How to Recreate the Classic French House Sampled Sound

One of the defining sounds of early French House came from the way producers sampled disco records through hardware samplers.

At the beginning of the genre, producers used machines such as the Akai S950 and E-mu SP-1200 to sample disco and funk records. Their limited sampling technology gave the audio a gritty, crunchy character that became a huge part of the classic French House sound.

Today, you can recreate this without the original hardware using WaveTracing’s SP950 plugin, which emulates the character of these classic samplers.

Getting the Grit

Artists such as Le Knight Club are known for their particularly gritty and crunchy sampled sound. One technique used to achieve this involved changing the speed of the sample before and after sampling.

Originally, producers could speed the record up on a turntable, then sample it into an SP-1200 at that faster speed. They would then slow the sample back down using the SP-1200.

This process helped give the sample its distinctive degraded and crunchy character.

With the SP950 plugin, you can recreate the idea digitally. Instead of physically speeding up a record on a turntable, pitch the sample up before running it through the plugin. Once it has been processed, pitch it back down to its original pitch.

The plugin makes this particularly easy because you can move the pitch up and down without needing the original hardware setup.

Try pitching the sample up by several semitones before processing it, then bringing it back down afterwards. Experiment with different amounts until you find the level of grit you’re looking for.

Here's an example of a disco loop processed through SP950 at -5 tuning. I added a slight high shelf EQ to really boost the bitcrushing sound.

Once you have a processed loop, the next step is the track itself — how to make a French house track from scratch in Ableton builds the whole thing around it.