I’ve been producing music for years, and I have to be honest: I wish Splice sounds was around when I first started making music. In this post I’m going to talk about what Splice Sounds is, my honest opinion of it, and the idea of sampling and what it means. I’ll also say that Splice didn’t ask me to write this review, and this is a completely 100% viewpoint of it.
Here’s a video where I demonstrate how Splice Sounds looks on the inside – under the video is my review of it!
Sign up for Splice Sounds here: Splice Sounds
Now starting from the basics, in music a “sample” is basically any sound bite. It can be a percussive element, drum kick, bass note, vocal (sung, spoken or rapped), synth melody, and more. Samples are used constantly within music, as people will re-sample works of the past in addition to using samples that are being made every day.
Now the problem in the past with sampling is that it’s difficult to just get one sample. For example, if I wanted to just get a good kick drum, I would have to buy a $20 sample back that contains 300 samples – even though I only want one. I then have to figure out what key the sample is in, make sure that it fits the given genre I’m working with, etc.
What I love about Splice Sounds is that it’s a database, full of samples, that you can download one-by-one. In addition, they’re all organized. For example, I can organize the samples by key, BPM, genre, instrument, and more. This means that if I need a very specific sample, I can quickly narrow down my search results to find a sample within minutes (as oppose to hours).
As you can see above, if I wanted a Moombahton Vocal, I can quickly narrow it down with their search settings.
I’ll also mention this too: Everything is royalty free. What that means is that you can take the sample you download, use it in a track, and distribute it for commercial purposes (you can make money off of it).
Now here comes the big question everyone asks: How Much?? It’s actually pretty interesting (and cleaver).
The cheapest membership is $7.99/month, and for that you get 100 credits. Each sample that you download is 1 credit (sometimes they have free ones). Whether it’s a hi-hat or 30 second vocal, it’s all 1 credit. So essentially, you get 100 downloads/samples for $8 a month. In addition, any credits that you don’t use get rolled over to the next month. Although this strange at first to me, I actually really like the business model. Not to mention, 8 bucks is easily a drink at the bar, so it’s pretty cheap.
Lastly, any purchases that you make can be re-download for free. This is pretty helpful, simply because if you need to save space on your hard drive, you can delete samples after you release a track and always re-download them if you want to use them for another track.
Here’s my overall Pros and Cons list:
PROS
• Inexpensive
• Able to buy samples one-by-one (as opposed to being forced to buy a whole pack)
• Tons of really good samples
• Able to re-download purchased samples for free
• Great organization to find samples quickly
CONS
(I honestly had to think hard about what’s negative, and I could really only come up with a couple)
• You need the Splice Application on your computer to download the samples, and that can sometimes be a bit glitchy
• Like I said above, sometimes they have samples that are 0 credits (free). I wish there was another filter that allowed you to search for 0 credit samples, as oppose to randomly stumbling upon them
