Can you make music with Just Samplers(ensemble)?

I’ve got a room full of samplers, but the beauty of midi and grooveboxes means you don’t need more than one sampler, if it has enough channels or tracks. I wouldn’t make extra work for myself.

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Thats why ive never tried. But if you create a working template it might be worth investigating. I will try.

Please share? Its all good.

A sampler can be anything, so more than one sampler together is whatever you want it to be. The only caveat is how well they communicate and sync up.

Generally you would want to compose on 1 device but with, for example, a device that has midi but no sequencer then sequencing it with another midi device is common. Sometimes that’s a computer or a dedicated sequencer, sometimes it’s another sampler.

I use more than one sampler in a number of ways but would I use 5 samplers together? No, probably not. Just like working with 5 performers who all need supervision to accomplish what 1 or 2 performers can do, it complicates the act.

Could you do it? Sure. Why not.

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Curious where the question is coming from. Of course people can use multiple samplers - especially if they each bring something different to the table or cover each other’s limitations.

I’m mostly asking because it might be worth spending some time figuring out what you feel is missing first. Otherwise it’s easy to slide into GAS and end up justifying more gear when what you already have might actually be enough for what you want to do.

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Theres no gas from me as i have a lot of samplers. The question arises as i haven’t seem many ensembles? Maybe a couple paired but no more. You get ensembles of synths and others but not a samplers? Is there a reason for this?

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Its the sort of thing Look Mom No Computer would come up with. Sort of a boffin experiment. But i’d love to see somebody trying it.

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Got it. My post came from a place of friendliness, not lecturing, just to be sure. :slight_smile:

As to why you’d see fewer sampler ensembles, my guess would be due to the nature of samplers: a sampler can sound like anything, whereas synths tend to have their unique signature sounds. So ensambles are more meaningful with synths.

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I think because the differences in sound between all the samplers is negligible (to 99.99% of humans , lets not get in the weeds about DACs and bit rates) whereas every synth generally has a unique character and sound.

Samplers are more like guitars, fun to collect, all sound the same-ish

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Thanks. Samplers are all different though. My SP1200 is not the same as my Octatrack.(filters and components) etc. The flavours are different.

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I super glued my P6 to that big blank area on my MPCkey61 that could have had a sh!t ton of extra OLED knobs as a pre sampler interfaced with an iPad running Koala. Those three run into my SPmk2, which can route to my Force, and all of that into Ableton and another iPad simultaneously. That’s about 6-7 samplers. I could be annoying and add in the BlackBox and EP40 but that would be overkill I think. And the OGDT is always waiting to be unleashed.

Maybe I’ll should sell one or two.

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Absolutely, but perhaps not different enough to justify having several of them playing together. You could sample that SP1200 sound into a higher-fidelity sampler for example. The same can’t be said about making a Juno 60 sound like a DX7.

It’s just my theory of why there may be fewer examples out there of sampler ensembles.

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But they do sound different.

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Years ago I had a night with two samplers at the same time! That was super fun!

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From a workflow perspective it looks good on stage?

The thing is that Samplers mostly have a lot of Tracks to work with so, it’s often not necessary to have a lot of them involved in a composition. It’s not like Synths who can produce on ly sound at a time.

I think you’re suggesting reasons for why you’d like to see more sampler ensembles – I was just trying to guess why there aren’t many today. So, both can be true. :slight_smile:

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Thats true. But if you’ve got them why not use them? And it helps with the old more than 8/16 tracks issue(Peter Gabriel springs to mind).

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Fair does. We’ll meet in the middle :slightly_smiling_face:.

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