Sampling

Being such an advocate of music technology and technology in general, I thought I’d go back in time and recount my first experiences of sampling.

A lot of musician’s first experiences with sampling are with something like an Akai s950 (back in the day!), or more likely these days, an earlier version of Reason or Halion.

My first experience was with a piece of hardware on the Amiga 500 called StereoMaster. This was a cartridge that plugged into the port. It had 3.5mm jack at the end, so you would connect the the headphone output of your music to 3.5mm input jack.

There was some included software which had a perfectly serviceable editor, with variable zoom, and allowed you to save in different bit rates and formats. This must have been about 1992 – with hindsight, this program seemed quite ahead of it’s time .

So I used this along with a tracker called Octamed. Octamed was one of the big trackers of the time, and is still used by some people. Rather than the conventional left-to-right timeline in sequencers such as Logic/Cubase, trackers (including Octamed) run down the page, and they look very spreadsheet-like.

Although the user interface is quite uninviting, the program was quite stable (an important factor too was that it was free from CU Amiga. If I hadn’t picked up that copy when I was 14, my life would probably be very different). It was great for programming stuff in very quickly, and I was able to get loops going for the first time – me and my friends would make very bad rave tunes.

After that, I went to uni, and learned how to use an Akai s950. Looking back now, it seemed like a retrograde step. The sample memory was minute, the interface was clumsy. I’d been used to editing samples and zero-crossing points on a computer screen – to be doing the same task with a tiny LCD screen was a little frustrating, to say the least.

After uni I bought a PC and started to use Cubase. I started to mess around with audio regions, and tried to program drums by doing stuff in Reaktor 2.3, exporting it to audio, then chopping it up in Cubase. Unfortunately, I was rubbish at it, and eventually I ended up getting a Mac a few years later and learning how to use Logic. Soon after that I bought an Emu (E4000 I think). Lovely sampler, but still too fiddly for my tastes.

Nowadays, I use Logic EXS24, the built-in samplers inside Reason and Renoise. In some ways I find that I’ve kind of come full circle – I still like the old tracker method, although I stopped tracking for 10 years, it was easier to get used to it, there’s a logic (excuse the pun) there that just seems to work. I don’t miss the old hardware samplers at all – although some people swear by them, life without a million floppy disks or transferring stuff via SCSI (remember that?) is a much more rewarding and fulfilling life.

With hindsight, Stereomaster was a precursor to a lot of soft synths that everybody uses these days. All the sound was held in the Amiga’s RAM, so apart from the interface for recording, there was no external hardware used at all. Sounds could be edited on-screen.
In future posts I want to discuss sampling in pop music, and how it’s developed in recent years. Any comments/discussion appreciated