From Field Recordings to the MPC: The History of the Sampler

This feature is based on our YouTube video. A documentary-style breakdown of how the sampler evolved, from its experimental origins to its central place in hip-hop and electronic music. If you'd prefer to watch instead of read, the video is below.

The Sound Object

In the basement of France's national broadcaster in 1948, a revolution was quietly taking place. Surrounded by turntables, tape machines, and a disc-cutting lathe, a man named Pierre Schaeffer was conducting sonic experiments that defied musical norms. He wasn’t playing instruments, composing scores, or leading orchestras. Instead, he was recording the screech of train brakes, the murmur of river barges, and the clang of metal on pavement. Then, using scissors and tape, he stitched those sounds into something entirely new. Music, he believed, didn’t have to start with notes on a page. It could begin with the world itself.

This radical approach would become known as musique concrète ( a style of experimental music that is composed using recorded sounds) and Schaeffer, a French radio engineer turned sonic pioneer, was its unlikely architect. His studio, the Studio d’Essai ("Studio of Experimentation"), became a laboratory not for preserving sound but for transforming it. With his portable recorder, he roamed the streets of postwar Paris capturing the overlooked sonic textures of daily life: a coffee tin rolling across a table, footsteps echoing through alleyways, laughter, breath. Once inside the studio, he would loop, reverse and layer these fragments to create audio hallucinations, compositions that felt closer to dreams than to symphonies.

Schaeffer coined a new term for these building blocks: "sound objects." His first major work, Cinq études de bruits ("Five Studies of Noises"), was a series of looping, surreal vignettes that turned industrial noise into musical narrative. He called it acousmatic listening; the idea of hearing sound divorced from its source. Today, we know this concept by another name: sampling.

At the time, critics derided his work as noise, but history has proven otherwise. Schaeffer, and later his collaborator Pierre Henry, laid a conceptual and technical foundation that would ripple across music for the next century. With tape splicing, multi-track recording and machines like the morphophone and phonogene, they transformed how sound could be manipulated, paving the way for the sampler.

The Tape Loop Era

Across the Atlantic, a different but equally revolutionary idea was taking shape. Guitarist and inventor Les Paul, one of the forefathers of the Electric Guitar, was also reimagining how sound could be layered. In his home studio, Les and his wife Mary Ford created intricate pop songs by overdubbing vocals and guitars on a custom-built 8-track recorder. Their hit How High the Moon featured Mary harmonizing with herself a dozen times over. It wasn’t sampling yet, but the spirit was the same: record, reshape, repeat.

In London, Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were painstakingly building music out of pure tape. Without access to synthesizers, Derbyshire manipulated tape speed and length to assemble the iconic Doctor Who theme.

Meanwhile, the Mellotron, a tape-based keyboard instrument developed in the early 1960s, allowed players to trigger recorded sounds — strings, choirs, horns — with a touch of the keys. The Beatles famously used it on "Strawberry Fields Forever," creating a ghostly sonic haze that no traditional instrument could replicate.

But it wasn’t just Europe and the U.S. pushing boundaries. In 1970s Jamaica, King Tubby and other dub pioneers used mixing consoles like instruments. They stripped reggae tracks down to their bones, then rebuilt them live with echo, delay, and reverb, creating entirely new versions. The message was clear: recorded sound was no longer sacred. It could be deconstructed and flipped.

The Digital Revolution

Then, in the late 1970s, the final piece of the puzzle arrived; digital sampling. Powered by the newly-invented microprocessor, Australian teenagers Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie built the Fairlight CMI, the first commercial digital sampler. Suddenly, musicians could record, store, and trigger sounds at the push of a key. Kate Bush called it one of the greatest creative tools she ever used. Herbie Hancock demoed it on TV, showing how the Fairlight turned the human voice into a playable melody. Yet the machine cost as much as a house, limiting it to elite studios. Sampling was here, but it was far from accessible.

In 1984, the Emulator II emerged as a slightly more affordable option, but it wasn’t until the 1985 arrival of the E-mu SP-12 that samplers truly reached working musicians. With just 1.2 seconds of sample time, it was limited but revolutionary. Two years later, its successor, the SP-1200, offered 10 seconds and no factory sounds, just blank memory and endless possibilities.

Golden-era hip-hop producers turned these limitations into aesthetic choices. To conserve space, they sped up vinyl records, sampled them at higher pitches, then slowed them down, resulting in the gritty, textured sound that came to define boom bap. As DJ Premier once said, "I loved the limitations, they forced you to be creative."

Around the same time, the Akai S950 introduced time-stretching and pitch-shifting without altering tempo, a dream come true for loop builders. Then came the holy grail: the Akai MPC60, a sampler/sequencer hybrid with velocity-sensitive pads, co-designed by Roger Linn. With just an MPC and a crate of records, artists like A Tribe Called Quest could build entire songs from scratch.

By the mid-1990s, sampling had gone from avant-garde obscurity to mainstream engine. House, jungle, R&B, trip-hop, boom bap, they were all built on the bones of other music.

From Hardware to Software

And then the sampler disappeared.

Not literally, of course. It simply became invisible. As computers took over the studio, digital samplers were folded into software: Logic’s EXS24, Kontakt, Ableton Live. Anyone with a laptop could chop, stretch, and pitch. Later, tools like Serato Sample and even AI-based stem splitters gave producers forensic-level control over every audio element.

Yet for all this power, the soul of sampling remains stubbornly analog: the joy of finding an old record, lifting a tiny fragment and flipping it into something new.

It began with a train brake in Paris. And it lives on in every beat that dares to reimagine the past.

That ethos is exactly what we’ve tried to capture with our sample packs at Loop Kitchen. Carefully crafted compositions inspired by vintage film scores, dusty soul, and the golden age of sampling. Whether you’re chopping on an MPC or slicing in Ableton, they’re made to be flipped, stretched and transformed. Check out our packs HERE, they’re currently buy one get one free using the code 'SECONDCOURSE'.