The sound of samplers - important or not?

[BONES]

I've done some '90s style drum and bass, having an "old skool sample" sound was integral.

Which is why bitcrushers exist.

[_leras]

I don't think it matters that much any more.

So many options to make a more unique 'crunchy' sound. So many lofi tools, tape emulations, transient tools, saturations, distortions, bit crushers, limiter.

You can preprocess samples or apply to recorded tracks. Can make your own loops to process and us further.

Even if that won't work and you want to recreate and exact older crunch, samplers like kontakt and Tal have emulations of different sampler playback built in.

I'm not a nostalgia chaser though... So maybe some sample geeks might disagree...

[pdxindy]

So many options to make a more unique 'crunchy' sound. So many lofi tools, tape emulations, transient tools, saturations, distortions, bit crushers, limiter.

I have a Waldorf Quantum. It has high resolution modern wavetables and lots of tools to 'grunge' things up. It never sounds like the Waldorf M though... I've spent hours trying to duplicate the M on the Quantum but it never has the particular character of the M wavetables and how they are calculated. I have not found that particular quality of the M in any of the software wavetable synths I have either.

[sin night]

I do care for the results and/but I'd use whatever it's avaible.

The sound of a sampler (as a colour) is somewhat important to me, but I'm not willing to spend a lot of money to buy anything vintage and then possibly have to perform maintenance/upgrades (for example: power supply recap, floppy drive emulators) and then having to deal with a less than comfortable workflow... I may still buy one if I happen to find a deal of a lifetime (it will never happen!), but it would be mostly to satisfy my nerd side, rather than to make any actual music.

I own a MPC-500 (I bought it second hand years ago) and I rarely use it; setting things up in a hardware sampler doesn't really work for me (I hate doing that!!!), I'd rather use a pc with screen, keyboard and mouse. That's the reason why I haven't bought a SP-404 yet (which, at least, I can buy brand new with warranty and doesn't need any maintenance/upgrade work anytime soon).

When it comes to samples, I favour the workflow to the sound. I use TAL Sampler or a bitcrusher and call it a day, even if it won't sound the same as a vintage sampler. There are some hardware sampler's features that I'd like to have access to, for example the EMU Z-Plane filters, but I'm not going to mess up my workflow or spend a lot of money in order to access those features, they are no what makes or breaks any of my tracks...


I feel there's a point where I need to draw a line, in order to try to be productive... I'm already (too much) into analog synths; getting also into hardware samplers would make things even worse

[_leras]

So many options to make a more unique 'crunchy' sound. So many lofi tools, tape emulations, transient tools, saturations, distortions, bit crushers, limiter.

I have a Waldorf Quantum. It has high resolution modern wavetables and lots of tools to 'grunge' things up. It never sounds like the Waldorf M though... I've spent hours trying to duplicate the M on the Quantum but it never has the particular character of the M wavetables and how they are calculated. I have not found that particular quality of the M in any of the software wavetable synths I have either.

Isn't that a bit different though, more on the creation side.

Samplers sound is the limited bit rate of the sample, a bit, but also the converters on the output.

You can actually convert the samples to a lower bitrat instead of just bit crushing, but personally I wouldn't see the need.

Elysia's Phil's Cascade has some good options to maybe get a similar effect.

[Etienne1973]

@_leras: Doesn't additionally some different sample transpose (interpolation) techniques exist? Does they sound different? I don't mean wavetable cycle to cycle timbre morph. I mean pitch transpose sampler's root key pitch to other pitches methods.

[pdxindy]

Isn't that a bit different though, more on the creation side.

I was making the point that how samples or wavetables are calculated can give results not obtainable by messing with a high resolution sample or wavetable after the fact.