Noisli is a fantastic background noise and color generator ideal for working and relaxing. It includes many high-quality sounds to help you focus while working, relieve anxiety or to just relax while reading or before going to sleep.
Sample a bit of this. Sample a bit of that. It’s the taster’s choice.
Whether you know it or not, sampling is everywhere in music.
Samples are small portions of recorded sound that are re-used in in new pieces of music. They’re easy to make and wickedly fun to use in your DAW.
Not sure how to sample? No worries, this step by step guide to creating the perfect sample will get you started on the wonderful path to sample paradise.
Finding audio to sample isn’t hard. Here’s the 5 best places to find free samples.
How to Find Sounds to Sample
- Use The Creative Commons– Creative Commons is a licensing organization that fosters the fair use of artistic work for other artists to use. Their search engine CCMixter is great for finding all types of sound that is legal to sample. Just type in what you’re looking for and browse the results.
- Search The Public Domain – When an artist creates something they keep certain ownership rights. But after a certain amount of time these rights expire and their works enter the public domain. That means they’re safe to sample. A great place to find public domain sounds is the music page on archive.org.
- Make The Sample Unrecognizable – Apply effects to your sample. Reverse it. Pitch it down. Layer it. Or bury it in the mix. This basically just means making your sample an entirely new thing. Sure, the original sound is in there somewhere. But you’ve made it your own and it’ll be hard to hear any trace of the original. Doing this can be a bit dicy. So make sure you really change it up.
- Use Sample Sites that Offer Royalty-Free Sample Packs – Sites like Wavy.audio provide sample packs that are 100% free and legal to use in your own tracks. They’re the perfect resource for finding good free sounds to build a project around. They take the stress out of clearing samples.
- Clear Your Sample – If all else fails and you just have use that perfect copyrighted sound you can clear your sample with the owner. When someone writes a song the songwriter or publisher owns the rights. The same thing goes for recording a song. The recording is usually owned by the artist or their record label. To clear a sample you must get permission from both owners and enter into a sample agreement. Usually a very expensive endeavour. Your best bet is to stick to the royalty-free sample methods I mentioned above.
Smart sampling means doing the research. So dig long and hard.
Smart sampling means doing the research. So dig long and hard and always make sure you know exactly who owns the rights to a work you’re sampling.
Knowledge is power.
Snatching the Needle from the Haystack
Now that you know where to find good sample material you have to start listening in a different way. Stop hearing the whole song and start focusing on the little bits.
Hear the song, but focus on the parts that it’s made of. If you’re looking for drums, hear the drum part. If you’re looking for strings, focus on the strings.
How to Use Samples
Let’s find a sample in a song and use it in a beat. There’s a million different ways to sample—loops, breaks, one-shots, vocals.
But for this example we’re going to take a small orchestral stab from the Dragnet theme song.
Here’s the original that I found through the public domain search tool on archive.org:
http://blog.landr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/dragnet-theme-LANDR-Medium.wavI found a sound that I like right around the 4 second mark. You can see it highlighted in the waveform below. I used Simpler in Ableton to isolate it.
![Samples Samples](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125754572/816489142.jpg)
Here’s what it sounds like on its own:
http://blog.landr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/stab-individual5-LANDR-Medium.wavExplore the options in your daw and try morphing, flipping, and effecting your sample. Most DAWs have an option to play your sample as a multi-octave voice.
It’s my favourite way to mess around with samples.
Here’s how I used my sample in a simple beat. I used the Dead Horse Beats sample pack for the drums. Listen close for the Dragnet sample.
http://blog.landr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Sixteen-Jewel-Thieves-LANDR-Medium.wavWhat you do with your samples after you cut them out of the source material is the fun part. Experiment in every way that you can and add sampling to your production toolbox.
Sample smart. Sample well. Sample simple.
The right kind of sound can relax your mind, hone your focus, drown out distractions, or get you pumped to kill your to-do list. We've assembled some research and free resources to help you create your own best workspace soundtrack.
