Sample Manipulation VST

[alex921]

Currently I use Ableton Live Sampler, which is very powerful. The ability to morph oscillators with the sample is very good. I generally do like to manipulate samples and it let me thinking if there are other plugins available which can compete with Ableton's Sampler?

Also, as a sample heavy producer, i'd like to know if there is a plugin which primary focus is on manipulating samples to my hearts content.

I've tried Gladiator from tone2 which loads short samples and gave quite impressive results. I also tried Xfer Serum, but it's more wavetable based.

Suggestions are more then welcome, if it's free the better!

Thanks

[Kinh]

NI Form
Falcon
are the 2 I use.
What do you mean manipulate samples? in what way?

[thecontrolcentre]

Palindrome
https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/ ... Palindrome

Cataract
https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/ ... 3-Cataract

Polygon
https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/ ... 12-Polygon

[gentleclockdivider]

Renoise + composers desktop as lua extension

or redux (renoise plugin )

[] Peter:H []

Try check out Granular Plug-ins, like Padshop or Granular Fx like those from Meldaproduction.
Other thing that is big in Ambient is PaulStretch (which is standalone) and the latest VST derived from it.
I think you can find it somewhere on KVR...
---
Check out my latest track: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=518338

[Echoes in the Attic]

Samples can be manipulated mostly by either granular synthesis or by resynthesis. There are plenty of threads you could search for granular suggestions. For resynthesis you could check out halions wavetable module, harmor, and other additive resynthesizers like alchemy in logic.

[alex921]

Yes, I tried granular synthesis, it's nice, but not exactlty what I want. I'd like to keep things harmonically, with granular synthesis it's mostly noodling.

So basically i'm looking for something equivalent to ableton sampler. TAL-Sampler seem to be close, but i prefer Sampler. Falcon does indeed seem to be the way to go, but the price tag is too much.

Glitchmachines is not what i'm looking for, either I have not fully tested it potential, but it's sample manipulation at a very non natural way. Something like renoise, redux fits the bill for me, and I'm thinking of purchasing it. Does anyone have experience with it, and particulair with the resampling capabilities?

Never tried Composers Desktop, will give that a whirl. Thanks.

[alex921]

What do you mean manipulate samples? in what way?

ping pong looping, blending samples together/layering, LFO's etc. For example Geist 2 does this very well, but I hate combining it with my main daw as I have to export stems, which kills my workflow.

[Neon Breath]

New Sonic Arts Nuance maybe? https://www.newsonicarts.com/html/nuance.php

[cron]

Yes, I tried granular synthesis, it's nice, but not exactlty what I want. I'd like to keep things harmonically, with granular synthesis it's mostly noodling.

So basically i'm looking for something equivalent to ableton sampler. TAL-Sampler seem to be close, but i prefer Sampler. Falcon does indeed seem to be the way to go, but the price tag is too much.

Glitchmachines is not what i'm looking for, either I have not fully tested it potential, but it's sample manipulation at a very non natural way. Something like renoise, redux fits the bill for me, and I'm thinking of purchasing it. Does anyone have experience with it, and particulair with the resampling capabilities?

Never tried Composers Desktop, will give that a whirl. Thanks.

A few general thoughts on the ideas in here...

Although I haven't used a tracker (the class of software that Renoise/Redux is based on) since 1994's FastTracker 2, the paradigm is very, very well suited to audio manipulation. In some ways it was even more powerful than sampler plugins today. Darting around a sample becomes second nature and can be achieved with incredible speed once you understand the commands. Break chopping - rearranging old loops into new loops of often staggering complexity - is particularly easy and fast. I imagine modern software like Renoise has expanded these already powerful capabilities a great deal since.

