Old school sampler

The Lounge Other Gear
#93

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/dust-brothers?print=yes

Dust Brothers:

We did all of Paul’s Boutique on an Emax HD, which was mono and 12-bit and had a 22kHz sampling rate. So we had plenty of experience of the primitive domain of early sampling: low bit rate and low sampling rate. But we’ve never been in love with the degraded sound of those early machines, we were always trying to make samples sound better. We had Pro Tools in our heads before it even existed. Since both John and I came from a computer background, we knew what computers were capable of, and we were kind of bombed that the samplers were still so lo-fi or hard to use.

:upside_down_face:

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#94

It’s the same with these mid to late 80’s roland keyboards. The D-series. If you play the samples (PCM’s?) on the lower octaves, you get this gorgeous buzzing sound. It’s just aliasing. So simple yet so effective. Of course it wasnt really intended. Only in hindsight by comparing with new tech you appreciate it

#95

I think I need a Polyend Tracker.
Any idea if the 1010 Blackbox does it? (Disable antialiasing).

I think those early samplers also resampled on the fly? (With each key-press?) Unlike modern samplers?

#96

I’ve owned most of the rack Ensoniqs, Akais, and Yamahas. Used an E4XT, but not much else from EMU.

My favorite sounding (Edit for clarity: for drum crunch & sizzle) was the Casio FZ10m. :grin:

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OT - sound quality
#97

Im not sure how the old ones did it. But different. Im not very tech savvy :slightly_smiling_face: Something to do with changing clock…

The Polyend Tracker is great but it has it’s quirks and it’s still in a very early stage. But the sound -to me- outweighs it’s bugs/issues by miles. The reverb is kind of nice too on drums. A million times better than the octatrack, which honestly stinks (for drums) -in my opinion.
Ive never used or heard tge 1010 blackbox. Its the one with tge touchscreen, right?

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#98

That’s the one. Elektronauts seem to love it. Mega-thread is here: 1010music Blackbox

Tracker’s been on my shortlist. Glad you mentioned that we can disable antialiasing. Love that crunch and nasty sizzle.

What do you think of the modern MPCs? They convert/sample everything to 32-bit floating point. Sounds better than most everything I’ve tried when pitching down.

#99

I stopped using them once they came with software and touch screens, so i have no idea!

#100

The MPC5000 i feel had a crunch and sounded bad ass loud (again imo) but also not particularly good at the same time(depends as often) but i far prefer it to the clean later models.

#101

I liked the synth part on the 5k quite a bit! Synth wasnt the best sounding VA, but was fun to use inside an MPC.
The 5k was loud and clean but nothing special. No crunchiness when downpitching

#102

The old Nintendo cartridge games - there are many software emulations for Windows, though I’ve never tried them. Do they have the same 4 or 8 bit sound?

If so, can this done for old sampler firmware? Ensoniq Mirage (without the hex editing system) would be interesting.

Hmm, completely forgot about Arturia’s Fairlight and Synclavier emus. I’ve got the official Synclavier app on the iPad, need to spend more time with it. There’s the official CMI Fairlight app too.

#103

this is probably the best

I think it is still not QUITE like having a gameboy or a NES though. I don’t have a NES, but I have a few Gameboys and there is still something delightfully sh1tty about the actual hardware.

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#104

Also, since my last answer on this thread I inherited an old AKAI… and there’s definitely some mojo in there, even though I have an S3000Xl which most AKAI heads seem to rate very badly.

I think with a combination of saturation and Decimort and whatever you could get the sound… but then that’s loads of messing about when you can just sample a hit through the AKAI, send it back out to Ableton and it just slams more.

might just be nice premaps slightly overdriven… but it’s definitely a “thing”.

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#105

Having owned a few rack samplers, an SP202…an Electribe ES-1 I would say no. None of them were worth the money or time and effort for the results I got. Unless you really want those Z Plane filters on the 6400. Currently owning the M:S and a DT I can’t see the point–not even to just make things “sound old”. There are too many easier ways to do it.

I would still own an Electribe S but only because I have a fantasy of having an functioning Electribe mini museum in my studio some day.

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#106

Still worth what?

#107

You’re probably interested in: TAL Software

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#108

Screenshot 2021-03-08 at 18.00.33
Screenshot 2021-03-08 at 18.00.331564×454 60.7 KB

not quite the same thing but makes for a similar gritty sound when pitched

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#109

I’m pretty partial to the EMAX

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#110

I don’t think I’ll ever voluntarily get rid of my S950, because on the occasions you can be bothered to set it all up, it does bring something to the table. The sound and filter are part of it, but it’s more the rote and ritual of sampling and processing in that UI, the way it steers you, that leads to results you wouldn’t get elsewhere. Keeping the floppy drive in there is part of it… inconvenience can be a driver. Less so, I’m sure, if you’re doing this for a living and have bills to pay. But as a hobbyist who can indulge himself, it’s an interesting thing to keep around.

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#111

The Electribe ES-1 was my first sampler and I definitely see why it’s so loveable (good lo-fi sound, superb sequencer, fx, processing, resampling) and then a Digitakt (all of the above, but at 48khz) but I still ended up purchasing a few rack samplers. Sure, they lack many of the luxuries from the drum samplers above. But still, they have amazing polyphony, chromatic tuning across the keyboard, several different filters, and deep modulation options. The ES-1 and DT to me are drum machines that happens to sample while the rackmounts are synths whose oscillators happen to be samples. I happily live with both types and will gladly send material to & fro.

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#112

The rack samplers defo have lots of features a lot of modern samplers don’t.

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