Blast from the past is a weekly feature at Lifehacker in which we revive old, but still relevant, posts for your reading and hacking pleasure. This week, we're reviving a particularly old post listing some of the best music and sounds for productivity, as crowdsourced by the Lifehacker commentariat of 2009.
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Does Music Really Make You More Productive?
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The answer falls somewhere between 'Listening to Mozart makes you a genius' and 'Just be quiet and work.'
The most often cited study into the question of music's effect on the mind involves the so-called Mozart effect, which suggests that listening to certain kinds of music—Amadeus Wolfgang's classical works, in particular—impacts and boosts one's spatial-temporal reasoning, or the ability to think out long-term, more abstract solutions to logical problems that arise. The Mozart effect has been overblown and over-promised, and even outright refuted as having 'bupkiss' effect, but that doesn't mean a great mind-juicing playlist can't be created.
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The Workplace Doctors site details both sides of the question. In one study, University of Illinois researchers found that listening to music in 'all types of work' increased work output 6.3% over a control group. In another study (dissected at MetaFilter), 56 employees working on basic computer tasks were found to be more productive when there was no music playing over the same period tested with music.
So the real answer turns out to be, unfortunately, 'it depends.' It depends on whether your office or workspace is noisy enough that a good kind of noise or music is preferable to the natural cacophony. It depends on your personal attention span, and how likely you are to fiddle with controls versus letting a music stream trickle past your ears. Though many of the final answers to studies of music at work conflict, the general consensus seems to be that people can be boosted at work by music, if they're willing to be.
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If that sounds like you, here's a few suggestions on where to find music that others have found helpful in their own workspaces.
The Classical Route
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How it works: The ornate instrumentation and composition of Baroque classical music gets a lot of attention for its possible mind-boosting effects. Eight radiologists were asked to go about their day while listening to Baroque-period tunes. They mostly self-reported better mood and productivity, except for one worker who said the music had a negative effect on his concentration.
Followers of Getting Things Done and productivity writer David Allen note in forum posts that the man himself seems to dig Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons,' Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #3, and other Baroque tunes as mood-setters for tackling tasks like a weekly review. A key suggestion from a David Allen forum poster—look for tracks paced at about 60 beats per minute:
It's the beats-per-minute required to get the brain up to optimal revs. David has a segment about it on GTD Fast – I also came across it at a speed-reading class. It seems to cause a 'bright and breezy' frame of mind where thinking and creativity are easier. I find it works.
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Where to get it: Being often hundreds of years old and a niche interest these days, classical music is relatively easy to find online. Wikipedia has hundreds of freely-licensed files, and public domain search sites like Musopen offers a lot of good stuff, too.
If the Baroque sound doesn't quite do it for you, Lifehacker commenter Catalyst suggests the Vitamin String Quartet, which covers pop tunes in string quartet/chamber music style. It's not the same kind of down-deep arrangement as traditional classical work, but the Quartet's work takes away distracting lyrics and soothes out pop music's more annoying edges. (Though it's worth noting that unfamiliar music may be better than stuff you know).
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What Music Helps You Get Things Done?
Music is a personal choice, but most of us can't really sort emails to Slayer or hit tight…
Read more ReadHere's a sample of the Vitamin String Quartet:
The Ambient/Electronic Route
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How it works: The label 'ambient' has been applied far too broadly to be of much help to anyone but record store owners. Still, at its core, all ambient music is designed not to jump in your face, but still keep your brain engaged at a lower, subconscious level. Pioneers like Brian Eno developed ambient music as an experiment in composition, allowing algorithms, randomness, synthesizers, and whatever sounded neat to replace the standard components of pop music.
A modern variant, chillout, and its categorical cousins downtempo, ambient house, and certain varieties of IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, grew out of a need for dancers and partiers at techno clubs to take a break, relax, and recover from their efforts, along with whatever else they needed recovering from. Like the original ambient music, much of it is designed to relax the mind and allow it to roam, while providing just enough stimulation to register as inspiration.