With regards to plugging Composer's Desktop Project into it, I've been a CDP user for almost 15 years but my recommendation of whether or not to try it would really come down to how well it's integrated into Renoise, and I don't have any experience there. I don't think I'd recommend it as a standalone tool + standalone frontend to new users in 2019, because it's extremely fiddly, difficult to learn, and only suits a particular kind of workflow (e.g. mine, being very audio heavy with minimal realtime synthesis). It's an old-school command line piece of software where you're entirely at the mercy of how good the third-party graphical front-end is, and if Renoise has cracked this in a way where using it is easy and it covers a decent number of the available transformations, then yes definitely give it a go. There are things it can do which you simply can't do anywhere else.

With regard to granular synthesis, it can be very tonal and pretty! I think the first thing people tend to do is go for really extreme parameters with no automation, turning everything into clouds of decorrelated noisy texture, but it's capable of a lot more than that. The number of 'classic' effects like flanging, delay, reversing, amplitude modulation, time stretching etc you can achieve/approximate is pretty staggering, and with a good editor like the free Hourglass you can blend across them and animate your sound in almost limitless ways. Granular really comes alive with post-editing too, repitching/reversing/repeating etc individual grains or 'grain phrases'.

[alex921]

Yes, I tried granular synthesis, it's nice, but not exactlty what I want. I'd like to keep things harmonically, with granular synthesis it's mostly noodling.

So basically i'm looking for something equivalent to ableton sampler. TAL-Sampler seem to be close, but i prefer Sampler. Falcon does indeed seem to be the way to go, but the price tag is too much.

Glitchmachines is not what i'm looking for, either I have not fully tested it potential, but it's sample manipulation at a very non natural way. Something like renoise, redux fits the bill for me, and I'm thinking of purchasing it. Does anyone have experience with it, and particulair with the resampling capabilities?

Never tried Composers Desktop, will give that a whirl. Thanks.

A few general thoughts on the ideas in here...

Although I haven't used a tracker (the class of software that Renoise/Redux is based on) since 1994's FastTracker 2, the paradigm is very, very well suited to audio manipulation. In some ways it was even more powerful than sampler plugins today. Darting around a sample becomes second nature and can be achieved with incredible speed once you understand the commands. Break chopping - rearranging old loops into new loops of often staggering complexity - is particularly easy and fast. I imagine modern software like Renoise has expanded these already powerful capabilities a great deal since.

With regards to plugging Composer's Desktop Project into it, I've been a CDP user for almost 15 years but my recommendation of whether or not to try it would really come down to how well it's integrated into Renoise, and I don't have any experience there. I don't think I'd recommend it as a standalone tool + standalone frontend to new users in 2019, because it's extremely fiddly, difficult to learn, and only suits a particular kind of workflow (e.g. mine, being very audio heavy with minimal realtime synthesis). It's an old-school command line piece of software where you're entirely at the mercy of how good the third-party graphical front-end is, and if Renoise has cracked this in a way where using it is easy and it covers a decent number of the available transformations, then yes definitely give it a go. There are things it can do which you simply can't do anywhere else.

With regard to granular synthesis, it can be very tonal and pretty! I think the first thing people tend to do is go for really extreme parameters with no automation, turning everything into clouds of decorrelated noisy texture, but it's capable of a lot more than that. The number of 'classic' effects like flanging, delay, reversing, amplitude modulation, time stretching etc you can achieve/approximate is pretty staggering, and with a good editor like the free Hourglass you can blend across them and animate your sound in almost limitless ways. Granular really comes alive with post-editing too, repitching/reversing/repeating etc individual grains or 'grain phrases'.

A friend of mine uses Renoise heavily, the sound it produces is unmatched to other DAWs and the sampling capabilities are great. I'm not a tracker guy myself too. I have some synthesizers and drum machines which is not ideal for use with Renoise. I did trial Redux, and I liked it very much. If i'd buy it I wont be using the tracking futures of it, which might be a waste of money/plugin potential.

I can see what you mean about CDP, I do like synthesis/sound manupilation alot, but CDP being standalone, it's not an ideal solution for me when i'm in 'track modus'. But I do like patching a lot, for example Audiomulch, I love that tool to death.

