How To Sample Old Keyboards?

[memyselfandus]

Any tips on how to sample Old keyboards?
I want to make some soundfonts and I have some friends with some awesome old
keyboards. How long should I have the notes ring out? Ect ect

Thanks in advance

[CascadianSynths]

Any tips on how to sample Old keyboards?
I want to make some soundfonts and I have some friends with some awesome old
keyboards. How long should I have the notes ring out? Ect ect

Thanks in advance

I thought I saw a computer program that does just that for users using midi to automate the process.

[emdot_ambient]

Yes there are programs to help do this. They generally send out a MIDI note command to play the notes you've told them to (every major 3rd, every note, whatever)...but I don't know how they determine the length of the sample. Probably user defineable, too.

But really there are a lot of different philospophies on how to sample old keyboards. And depending on what you want to do, you'll have to adapt your sampling methodology.

For example:
Do you want to sample a specific preset, or are you sampling just the raw oscillator sound?

If you're doing a specific preset, you'll probably want to sample more notes, like all of them, so you get the proper response to envelopes, LFO's, filter sweeps and the like. And you're going to have to make longer samples.

When sampling specific presets (and this is much harder than sampling the raw oscillator sound) you'll need to 1) make sure each note is held long enough to go completely through the Attack and Delay sections of all envelopes used, and 2) only long enough to capture a complete cycle of the Sustain, possibly followed by 3) the entire release cycle. The tricky part is the Sustain section. There are two ways of handling the Release section of the preset's envelopes: 1) delete sample information after the loop end and recreate the release section using the sampler's envelopes (easiest but least authentic way, depending on the preset), and 2) leaving the release section of the original sample and deleting any information after the loop end but before the Release start, then programming the sampler to continue playing the sample from the loop end when you release a note. Obviously this second method will be more difficult.

But if you're only after the raw sound, then you'll set the AMP envelope to full sustain, no Attack or Decay or Release, turn off any filter modulation and FX, set the filter's resonance to 0 and the cutoff freq all the way up. Then you can sample every major 3rd if you want to cut down on the collection's size, or sample every note. But you'll only need to sample long enough to capture one full cycle of the wave, generally 1-2 seconds is more than enough.

When I've done it, I simply start recording and play up the scale one note at a time making sure to leave a few seconds of silence between notes. Then I chop that long file into individual notes, go in and loop the individual samples and delete any information after the loop.

Whatever you do, make sure you tune the instrument first. It's always best to sample an instrument that's actually in tune, rather than doing tuning corrections afterwards.

Also, make sure you record the samples as hot as possible without clipping. To truly capture the instrument's real character, you don't want to do any normalization or compression/limiting afterwards. (Unless you're not really concerned with accurate representation of the instrument).

[memyselfandus]

Awesome info! Thank you.
Do you have any of your recorded sounds available?

[ThePianoMan]

Hope this helps ...

SkyLife SampleRobot (soon v3 will be available) is the software you probably need. I used it to sample a Roland MKS20 with great results. Next project will be a series of Elka Synthex Soundfonts.

[memyselfandus]

Hope this helps ...

SkyLife SampleRobot (soon v3 will be available) is the software you probably need. I used it to sample a Roland MKS20 with great results. Next project will be a series of Elka Synthex Soundfonts.

I forgot about that software! cool

[emdot_ambient]

Awesome info! Thank you.
Do you have any of your recorded sounds available?

The only really complete one I've done is the Roland RS-202 string synth.
I published it in Kontakt 2 format, but with the individual samples, and Kara was nice enough to use them to create Soundfont, Vsampler 3, Wusikstation & EVE2, an EVE2 12 preset bank and a Crystal 12 preset bank.

What a guy, huh?

I haven't had time to finish this collection. All the above is from the 202's String I register using the Ensemble II (chorus) FX. So this is really kind of a combination of the two types of sampling I mentioned. The filters were set wide open and no envelope control was done, but the FX were on, which made the samples a bit longer. Every note was sampled in one go, no normalization was done. Which really makes the samples accurate to the machine because the volume really varies on a note-by-note basis on the hardware machine, which is captured in these samples.

[EDIT] I've already sampled Sring I (no FX), String II (no FX), String I Ensemble I, String II Ensemble I and String II ensemble II, but haven't gotten around to doing the looping. I'm considering sampling the crappy synth brass setting, too...but not sure it's worth it.

[Distorted_Mastermind]

The way I do it is to add midi notes for every note I want to sample (ex C, E, G# octaves 3-6). I usually make the note a bar and a half through every note at velocity 127. Actually haven't done this since the addition of Edison in FL Studio but next time I do it I have an idea it will makes this process real smooth.

[dreaddd]

there should be a very simple software available thru Aciddose site (the creator of Xhip VSTi) but never tried it so far..
Peace

[Lotuzia]

Hi,

I think that Samplit from the guy who made Cdxtract can do this too.


Hope this helps


LtZ

[olepro]

Extreme Sample Converter can do it too

http://www.extranslator.com/info.html

[Lagrange]

Synthcatcher v1.1

I hope when you say 'old keyboards' you mean ones with MIDI or non of these solutions will work ..

edit:

Sorry I meant to say you'l have to trigger the notes manually from the keyboard and set the software to record by threshold...

L

[Ben H]

I hope when you say 'old keyboards' you mean ones with MIDI or non of these solutions will work ..

edit:

Sorry I meant to say you'l have to trigger the notes manually from the keyboard and set the software to record by threshold...

L

Hey Lagrange,

EXSC contains BOTH a VSTi convertor AND a hardware convertor.

[dreaddd]

ah forgot about Synthcatcher!
good advice, Lagrange

[CascadianSynths]

Extreme Sample Converter can do it too

http://www.extranslator.com/info.html

SO if I got their Extreme Sample Converter then I wouldn't need to pick up Samplit?