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Where to get it: Both Gina and Brian Ashcraft at our gaming-focused sibling blog Kotaku find Eno's Music for Airports to be superior music for deep tasks and serious studying. It was designed, after all, for actual airports, to put passengers at ease in an often stressful situation, right before getting on a tube that some consider their worst fear.
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Ask the Readers: Best Music for Studying?
Your upstairs neighbors sound like they're rearranging the furniture and your roommate's…
Read more ReadGina and many, many commenters dig the Groove Salad stream and other stations, like Drone Zone and Secret Agent, provided by Soma.fm. Half as many recommend the ambient offerings at Digitally Imported, and often flip between it and Soma.fm for fresh streams. Both sites provide free audio to most any music player that can tune in web playlists or radio.
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Get Productive to Groove Salad
Just in time for finals week, the HackCollege blog recommends studying to a continuous ambient…
Read more ReadIf you're a fan of streaming recommendation site Pandora, or like the minimalist, 'glitch,' or seriously ambient side of techno, commenter maczter recommends a playlist created by a Pandora employee, Ovals, that he describes as 'minimalist elemental glitch.' I tried it out for an afternoon writing session, and found five out of six tracks to be unexpectedly calming and helpful in the task—with the exception of one rather jarring, high-pitched interloper.
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The Noise Route
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How it works: If music is too distracting for your tastes, but your chatty co-workers, office machinery, and general clamor are even more distracting, colored noise might be a worthy addition to your audio repertoire.
Noise generators, usually grouped into groups of white, pink, or brown/red, cover a range of your ear's audible spectrum with generic sound to mask or lessen the distractions of other sounds. Wikipedia's entry on sound masking puts it best:
![Sounds good in focus house samples 2017 Sounds good in focus house samples 2017](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125754572/650986067.jpg)
Imagine a dark room where someone is turning a flashlight on and off. The light is very obvious and distracting. Now imagine that the room lights are turned on. The flashlight is still being turned on and off, but is no longer noticeable because it has been 'masked'. Sound masking is a similar process of covering a distracting sound with a more soothing or less intrusive sound.
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Where to get it: If you can install desktop software where you work, we've previously recommended web sites like Coffeetivityand Rainy Cafe, and apps like Chatterblocker for Windows and OS X for covering up sounds. They recreate different environments (like a coffee shop or office) to fill in notable gaps or introduce other ambient-type sounds into your mix. For a more pure white/pink/brown noise generator, try SimplyNoise.
Download of the Day: ChatterBlocker (Windows)
Windows only: Desktop application ChatterBlocker 'neutralizes' office noise with a…
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Lost in a sea of random speaker crackle? Editor's tests have found that pink noise generally simulates a waterfall effect, while setting the brown/red noise in SimplyNoise to a low volume, while allowing the volume to fall up and down, or oscillate, provides a soundscape similar to waves hitting the shore off in the distance.
Other Routes
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We asked our readers to share the music that helps them get things done, and they showered us with responses. There are a lot of specific artists, albums, and genres listed in the comments of that post that might inspire you to re-seed your own playlist, but a few had some unique ideas on what helped them listen while stay productive.
four12 wrote that listening to radio stations in foreign languages 'effectively drowns out the office noise, but because I really don't understand what is being said (though I am learning), my brain tunes even that out.' In his case, France Info radio provides the news-but-not-really-news he needs.
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wowser808, on the other hand, goes with a more traditional, and heart-warmingly geeky, pic: the Blade Runner soundtrack.' He notes that Vangelis' ethereal tunes 'got me through every single essay at university.' Video game soundtracks might be good, too—since they're designed to provide a stimulating background that doesn't mess with your concentration.
Blade Runner /
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We are still more than open to your suggestions of what music, noise, random sounds, or audio hackery makes for the most productive environment. Tell us your picks in the comments.
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Title photo by Sara Björk.