I just wanted to quickly share this with others who may have the same
lingering "How Do They Do That?" question...
(It's incredible stuff!)
Vance Pitman wrote:
quoted 1 line
> quoted 55 lines 1) the >vast< majority of samplers are used by musicians, and most are
> 1) the >vast< majority of samplers are used by musicians, and most are
> used by keyboard/synthesizer players to play back reasonable emulations
> of real instruments along with their synthesized sounds. The most common
> sample you'll find in a musician's setup is a recording of a piano. You
> record about every fifth note from the lowest to the highest notes on a
> grand piano, use the sampler's software to map those notes and adjust
> their pitch to respond by adjusting the samples so that the machine will
> play back every note you ask it to, and Voila! You have the sound of a
> grand piano, from the lowest to the highest notes tucked away in a box
> that usually ways about fifteen to twenty pounds and can be tucked under
> one arm. Try packing up a grand piano and rolling it out the front door
> to go play a gig at a club! All you need to play the sampler is a
> keyboard to connect and tell it which notes to play...
> 2) most keyboard players have devices called sequencers (in fact, since
> they're built in to a lot of synthesizers/keyboards, most of us have
> three or four). I can play an entire performance, and the sequencer will
> record all the button pushes and keys played. To play it back, I just
> hit the play button. Most sequencers will do this anywhere from 8-16
> times for keyboard sequencers and up to several >hundred< times for
> computer sequencers. Big deal, right? It is when they all play back
> together. Imagine playing two piano parts that are completely different
> (and impossible to play live, without four hands!), a string bass line,
> a drum part, and a guitar part from your keyboard and sampler. Because
> you have the right equipment, you just made your piano-playing skills
> cover all the instruments in a band, but all you played was keyboards
> with different sounds attached to the keys! Er, wait a minute. Where did
> the drum, bass, and guitar sounds come from? The sampler! You bought the
> sounds or recorded them yourself just like you did the grand piano!
> OK, what is the synthesizer for? For all those bleepy, noisy,
> non-traditional sounds that you hear in music these days. How do you
> tell synthesizer and sample sounds apart? Sometimes you can't, since a
> sampler can make normal sounds into synthesized ones, and really complex
> synthesizers can accurately simulate many traditional acoustic
> instruments.
> But that's another can of worms entirely. If you want to hear a few
> synthesizer sounds for yourself, buy a copy of _Future Music_ at a local
> bookstore that specializes in music mags. It's an import from England,
> and it runs about $10 (if you're in the US, even cheaper in the UK). The
> killer thing is that it includes reviews and recordings of synths on the
> included CD, as well as files of samples you can load into your sampler.
> If you can't track it down or don't want to shell out the cash, try
> www.keyboardmag.com This is the online site for the US mag _Keyboard_.
> They don't include a CD with their mag, but they do keep sounds from the
> monthly synth reviews online. You can easily download them (I recommend
> the 8-bit 22kHz sounds files. They're smaller and they sound pretty much
> the same as the 16-bit files.)
> 3) getting rather windy, but this is the last example. A lot of
> producers and dance remixers (as well as some musicians, notably
> rappers) record entire segments of songs and stretch/speed up, and loop
> them to create new versions of the song (virtually all the dance remixes
> done these days are done that way, and Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice Baby", or
> whatever it was, was the same type of thing done with the Queen/Bowie
> song "Under Pressure".
>
> Vance