Make Your Own Vinyl Drum Samples With The Teenage Engineering PO-80 Record Factory
Are you tired of getting takedown notices on your tracks because you used a sample from a vinyl record somewhere?
It is now possible to make your own vinyl samples at home with some effort and inexpensive equipment.
Yes, you read that correctly. The equipment exists to cut a basic record, then record that back into your sampler or DAW that you can then use to make beats with.
Read on to learn more about what you need to set up this kind of workflow.
Spending time to create your own vinyl sample pack solves a big problem
Lots of people love the vibe and character of old vinyl music.
Whether its old jazz, soul, funk, or reggae music, there's something about the warmth, hiss and crackle of vinyl sounds that resonates even with young people who grew up long after the glory days of vinyl records.
Many popular songs have been made by producers who chopped up disco records (or whatever genre they were into) and made their own one shot drum samples they could trigger and turn into their own beats.
The big problem is these sounds are not royalty free.
The invention of the sampler made the legal profession a small fortune from musicians and record labels suing each other for copyright infringement created by sampling.
Some people don't care and do it anyway.
However we now have a new, interesting solution from Teenage Engineering.
The PO-80.
What is the PO-80?
The PO-80 Record Factory is a rebrand of a Japanese product called the Gakken Ez Record Maker. Both are based on the same Yuri Suzuki invention, photo is courtesy of turntable lab.
It's a toy record cutter.
You to assemble it yourself and it's not the best quality (this might actually be helpful), but if you put it together with a modern DAW, you can make some great free samples that have the authentic vinyl surface noise and crackle.
Tip: This is surely going to be a very popular product. Very high likelihood the pre-order sells out and doesn't re-stock for a while due to ongoing supply chain issues. If it sells out, just go buy the Gakken version and you'll have essentially the same device, except the assembly instructions are in Japanese.
Can the PO-80 cut commercial quality vinyl?
No. The recordings it makes are monophonic and are going to have a lot of noise.
Get ready for lots of that "hiss sound" feeling. But that's not the point. We recommend that you embrace the imperfections for creative purposes.
The company also ships some kind of "mastering software" but that's most likely just an EQ curve and some dynamics processing to clean things up a bit.
You should experiment for yourself to see what you can come up with.
So what is the Teenage Engineering PO-80 useful for?
We think the PO-80 (or the original Gakken unit) is the perfect tool for creating your own royalty free vinyl sample pack.
You can record your own sounds, like one shot samples of drums, or compose loops in your DAW, record them onto vinyl with the PO-80, then dub them back into your DAW.
From there you can use it as it, load it into your sampler, chop it up again with AUTOCHOPPER, stereoize it with plugins, sky and your creativity are the only limits.
A Personal Sound Library
If you do this over time, you'll eventually have a large collection of vinyl sounds that are exclusive to you.
