Building Blocks is a series of features developed in partnership with Splice commissioning dance music artists to make a sample pack. Each artist develops a pack that reflects their voice as a producer—a suite of sounds they'd use in their own tracks and live sets. Apart from the sample pack itself, each feature includes video and text where the artists talk all things samples and sampling, the process of making the pack, and their own creative evolution from beginner to the present day. The packs will be available to purchase via Splice.

First we have Aaron Röbig and Felix Wagner of FJAAK, whose studio we visited at the start of 2020. The Berlin duo came of age playing live techno with hardware instruments, bringing a tongue-in-cheek attitude to a world of anonymous white labels and weekend-long raves. Don't be fooled by their joker tendencies—the attitude hides a long-running obsession and dedication to sound, which they discussed with RA from their home studio last year.

When did you realise producing music was something within your reach?

Felix: Software was more expensive when we started. If you didn't know how to download it illegally, then you got it from a demo CD. We got ours from a box of cereal. A big brand was putting various creative programs in their cereal boxes—one was for music, one for video, one for image editing. Super basic. So we bought the cereal to get the CD, which was only a demo, of course. It was a super closed environment. For example, you couldn't change the pitch of a sound, you could only sequence them. That gets boring pretty fast but the key thing is that it was a fun way to start. It felt more like a video game.

A friend of ours eventually got the Maschine software and controller. We saw that and were like, "Wow, that's so cool." After a few weeks, I think everybody in our crew got their own Maschine. We had, like, ten friends all making music at the same time and they all got Maschine. Everybody was into it, again, sort of like a game.

Aaron: It was also about sharing the knowledge, fun and experience around a larger group. If somebody was excited by some new discovery, the others realise, "Hey, I can do this, too." This group dynamic was how we pushed ourselves in the beginning. If you get into it with your friends, they learn something new which drives you on to learn new things, too, and you pool your experience together.

This is also how we acquired gear. Something is out of reach financially, then a friend spends years saving up for it and you can see the ways in which it is actually worth it, that the amount of good music that comes out of can be worth the investment. For us it was clear that this was our passion and our life. And we want to spend everything we have to support this.

Felix: When we were 16, when we stopped going to school, it still took time to dive into music all the way because everybody was saying to us, "Why are you throwing away your lives? Are you crazy? You're going to lose everything and ask us for help." And so this makes you scared. There are a lot of people who fail. We have so many friends that are fighting so hard all the time. Of course, some will make it but I hope the best for everybody who's making the effort.

Aaron: I think if you really believe in something and try your best you can do whatever you want. But you have to focus and really do it. Not just saying it or thinking it but really seriously meaning it for yourself.

Do you think beginners tend to overestimate the difficulties starting out?

Aaron: In the beginning, everything feels like an incredible overload. The complexity of sound, music and the technology is overwhelming. At that time I was thinking music was more about mathematics and physics…

Felix: Yes, and that there are "secrets."

Aaron: … And that you have to study everything. But with more experience, it seemed better to me to try to divide creative and technical tasks. I think many of the best musicians don't even know the technical engineering part. Clearly for them it doesn't matter because the technical and creative sides are not really that connected. Or that they're not as connected as they seem specifically when you're making electronic music.

Felix: Of course there can be a connection between the technical and the creative.

Aaron: Sure but it is not necessary. After spending years becoming comfortable with the technical stuff, I would say that there isn't as much to it as it seems at the beginning. You have amplifiers, filters, EQs and sometimes compressors. If you look at a channel strip from any mixing board, it's the same every time. Then if you have the knowledge about what each individual component does to the sound, and if you focus on these small, individual components and understand what you're doing and can hear the difference, then you're done. So there are just a few fundamentals but you have to focus deeply on what is there.

The amount of technical information available today for sure has benefits but it does also reinforce this idea that you are chasing some impossible goal.

Felix: More information is good but you have to separate between good and bad. You have to filter it super hardcore. This is why the basics, the stuff you probably already know about, are so important.

Humans are in some way quite sympathetic so it's easy to be seduced by how the information is presented. You are, consciously or not, looking for good, positive, helpful information so you have to think twice about how that influences you.

Aaron: It's also a lot about taste. Maybe for you a sound is the best ever but for someone else, it's not. This is why you have so many different, say, preamps to choose from but people are mostly using the same one or two products. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems like everyone already agrees what is "the best," and so you might not even realise that you like another option much better because you didn't even try it.

Being pretty young and starting out with hardware, did you ever have a bias against samples? Did you think it was a "less serious" way of working?

Aaron: There are a lot sides to this. When I was getting into sampling, it was because of hip-hop. If you make a point of researching the sample sources, it can be great for your knowledge of music. It leads you to jazz, soul, funk, blues. Because that's where the best stuff is coming from!