In your suggestion about granular synthesis, this is the case, I usely bend parameters to oblivion, which returns into noise/unusable sounds. But ultimately, if granular synthesis can do classic effects as you mentioned, flanging, delay, reversing, amplitude modulation, time stretching, I definetly want to give it another try.

And to honest, I really can't of another way other then granular synthesis which provides "extreme " sample manipulation.

I see you mentioned hourglass, from Xenakios, you use this as your granular processor and export your sounds to your daw to process them afterwards with repitching/reversing etc as you mentioned? And does it pair well with your daw?

Thanks for your detailed explanation btw.

[SoundPorn]

Serrato sampler is what ur looking for and this.https://www.tx16wx.com

[SoundPorn]

For any Reaper users interested.i found these suite of plugs programmed in JS that r phenomenal. https://geraintluff.github.io/jsfx/#spring-box

[Neon Breath]

With regard to granular synthesis, it can be very tonal and pretty! I think the first thing people tend to do is go for really extreme parameters with no automation, turning everything into clouds of decorrelated noisy texture, but it's capable of a lot more than that. The number of 'classic' effects like flanging, delay, reversing, amplitude modulation, time stretching etc you can achieve/approximate is pretty staggering, and with a good editor like the free Hourglass you can blend across them and animate your sound in almost limitless ways. Granular really comes alive with post-editing too, repitching/reversing/repeating etc individual grains or 'grain phrases'.

Totally agree with that!

Granular synthesis is probably one of the best way to deeply manipulate samples. But you have to use the parameters right & carefully, like a sculptor would use his tools to create shapes. A small subtle twist of a control and it can drastically change the whole sound. When used cleverly with the right sounds, it's an amazing technique to transformer and manipulate any sounds.

[cron]

Hourglass, similar non-real-time tools and VST granular instruments have a huge advantage over real-time granular effects because of the control you have over the location in your sample the grains are selected from. Granular effects that you just slap on an audio channel or after a synth are nowhere near as precise because the buffer containing the audio from which grains are selected is either constantly 'moving' or abruptly changing when it gets refilled.

Having this extra control is great for keeping things tonal, because you can zone in on say, a single note or chord in your sample and play it chromatically like you would with a normal sampler, and you know your playhead is going to stay where its told. You can make low effort, heavenly sounding tonal music by just loading a pre-existing track into your granular synth, holding down one note, and then dropping the playhead in various places that sounds nice (such as on chord changes in the original track).

Having all this control over the timeline of your selected sample is also what makes effects like reversing and timestretching possible.

I've only really got one tonal example of my own on hand now, and it's a real-time thing using The Mangle (sadly unsupported with an MIA developer, but I gather PadShop Pro does everything The Mangle can and more). Super, super basic, but one of my favourite things at the moment is dropping classic rave stabs into a granular sampler then just playing them chromatically in the same way the old-school rave guys did with a normal sampler. Puts a kind of fresh spin on classic rave sounds. The original sound is the classic 'Brazil stab' from the tune Brazil by Spectrum that's used in countless old school rave tunes. The Mangle is playing grains from it at a random rate from a fixed point at the start of the sample, and filtering and transposing each grain but locking the transpositions to octave values so it doesn't become an atonal mess. Through all that, it's still fundamentally recognisable as the Brazil stab! https://soundcloud.com/user-922639837/2 ... chive-dump

I'd also urge you to check out Neon Breath's music from the link in their sig a little further up the thread (edit: actually above this post since a few people posted while I was writing this). While their music as Sleeping On Lotus Ashes is (mostly) atonal and I gather you're keen to do more tonal stuff, it's still a virtuoso display of the kind of animation and 'liquid' flow that can be achieved with granular synthesis in the right hands. That it isn't tonal is simply a preference on their part rather than any inherent limitation of granular synthesis.