KVR Audio

Filtah · Post by **Filtah** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 2:32 am

Hi, ive wodered for a while now if it is possible to capture the sound charicteristics associated with hardware samplers, such as the akai mpc series and emu Exx Ultras?

im guessing that loading one of these samplers with a single sample "click" sample, and recording it into a computer, (at root pitch of course) would give an impulse response of the system.

you could then load this into your favourate convolution pluggin, or the new kontakt 2 , and there u have it, your soft sampler sounds just like an akai!

im aware of some poosibe limitations which wont capture the sound corectly (different interpolation algorithms, system non linearity) but im guessing you could capture the sound of the DAC's. Or am i wrong?

anybody tried this already, or maybe give it a go?

cheers,
fil.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 8:57 am

As I've got no hardware sampler at all I couldn't try - but it sounds plausible to me.

Kim Lajoie · Post by **Kim Lajoie** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 9:10 am

It'd capture some aspect(s) of the sound, but as you've already mentioned, it wouldn't capture everything required to recreate a "classic" sound.

Forever,

Kim.

C00kie · Post by **C00kie** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 2:24 pm

Just an impulse won't do in my opinion. A sine sweep would capture the freq response of the AD/DA path much more closely. That can be converted to a proper impulse wav at very high sampling frequency.

And some effect that chops every bits after nr12 maybe, for some extra graininess... I would probably hate the resulting sound btw

C00kie · Post by **C00kie** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 6:35 am

Second thought: The "akai" sound to me is not so much something you can capture with an impulse response. I guess that effect would be quite subtle, and you can mimic that easy with a parametric EQ once you know where the bumps and dips in the spectrum are.

Nope, you have to work on the samples that you use:
* lower the sampling rate to 32kHz or 22kHz
* lower the bit rate to 12 or even 8 bits
* chop off the tails like its a super-breed dog

In the old samplers you had to be careful with scarse storage space, so any trick was used to preserve that. With the trade-off: sound quality. So use some lower-quality samples, and you'd recognise that as an old-school sampler.

Load these into SFZ, and set its resampling quality to lowest, and have some eighties fun!!

CapnLockheed · Post by **CapnLockheed** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 10:43 pm

Mmnn.....yesss....why have caviar when, with a bit
of extra effort, you can have dog turds?

Cheers....CL

greendoor · Post by **greendoor** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 10:56 pm

Because sometimes dog turds can express your artistic goal much better than caviar

waiting man · Post by **waiting man** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 10:56 pm

CapnLockheed wrote:Mmnn.....yesss....why have caviar when, with a bit
of extra effort, you can have dog turds?

Since1980 · Post by **Since1980** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 11:16 pm

I was actually thinking about this over the weekend...

greendoor · Post by **greendoor** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 6:03 am

A bit-crusher plugin followed by a gate should sound a bit like a hardware sampler. I don't think convolution is really suited to much more than reverb.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 11:09 am

greendoor wrote: I don't think convolution is really suited to much more than reverb.

Huh? There's some great amp emulations done via convolution.

plastique · Post by **plastique** » Tue Apr 19, 2005 11:15 am

would it work if you send the impulse file of an anechoic chamber (they exist) to the outboard device and record the output back into the recording app or is there something substantially missing in this consideration ?

greendoor · Post by **greendoor** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 2:29 am

Sascha Franck wrote:
greendoor wrote: I don't think convolution is really suited to much more than reverb.
Huh? There's some great amp emulations done via convolution.

Really? I use some cabinet impulses that sound fantastic. But essentially that's a type of reverb. I think the impulses taken from a POD or whatever are a joke. (But then I have a PODxt, which i'm not exactly enamoured with). To be a truely "great" amp emulation, the overdrive would have to vary with dynamics, and correct me if i'm wrong, but convolution is nowhere at that level. It can grab a flavor - essentially an eq curve with some phase smearing. I think convolution is an important step towards the ultimate goal, realistic modeling.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 8:08 am

greendoor wrote: To be a truely "great" amp emulation, the overdrive would have to vary with dynamics, and correct me if i'm wrong, but convolution is nowhere at that level. It can grab a flavor - essentially an eq curve with some phase smearing. I think convolution is an important step towards the ultimate goal, realistic modeling.

OK, you're right, I should've said "cab emuulations" rather than amp emulations.
Of course for dynamic playing they aren't suitable.

dharmawan · Post by **dharmawan** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 8:26 am

it wont get you far. with an IR you will capture a static frequency response

Creating impulse responses from hardware samplers?