Which is your favourite sampler???

Saw this cool little video by Gwem and thought I'd post it for you guys quite interesting.

Akai S612

Gwem's been on a roll lately, I hadn't checked his channel in a long time but I've been keeping an eye on in since the MaxYMiser high-res update and it's good to see him uploading more.

Octatrack mkii

Aphex Twin - Blue Calx

Oh wait sorry this was a thread about samplers... 

meanwhile on my computer i can take the same sample and turn the frequency spectrum completely upside down, rearrange the entire sample an infinitely number of ways and turn it into a 20 minute ambient track if I want. But lets obsess over the hi frequency rolloff and subtle bitcrush of those old akais.

Casio SK-1 (or maybe TAL-Sampler)

Yamaha A3000 is my favourite, don't have one anymore, but that thing was pretty fun.

Octatrack. Only because I know it extremely well from a workflow perspective and it's the best machine for electronic music ever made, not because it has any kind of "sampling character" that I particularly like, except for a few tricks that add character that I consider separate from sampling characteristics.

Sampling characteristics!

...as if you can’t add that with another hw or sw!

  On 7/6/2020 at 5:53 PM, nikisoko said:

meanwhile on my computer i can take the same sample and turn the frequency spectrum completely upside down, rearrange the entire sample an infinitely number of ways and turn it into a 20 minute ambient track if I want. But lets obsess over the hi frequency rolloff and subtle bitcrush of those old akais.

  On 7/6/2020 at 6:21 PM, xox said:

Sampling characteristics!

...as if you can’t add that with another hw or sw!

Are you guys unfamiliar with the basic concept of picking your instrument by the sound it makes and how easy it is to make the gear work for you?

I mean I don't want to spend hours tweaking some VST to get the same sound that I get from some ages old rack gear in 20 seconds (which is the time it takes to boot up).

This is the sound equivalent of pointing at an abstract painting and saying "my kid could have done this".

I think from that vid I would pick Volca Sample because it is the only one I own and it can do so much wacky stuff that you can definitely emulate on a PC but even though it loses by processing power and storage, it has it's own workflow which is the thing that actually matters.

  On 7/6/2020 at 7:21 PM, thawkins said:

 

Are you guys unfamiliar with the basic concept of picking your instrument by the sound it makes and how easy it is to make the gear work for you?

No, I’m not unfamiliar with delusional romantic beliefs about old samples and using an expensive ancient sampler just for its sound signature that can easily be replicated and replaced with plugs that come bundled in any modern daw; you make a present and use it millions of times in parallel, instantly. You can even find presents on the net, and they usually even sound better, and you can add the processing gradually, 0-100%.

imho

Horses for courses. In biographical order...

Akai S2000 - Sounds lovely and pretty neutral, especially the time stretch. Polyphony is decent. Sampling and programming is is a little bit tedious, as is editing w/o a proper waveform display.

Boss SP202 - Super immediate and good fun but obviously very limiting. There's really something to be said for having a built-in mic. Sound is this weird "neon" kind of lo-fi but somehow smooth and shiny and sparkly.

SK1 - Good fun but I never found it super useful for anything but humming into to make pads. Clip that aliasing resistor and sample something a bit warbly, run it through some delay and it can get a bit lush. Without much in the way of any kind of control, though, it's a bit of a joke. Not awful, though. Not going to go into circuit bending but that's good fun too.

Roland S550 - Gorgeous, warm, slightly gritty sound. 12 bits is the magic number. Having to use a TV to edit is annoying but oh la la, what a sound. Also, having shared wave space for multiple waveforms is a brilliant idea, which like many was probably just a way of overcoming an engineering obstacle. Happy accidents galore.

Yamaha A5000 - So much wasted potential. Sound is crystal clear like an alien laser drill, the effects are a buffet of deliciousness, and the polyphony and mod matrix are obscene. The interface, however, is the dog's breakfast. 4 flaky encoders and a few buttons is your lot. This could have benefited greatly from an ESQ-1 style splash of buttons with a rugged, dedicated data wheel. Also the MIDI spec is surprisingly shit for a Yamaha - it's just flexible enough to be semi-usable and frustrating as shit.

Yamaha SU10 - Seemed really charming because of the portability but it just turned out to be bad. No proper external storage, janky controls, no backlit screen, poor polyphony, and BAD sound. Not charming lo-fi like the SP-202 or SK1, just BAD.

