Making Beats from Sampled Sounds with TOKiMONSTA

Interested in making your own clean, polished samples to use in your beats? In this video, acclaimed producer/DJ TOKiMONSTA shares how she uses iZotope  RX  to transform everyday sounds into her own unique beat-making arsenal. 

Watch as she cleans up recorded samples by removing background noise like computer hum, and see how she uses RX in her productions to sculpt her sounds with Spectral De-noise and Guitar De-noise. Finally, discover how she blends her unique recorded samples with stock sounds to make one-of-a-kind beats. 

New to RX? With groundbreaking modules like Music Rebalance and Guitar De-noise along with De-hum and Voice De-noise, you can quickly repair your audio tracks so you can get back to making music and being creative. 

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This article references a previous version of RX. Learn about RX 10 and its powerful new features like Dynamic Adaptive Mode in RX De-hum, improved Spectral Recovery, the new Repair Assistant, and more. 

TOKiMONSTA on sampling sounds

"If you were to open any one of my sessions, very likely you're going to find a lot of samples.

Sampling is incredibly important to my music, it's a quality of my music I've had for a very long time. It's a part of me as a musician, a part of the the music I'm influenced by. Now the way that I sample is through field recordings, so they're samples I'm creating. RX 9 is very much a part of that process. Through these samples I'm able to create unique sounds that no one else will have."

How RX is used in TOKiMONSTA's productions

"For me, RX is important because it allows me to take these samples and keep them really clean. Without something like RX, there would be a lot of noise that would compete with other things happening in the song.

A few modules I use are the Spectral De-noise in adaptive mode, the De-crackle for taking crackles out of vinyl, De-rustle, and De-plosive whenever I record people's voices. The module I use the most is probably Spectral De-noise. I find it the most universal and it's pretty important when you're out in the wild recording sounds.

I have this really interesting moment where I use Music Rebalance. I had done this remix of "Every Woman" by Chaka Khan it featured Tinashe. The thing is, I was meant to make this remix without any a capella, and at the time, I didn't have Tinasha next to me.

How was I going to do this? I extracted the a capella from the original version that Chaka Khan had sang and built the remix around her vocal, which we ended up replacing with Tinashe's vocals and she actually referenced those in order to sing it.

A more far out way I've used RX is this one moment where I was sampling my cat. I just took my phone, put it up to him, gave him a little scratch by the ears, recorded him purring, took that into RX to use Spectral De-noise, took out the room noise, and put it into a song that someone will hear one day.

For me, if I were to describe what RX is to someone who's never used it: If you're a sculptor and you have a block of clay, it's like the tools that you use to kind of "whittle that down" into what you want it to become. And that's what it is to me."

Watch the video to learn more about TOKiMONSTA's creative process with RX.