, reverb and there is a pad.

Also not forgetting we can add in kicks, hats and snares all from the In Your Dreams hot box of shots. It makes it so easy to get a unique sounding track. Just by thinking outside the box of hot one shots (pardon the pun).

Get creating while using samples in a new way and see just how differently you can produce music by adopting some new techniques.

You can buy In Your Dreams Box of Hot One Shots here:

Why not visit the In Your Dreams Insta account and see what Andi gets up to.

The video demo

I made a video to demonstrate the techniques talked about in this video. I show you how to use the modulators in Bitwig to get you started.