Akai MPC1000 - A keeper. The sound itself isn't necessarily anything to write home about - I would almost call it boring. Onboard effects are fine - utilitarian and that's all. But the workflow is brilliant - no-frills, get down to business, garbage in, garbage out. And this is still my favorite thing for slicing samples which is why I've kept it around for more than 10 years - only Renoise even comes close for me.

Octatrack MKI - Another keeper. Nobody else has figured out how to do live sampling this well yet. It makes up for a bit of an awkward workflow (especially for sampling) with absolutely insane flexibility - this is truly a sampler, a sequencer, an effects box, and a mixer in equal measure, and it's pretty damn good at all four. The filters are my favorites of any sampler I've used. The super-powered crossfader, built-in retriggering, custom LFOs, sequencing features, and smooth parameter modulation seal the deal - these also have a multiplicative effect where they make each other combinatorally more useful. This is one of those pieces of gear that feels like a countryside to explore because it's so fucking deep.

Ensoniq Mirage - Crusty as fuck, but there's some magic to the fact that the voice chips' frequencies seem to be discretely controlled, so that e.g. the onboard detuning sounds really good. The analog filters are low pass only but have an interesting hump to them where they end up being a useful nonlinear boost around the resonance point, so you can get a lot of warmth out of them. Editing with a 2-digit 7-segment display goes about as well as you'd expect, though. I wouldn't miss this one too much, aside from the fact that it sounds great for things where the 8-bit depth isn't a big deal.

Korg Volca Sample - Somewhere between the S2000 and S550 sound-wise. No onboard sampling is a bit of a buzzkill, but the parameters available have plenty of surprising, weird sweet spots. If anything, I wish this wore the aliasing on its sleeve a bit more. The sequencer blows just like all the other volcas (except maybe the Kick or Drum?) - good thing that new firmware improves the MIDI control.

Softcut (norns) - After 2 decades of fucking with samplers, I've come to the conclusion that if you're persnickety like me you just need to be able to make your own sampler. This is an excellent tool to do just that, and you can implement much of the above right in there. It's a much different vibe from playing with "proper" gear but it can be liberating (and daunting) to not be working with somebody else's design choices.

@sweepstakes nice overview!

Thanks @xox !

Forgot (at least) one -

Teenage Engineering PO-33 - Another keeper. The sound is somewhere in the neighborhood of the Mirage with a dash of SP404 - undoubtedly lo-fi but musically so. In my opinion, this is exactly what the phrase samplers of the 90s should have been. Sampling is super immediate and the onboard sequencer is limited but very intuitive and useful. 4 notes of polyphony is just fine for what you get here. Performance effects are decent - right between gimmicky and useful. The filter is just enough to be useful and interesting. Editing is a bit awkward with the knobs - some more fine-tuning with hysteresis would've helped here. Overall, though, this is my favorite portable sampler of all time. It knows what it is and they made all the right design choices. There's very little to get in your way.

Yeah, the Yamaha encoders and interface are indeed terrible (especially on the A3000s tiny display), but I still loved it/them for the end results. I guess back then you just learned to deal with your gear more than now.  Money was tight.

  On 7/6/2020 at 8:45 PM, Gocab said:

Yeah, the Yamaha encoders and interface are indeed terrible (especially on the A3000s tiny display), but I still loved it/them for the end results. I guess back then you just learned to deal with your gear more than now.  Money was tight.

Indeed. And those Yamahas do sound really good. But yeah, persevering and finding a way to work with the gear is the right way to do it.

  On 7/6/2020 at 8:22 PM, sweepstakes said:

Akai MPC1000 - A keeper. The sound itself isn't necessarily anything to write home about - I would almost call it boring. Onboard effects are fine - utilitarian and that's all. But the workflow is brilliant - no-frills, get down to business, garbage in, garbage out. And this is still my favorite thing for slicing samples which is why I've kept it around for more than 10 years - only Renoise even comes close for me.

Well put. I don't ever use the onboard effects but use the hell out of the onboard filters/lfo/envelopes (the pitch envelope is a gem). This is going JJOS, obviously.

As well, the 1000 has my favorite sample editor. The vertical zoom along with the horizontal zoom is vital, imo. Also good tempo discovery feature/ring mod/bitrate changer/etc.

