There’s also royalty free sample packs that can be bought for not too much. Many go for like $30-50 or so, and give you precut, looped, beat mapped, tempo and key tagged sampled. When I started out, I utilized Sonic Foundry’s loop libraries that they made for their Acid PRO software (which I also used), later owned by Sony, and now Magix took over the Acid PRO software, so I’m not sure if they also got the rights to the loop libraries as well? (researching now)
When I started out, I learned completely using loop libraries such as those, and worked with Acid Music, which was the basic entry-level version of Acid PRO. No FX, no vst’s/vsti’s… it did have recording, but I only had the mic jack on my computer and it was fairly noisy, but I did record a few things that way. Basically you could load samples, adjust the pitch, arrange them, slice them and dice them, and that was it. I think it MIDI, but I didn’t know anything about using MIDI back then. You could automate panning and volume, and that was about it lol. But I’m glad I started that way, because it forced to find interesting ways of varying samples. I also heavily got into editing. Editing probably is one of my strongest attributes as a producer. When you have a cool sample, and it’s almost perfect, but the loop ends on some flourish or something and you want just a consistent, driving groove. Or maybe you have the perfect sample for some melody, but the sample doesn’t change key, so you have pitch shift bits of it. Or, a cool drum loop, but you really wish you had another snare hit on the back beat or something and it’s not there. That’s what I’m into.
Also, reproducing effects when you don’t have fancy plugins or anything. It made me really learn WHAT effects do, rather than just, “send it through the BigDelay”, or what have you, and leave it at that.
Later on, I got a copy of Sound Forge, and that’s when my music REALLY started blasting off, being able to edit individual samples with actual effects and things. I’ve actually built songs entirely within Sound Forge. Then, after that I pirated a copy of Acid PRO, and by then I really could appreciate effect automation, or loading effects at all. I remember the copy I got tho was really buggy, and it’d always crash when I was working on a really cool track, and of course when I get in that mode, I’m not thinking about saving so often… and then it’d just crash. I definitely lost some awesome tracks that way. Some I was able to rebuild from memory, some never never quite got back to where I had them (fortunately I have a good memory).
Anyways, it really helped me as a producer to work like that. Loop libraries aren’t terribly expensive and provide many sonic beds to work with, and normally are royalty free, meaning you can use them for commercial use without worry of copyright. And also there are free libraries out there. Also, I was always really into sampling, so a lot of times I could just rip a track to my computer and cut pieces out of it. Love that kinda work, and sampling (copyrights be damned!).