A track like "My Name Is" by Eminem, it's just one sample. And I remember realising how little they changed the sample from the source. Maybe Dr. Dre added a kick, I don't know. But the sample was from a very different type of music with its own history and context, and the differences between the two work musically, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. So when we're talking about there being some responsibility to not take when you're sampling, you don't have to change the sample itself so much if you're putting it in a different musical situation.

Felix: You also have to think about what is important. Is it more important that someone took a sound from someone or is it more important that the resulting track is good? Is it a positive thing for music in the world? I came to a point where I felt fucked up by all these questions. There were a couple of years where I couldn't use samples.

Well, now we need to point out the differences in types of samples. I would happily still use a one-shot sample of a drum machine from a sample pack—I'm more talking about sampling fully-formed musical content. The point was, I wanted to do as much on my own as possible. And through that research of learning how the music you want to sample was made, you can then construct something from those elements that's more personal to your experience.

Aaron: In the beginning for us there was a stage where we only wanted to make sounds from raw oscillators. Like the Operator synth in Ableton.

Felix: We also thought it was actually illegal to sample.

Aaron: And that someone would find out and that we'd get in trouble.

Felix: With Maschine, the price included some samples. Then we got Ableton—I'm not sure what version we had but the point is it came with no sounds. Because we had no money we got whatever the cheapest version was. So we were focused on Ableton instruments like Operator and Tension. In hindsight, this was good for learning the building blocks of sound design with synths, the roles of oscillators, envelopes and so on. We didn't have anything else to make our own new sounds with.

When we found out that people would, say, take someone else's kick drum, someone else's snare drum, not paying for them, not giving a fuck, I was super surprised. I couldn't really believe it. What about the drummer who played this, is he getting paid? What about the mixing engineer who recorded this? On the other hand, of course sampling is super important. It changed things forever and gave us some of the best music of recent times.

Aaron: Especially if a piece of music is forty years old or something. Younger people perhaps aren't quite as interested in old music these days and sampling is a way of bridging that history gap. To see how good things were in the past but in a new way. But if you take something that's two years old from someone who makes similar music to you, don't do it. This is not the point. It's about digging, finding something special and making something new out of it.

Felix: Of course, you can take a song from the charts, take a second of it, put it in a granular synthesiser… or you could fart into a granular synth. What I'm trying to say is, depending on how you manipulate a sound, the source itself can become less important or totally disappear. Then nobody would know if you sampled a fart or an EDM sound. Maybe they even sounded the same in the beginning, which makes it more complicated (laughs). Where is the sample from? What does it mean? Is it a second? Is it a full track with an 808 kit added to it? I have no answers for any of these questions, it always depends.

We are obviously working in techno. In techno, you're basically sampling yourself all the time. Even if a lot of small things are changing, it's in a framework of repetition. Maybe we're playing a synth sequence and sending it to many different devices that capture loops out of the sequence and give them a certain character or set of possibilities. So in a way sampling is the central point of the production process.

The difference between an audio clip and a sample is just semantics.

You can name it how you want. All I know is that we record and sample ourselves early in the process and they become the building blocks of putting a track together. And despite all the gear we own, you don't always have access to what you need, but there is probably a sample out there of it you can buy. I would estimate approximately 0.1% of producers these days don't use samples.

Aaron: The thing you can't ignore about samples is the workflow. It's so fast. You have the sound there. If you know how to process it, to make it your own, you can build ideas in less than a minute.

Felix: Spend a minute in headphones on the MPC and the beat is ready. You can do things like take some hip-hop samples, raise their tempo, pitch them all down an octave, distort them, and layer them with drums. So samples can also be used to fill gaps or add character to other sounds in interesting ways.

Aaron: Every distortion unit or plug-in is different so they're good ways to make different textures and tones out of the same sample. As we said before, if you're processing the sample a lot, the sound itself stops to matter so much—you could make 1000 sounds out of one sound.

When I mentioned workflow before, that's the reason why you need a good library and filing system for your samples. And also that the quality of the samples themselves is good.

Well how do you know if a sample is "good"?

Felix: Obviously you'd want to avoid noise or distortion if that wasn't the goal of the sample. Also, say if you use one kick drum sound a lot but every time you always add high frequencies to it. If you were to sample it, you'd want those high frequencies added into the sound. Also, gear like old drum machines might not make the exact same sounds even if they're the same instrument. Two people could make sample packs out of different 808s and one might be better than the other because one of the 808s had a brighter clap.

Aaron: That's the technical side of it. From the creative side, you can have an 808 or whatever, but everybody has it. But having something that's your own, unique and still good, that's more important for me personally. This is the key about samples for me, that they're giving me creative input.

Felix: Samples can surprise you sometimes. Say you go to re-pitch a sound that you thought was timestretched, but it wasn't, and you realise that this accidentally longer, lower tone is exactly what you needed.