I only got an Akai S2000 and when I was using it I was unable to saves samples I recall.

I seem to remember Madlib's brother or cousin had a sampler that couldn't save, so he would just always finish his beat before he turned off the machine. I bet he got really fast that way!

s612

only sampler with a fun interface

plus, sounds good

  On 7/6/2020 at 11:39 PM, marf said:

s612

 

only sampler with a fun interface

plus, sounds good

Yeah, this is a question of haptics.

Close runner up/tie is the MPC2000xl because of those pads.  Only sampler I've ever used that I can throw in a case, take to a practice space, sit down with some friends, and just play it as a instrument.  Best $100 I've ever spent, but it's out of commission until I replace a few of the buttons.

  On 7/6/2020 at 8:20 PM, xox said:

No, I’m not unfamiliar with delusional romantic beliefs about old samples and using an expensive ancient sampler just for its sound signature that can easily be replicated and replaced with plugs that come bundled in any modern daw; you make a present and use it millions of times in parallel, instantly. You can even find presents on the net, and they usually even sound better, and you can add the processing gradually, 0-100%.

imho

You got two things wrong, though:

1. I'm not going to buy specific gear for their authentic lo fi sound, it's the other way around - I get a piece of gear used for cheaps and I fully know it does not have 32 bit floating point 96kHz sound or something. I don't (I assume others don't either) go around with a spectral analyzer to check if the synth or sampler or whatever can do a 22kHz sound.
   The only rule is "does it make a sound that is pleasing and inspiring for me". Ok, maybe the second rule is "is the workflow nice to work with".
   I mean these samplers cost like 200 euro and you have some amazing sample libraries available on the internet. You don't even have to have a hard-on for a certain sound to make this gear a good purchase if you don't want to buy a beefy PC to run all your bespoke VSTs.
2. If I start to build a track using above gear, I do it all by ear, and make something using the sounds it has inside, including any EQs and filters and effects it may have too. I am working more or less live, recording some MIDI and automation in my project but all the sound is actually coming from the hardware.
   The crucial point here is that since I work with the "crappy" sound it has, then the finished composition basically depends on that crappiness in a way. Like maybe one day I will be good enough to switch out sounds in my tracks so that the mix does not collapse, but for the time being a lot of the "magic" is there because/despite of the crappy hardware sounds.
   So this basically means that I never go around my mix trying to lo-fi it so that it sounds like an old sampler. It either already sounds like something old, or it does not. OK maybe I will put everything through an analog tube hipster bulb to make it warmer, but that's about it.

tl;dr I agree that you are a tool if you are buying an old sampler for the "lo-fi" sound, but that's is not the only reason people are interested in these.

I mean let's be honest, even a specced out PC is kind of shit compared to a dedicated hardware thing. I get crashes, I get pops, I deal with sync and buffer issues. Sometimes I can't even easily send MIDI to external hardware without going through a headache. This is because a modern PC is not running a real-time operating system dedicated for audio (hardware gear is).

Can of worms waiting to fly open in here but there's something to be said about the focused workflow and minimal disk space of a crusty sampler. I also haven't heard anyone authentically replicate the vibe of something like the SP-1200, but I'm all ears. It's like people playing up the OB-Xa (or even DX7) VST's, you can still clearly hear how much better the real thing sounds. 

I wouldn't hate having an s950 or 2000XL myself. I'm fine with my Digitakt though 

I'm from Octatrack camp. But i always look in ensoniq/emu/creative direction. Though i look at OT as modern times ASR10 but faster (ui- and cpu- wise).

Recently i was messing with such setup: Micromodular with Boss RSD10 as delay/sampler send/return and both are controlled with OT. MM sends audio to RSD + some feedback with phase manipulations + its 4 delays matrix in MM PolyArea then all that 'tank' is routed into OT. + OT controls RSD's delay and trig inputs via 2 flex slots loaded with single-cycle pulses which could be offsetted and so on. I'd say Boss RSD10 is pretty esoteric.

https://clyp.it/gw2xvw4l

I also fear to hook RSD10 to Renoise 
If OT + RSD10 is like ep7/gantz-graf/confield area
with Renoise it gonna be some hab/come to daddy/windowlicker area
https://clyp.it/o1wjmcej