Sample libraries of the 90's

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Hi, I have a question that I have since a lot of months.

I would like to know how the music producers of the 90's and early 21th century (espescially into Eurodance, techno, hands up music) made their tracks ?

Today, a lot of dance producers use Vengeance samples for example, it's very easy to find a lot of samples in the internet.

But, in the 90's, how did they do ? Did sample libraries exist at this time ?

Thanks you ! And sorry for my bad english.

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We used ataris, samplers, synths and drum machines ... we sampled records, tv, movies, ourselves and our / other people's gear.

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in the 90's unfortunately did not even know it was a PC In those years I had only two turntables,mixer,cassette recorder and a sampler , I used the technique of wild sampling , always my sampler everywhere as if it were a giant smartphone , crazy times and everything was much more difficult but at the time there was an atmosphere different . I miss those days :(

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AKAI samplers and the Emulator were big in the late 80s early 90s with Ensoniq - the first really affordable disk based sampling system for gigging musos - and the japanese keyboard guys like Roland etc also featuring. The range of libraries for the AKAI samplers was pretty extensive but there was a range of stuff for the other hardware platforms too. This was all dedicated hardware but some computer based stuff - Amiga etc - was also around. By the late 90s we already had the big computer based disk streaming instruments like Gigasampler and then at the turn of the millenium EXS24 and Halion and then by 2002 there was Kontakt.

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thecontrolcentre wrote:We used ataris, samplers, synths and drum machines ... we sampled records, tv, movies, ourselves and our / other people's gear.
Yeah. It wouldn't hurt anybody to look at programs like FastTracker II and MadTracker. Load up a few songs and see how they're constructed. That was huge in the early 90s. It was a HDD efficient way to make music.

Basehead:
http://modarchive.org/index.php?request ... uery=69552

Second Reality was -the- tracker song:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reality

And a bunch of YT videos:
Mod Tracker Music - All Time High: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL ... OTVEtJKxmM

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Taifunk wrote: everything was much more difficult but at the time there was an atmosphere different . I miss those days :(
Lots of the tracker mod files would have a little message and end with "peace" or "love". It feels like a message from the past now. Times really have changed.

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arkmabat wrote:
Taifunk wrote: everything was much more difficult but at the time there was an atmosphere different . I miss those days :(
Lots of the tracker mod files would have a little message and end with "peace" or "love". It feels like a message from the past now. Times really have changed.
it is true.
I will not say that now everything is bad but we lost many emotions, colors and that peace or love message.

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thecontrolcentre wrote:We used ataris, samplers, synths and drum machines ... we sampled records, tv, movies, ourselves and our / other people's gear.
Yes, sampling was like na addict habit. And there were already some applications that helped transform crazy recordings into samples that we after loaded into the samplers (things like Alchemy, for editing the samples and transfer them to the samplers via MIDI, or Turbosynth to create the sounds from scratch using several synthesis methods and them transfer them to the samper using the same method - terribly slow but it worked).

Everything was suitable to sample - quality was not that much an issue since we always had to convert them in tiny fragments of audio, in order to squeeze the maximum into those small few hundred kb of memory (1 Mb of RAM at that time was a HUGE amount of RAM)

This was the 90s. :hihi:
Fernando (FMR)

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They used presets from their hardware mainly

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In the 90's users would pay close to a thousand quid for a 2xDVD sample set

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I seem to recall Time & Space / Zero-G being the sample library kings in the 90s. Check out Total House/Funk/Drum&Bass and you'll hear hear a lot the big sounds from that era.
Last edited by mutantdog on Fri Jul 10, 2015 6:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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+1 on the presets from Rompler keyboards and modules - Kurzweil and Korg keyboards and modules and things like the Roland JV-2080 were staples.

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Numanoid wrote:In the 90's users would pay close to a thousand quid for a 2xDVD sample set
That would be Elton John's sample CD's was it?

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