You'd think owning a lot of hardware, as you do, would render samples, especially one-shots, redundant. So why do you still need them?

Aaron: One big thing is playing live. Samplers are super useful and we rely on them a lot.

Felix: There's Elektron's Octatrack and the Analog RYTM…

Aaron: … and an MPC Live, which is also a sampler.

Felix: When we first started playing live we used to take an insane amount of stuff to places like Panorama Bar. We brought, like, five drum machines the first time.

Aaron: That's exactly it. If you have to take all this shit and fly with it, it'll break or get lost. Also, there's the sound. If you put a sample in the Octatrack, it's not the same sound any more. And this is how it is for basically every sampler. This is the big part of the magic of working with samples—the interesting ways in which hardware samplers colour the sound.

Felix: At the same time, we also process the samples again when we're playing live. We have saturation and buss compression, which really helps the overall presence and loudness. But yes, those samplers are the only way we could play live. We lost so much stuff in the past, we'd have to buy the same pedals over and over again.

Considering a hardware drum machine or synth typically has a specific sound, do samples give you a greater variety of sound options when playing live?

Even though we don't over-prepare our sets, the good thing about using samples is that we can play live versions of tracks we've released that people might recognise. It's a good middle ground between improvising and providing something that the audience might know already in a different way.

Aaron: There's also single-cycle waveforms. I guess they are samples, too. When playing live we often use samplers to loop a tiny fragment of sound and use it like an oscillator from a synthesiser. The lines between where a sample ends and a new sound source begins is more fluid.

Felix: So for instance Aaron might capture and freeze a tiny slice of feedback from a delay effect, which then becomes a drone that you can use like a synth. Then you can repitch and re-sequence that sound fragment however you like based on what you're feeling in the moment.

Aaron: Envelopes, filters, amplifiers—the structure of samplers and synthesisers are very similar. Eventually looped samples started being used as sound sources for synths, especially in the '90s. Another thing you can do is sample the raw oscillator of a hardware synth, sampling each note all the way up the keyboard, and then map each sample on to the keyboard of your sampler. Then you basically have a synth at that point. In the early years of sampling, the E-mu Emulator II was more or less based on this same idea.

Felix: Now this goes all the way back to instruments that played-back taped sound. I guess the Mellotron is the most famous one, the first successful sample player. That's super old school.

Aaron: The point to make is that you have many different ways of implementing and using samples that breaks down this barrier we set up between samples and any other sound source.

Did you have specific goals for your sample pack?

Felix: We tried to give the people original sounds that reflect the way we have worked over all these years. Our sound aesthetic should be in there.

Aaron: We will also use this sample pack ourselves! We tried to make the best package possible for us, too. A lot of good drums, a lot of good synths. And also sounds that are hopefully fun to work with. We wanted it to be something where, if we hadn't made it ourselves, we'd be excited to use them.

We would be working on an idea and sometimes you'd land on a certain signal chain and a certain sound that's blowing you away so you record it for, like, an hour. Like when the Jomox drum machine started doing the weirdest shit…

Felix: Yeah we changed the BPM from 999 to 0 a lot of times and it fell apart. We pulled out the MIDI cable and it kept playing, all the pitches of the sounds were changing on their own, like it was controlled by ghost hands.

Aaron: But it wasn't like drums anymore, no kicks, no snares. It was something else.

Felix: So we recorded this for 45 minutes, standing next to it just going, "Wow, what is happening?" Nothing repeated the same way. It was new combinations of sounds over and over.

Aaron: This is what people do nowadays with modular systems—I mean, people did this previously too but it's more popular now. It's so easy to modulate every parameter with LFOs so that sounds never repeat the same way. Then you just sit there listening closely to the subtle changes.

Is that how you made the samples? Just making ideas and when something worth capturing happened you'd record it for the pack?

Aaron: We did a lot of analogue processing with different drum machines and synthesisers.

Felix: Mostly we tried to use instruments where you really have to create the sound from scratch. For example, the Nord Drum. Each sound is broken up into a tone and click component, so the user can make a sound very specifically to their needs. Then when it comes to processing, we wanted to use gear that maybe you wouldn't find or have access to in the average studio. Pieces that I would've loved to have access to back when we didn't own the machines.

Aaron: Yes, the raw recorded sound was always processed heavily.

Felix: We ran these sounds through some crazy shit. A lot of preamps, EQs, compressors. We took time to make the sounds are ready to use and will stand up in any production. Of course, you've got to adjust the sounds to fit your overall track.

Aaron: Powerful but still clean and unique but versatile.

Felix: Even if a sound is distorted, it should still be useable. We didn't go overboard with degrading the signal but we did add some distorted tones because perhaps people expect this from us. We also tried to give people samples where you can maybe cut out a slice, shorten a loop, use a fragment as a layer for drums—there should be no shortage of uses you can get out of them.

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