WHY Old Samplers?

I've just bought what must be close to my 10th vintage sampler - this time a pristine example of the 1st sampler I ever used - Yamaha's A3000. I doubt I'm quite done yet - EMU's Emax & later EOS-based instruments still call to me across the digital plain - "try us, you've always wanted to!" sigh.

But why am I afflicted with such a curse? It's SAMPLING - recording sound, converting it to a series of 0's and 1's and then playing it back - trivial for any modern computer, any cheap digital device! Well, I've reflected and am happy to provide you all with some justification for my madness:

1. They Look Cool as Hell

Just look at that rack in the thumbnail - isn't it AWESOME? - like the legit literal meaning of the word? Rack samplers, with their clean lines, button-filled panels and glowing screens inspire an air of science fiction. Stack enough of 'em together and it feels like you're piloting a star-ship. A wall of 5U modular makes for likely Boomer/Gen'X eye candy - but I'll take a tower of Akai, Emu and Ensoniq please :D

2. Transposition Artefacts

When asked to transpose samples up or down in pitch, your modern computer will do a remarkably clean job, and that's TERRIBLE! Instead of using linear interpolation to smoothly deal with extra or missing samples, many (oft 12-bit) vintage sampling units operated via a variable playback clock for each voice. Annoyingly, this limits upwards transposition (if your max sampling rate is 50Khz, a 32Khz sample can't play an octave up!) but downwards? Wow! All sorts of cool aliasing grunge appears at the low end. So desirable is this sound that producers liked to sample a sound at double speed, only to play it back at those lower, grungy extremes.

3. Sample Munging & Modulation

"But some of your samplers are 16-bit! Justify Those!" ah, yes, ok. 80's samplers might have 12-bit sound and analogue filtering, but 90's era samplers offer other delights. Samplers across a large range of brands allow for the modulation of a sample's start point. Sheer sound design serendipity stems from triggering midi notes whilst modulating this parameter. Some, like the EMU IV range - let you modulate all sorts of things; Sample Start, Sample Loop, Chorus Position etc, via a wealth of modulators - and the Ensoniq EPS16+/ASR10 can modulate sample loops in even wilder ways - TRANSWAVE, LOOPSTART-X, BI-DIRECTIONAL - a sonic playground. PS - Sample Munging is a play on the term "Data Munging", the process of transforming raw data into usable material.

4. Unique Effects

These old dogs certainly have some new tricks in them - from destructive edits like time-stretching (these algorithms vary greatly in quality from device to device!) and EMU's transform-multiply, which imparts the essence of one sample onto another (it's unpredictable and takes a while - go brew a pot of tea!) to real-time DSP effects, old samplers can really bring the weird.

Real-time highlights for me include the Yamaha SU200's horrendous time-stretching - which seems to add an 11Khz grain, tech-modulation (which many Yamaha samplers share - a nasty ringmod variant) and Ensoniq's Waveboy series of 3rd-party effects: granular, FM, vocoder and bit-crushed destruction!

5. An excuse to "retro"

The sampling life often intersects with my other passion - vintage computing. PC wise, a Win'95 (or even DOS) machine is invaluable for reading and writing odd sampler disk formats, via OmniFlop. And older Mac or Amiga soft-synths generate enough novel waveforms to keep these hungry samplers fed! I dunno, connecting these old bits of gear feels very novel and "off-grid"!

And it's not just me, here's my friend Architecture with a look at Turbosynth - a classic Mac soft-synth. Enjoy!

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