I feel like i’ve been looking at Samplers for so long now.
I’ve had a lot that barely passed through my hands :
Mpc one, mpc live 2, digitakt, sp 404 mk2, koala on ipad, mpc 1000, maschine mk3.
I can’t even remember why i sold them to be honest. They all “seem” to have had some issue that led me to think i don’t need it but i can’t ever tell why after some time has passed.
Now i’m in that spot again where i hate everything i’m doing on my daw and i have this daunting thought that my most creative work has been with samplers.
I did try to use my daw as a sampler but i find it too big, too many choices, too random and ultimately it just feels “fake” i don’t know how to put that better… just feels like i don’t respect the sample anymore, there isn’t an intent or carefulness in any action i make.
Maybe that’s what i need, limitations of the box you choose.
And now obviously i start to romanticize it, like it becomes the absolute thing i need to make something again you know ?
I do feel like i have a plan. Being minimalist first and foremost. Dropping my laptop for quite a while because i know i need a break from the daw… and focus on the sampler i’d buy and nothing else… without giving up on the first barriers i encounter and keep it for at least a few months to know it inside out instead of selling it after a couple weeks like most gear i got so far.
I feel like i shouldn’t be trusted like a drug addict though. Am i just creating a new need, a new illusion of THE answer to my creativity, again ?
Anyway
What’s the perfect portable machine to mangle but still have some control and limitations ? (i surrender)
I can’t afford an octatrack, like ever so let’s ignore that.
What kind of music do you want to make? Are you more into performing stuff in the moment or carefully tweaking and assembling a composition? Is stereo sampling important? Chromatic playabality with polyphony?
If you could afford those bits, surely you could afford a second hand Octatrack Mk1? But by the sounds of it you’re deep in GASville, and it’s a tough place to be.
yeah i feel like i don’t want hardware limitations like mono
I feel like going back to simple things. I’m not really into house per say like the mood and these kind of 7th type of chords i hear all the time but i do like the rythm and mix it to sampling and try to make it super melodic. Think early gold panda maybe.
SP404 Mk2 is probably the best bang for the buck that would fit what you want I guess. I just got one the other day as something to feed into my OT, quite liking it so far. I can see how the resampling/skipback stuff is really nice for quickly crafting interesting sounds and rhythms, not touched the sequencing side yet.
I’m a bit annoyed about a bug that makes poly chromatic playback with a MIDI keyboard not super viable for live stuff so hopefully they can fix that in an update. But otherwise it feels like it has a good balance of quick sampling workflow and basic editing/FX so that you can’t really get bogged down in anything overcomplicated. The filter seems absolute pish to me compared to the OT’s but that’s ok tbh, I can work around stuff like that.
Man i don’t remember why i sold it back
I remember having huge trouble making a decent loop with an old song i sampled in but i don’t recall what limited me.
I read recently that it should be more considered as a fancy drum machine than a proper sampler to make beats on, do you disagree ?
What’s a video of it that would blow my blurry brains?
It’s a great god damn drum machine. If you consider an MPC the ultimate form of sampler then an MPC it is not. My finger drumming would be classified as hazardous to the poor suffering machine it’s being inflicted upon so it’s probably better that it doesn’t have velocity pads.
however there are various things which beg to differ with the impression that it’s not a sampler - first it can resample, do you know anything not a sampler that can resample? it can also now slice which it does with a slightly vagrant-esque stumble but is essential to resampling into something which can use performance mutes. It can also timestretch using an LFO, and it can coherently play long samples. I’m constantly running out of voices on digitone and sampling things from DN into DT frees up voices/tracks and keeps digitone playing as expected. fixed (set time) recording length is really helpful to getting loops to work.
As for videos, @Doug did some cool stuff with plocking hip hop vocals to beats for full verses to play back - definitely sampler quality right there.
lfo timestretch with amen break
sorry I mostly watch tutorials not performances but this cenk demo is still the shizz even if a bit dated!
give me a second to look at what I typed before I went down the youtube brainwash rabbit hole, all I can think about now is cat videos I’ve been recommended.
edited to change second video to relevant timestamp.
Looks like you burned through alot of gear costing more than an octatrack! Maybe buy a new one on installments which is a good way to commit. You can do everything you say you wan to do on it. I’d like to have two again. Someday.
Are you a musician? I mean, are you an instrumentalist?
It has been my general observation that a lot of people in the art of electronic music are not actually musicians; and there seems to be some denial about the importance of understanding music, and how that directly applies to making music.
What I’m saying is, all of the machines you’ve already owned (including your DAW) are more than capable of producing whatever music you might hope to hear. But you do have to hear it first—in your head, heart, and soul. Inspiration manifests within. It is the sum of your life experience; which includes being a student of music, if music is in fact the goal.
All that to say, no matter what instrument you choose, whether it’s a piano or a sampler, woodshedding is the only way forward.
alright back from metaphysical to physical, in the rabbit hole I’m reminded of another digitakt limitation which could impact how you perform music - that is to say that regardless of how you compose music, how you perform music is also part of being a musician and I was watching something which brings to light that the octatrack can add effects in one pattern, on the fly, and carry it over into the next pattern where digitakt is not set up to do this. You can sidestep this with pedals or whatever, for you know reverb or delay or something, but this is to say that if your effects need to be added as part of a loose performance workflow that you enjoy while transitioning patterns (unless I’m not aware of how) this isn’t possible. I do use pedals sometimes so this doesn’t always impact me and the only way I can think of to get around it is to do on the fly copy pasting of patterns (which is possible) but it’s not as simple as fx block type effects where it’s global.
just wanted to say in the real world when I play guitar with my pedals or whatever I don’t have to think about it as much but when I work in little black boxes I expect there to be a few work arounds. that is all.
I would go Digitakt again out of that list. If you use it in isolation, it sounds great and is plenty tweakable without going overboard into DAW-territory but has the advantage of streaming 8 outputs over USB via Overbridge so some DAW fine tuning can be added.
I’m not sure why Octatrack is being mentioned so many times, especially when you specifically ruled it out. Plus the gainstaging and other things make it a PITA to get sounding good compared to Digitakt imo.
I went through most of the things on that list as well (and the Octatrack) and ended up with the ARmk1, which for me, has been the ultimate sampler / drum machine. I use the analog engines as much as I use the sample part of it so YMMV, but a lot of those other machines were just not as much fun to use, even if on paper they had the specs I liked. The closest was the Digitakt but I like the way the AR works and sounds much more. Used ARmk1s are still out there too.
So what do you want to sample? Stereo but also for polyphonic playing? Multi samples or one shots?
I love the DT for its fast approach to sample and go off. It I always missed polyphony so ended wit Maschine for that purpose. And the ability to load stems into ABLETON quite easily…
trying to use your laptop as a beatmachine itself without a midi controller (only using the qwerty and no mouse/ touchpad only) can be oddly satisfying as a groovebox alternative…sometimes.
