I once owned an Ensoniq ASR-10. They were the top shelf of their time – yes I know there were AKAI boxes back then, but the Ensoniq boxes were for performing! AKAI people stayed in the studio. Not us! We lugged those goddamn ASR-10 keyboards up the stairs in their giant coffins. I was smart enough to buy the module, less keyboard but less hernia…
Anyway, one of the ways the ASR was a performance tool was in the loop point. You could move the loop point around while the sound was playing so it would constantly change tone and most often glitch like hell. If you were very clever you could design the waves so that they wouldn’t glitch – always looped on a zero crossing – and that was called a transwave. And I had the WaveBoy effects installed which made all kinds of weird ass pitch shift nonsense.
Samplers were once more than just a way to reproduce orchestras, pianos, guitars and all that stuff. They were grunge boxes. There are now ‘nice’ software samplers like Kontakt – and there are nasty ones like TAL Sampler. It’s vaguely designed around the EMu samplers with some lofi digital-analogue-conversion stuff but I don’t really care about that. What grabs me is that loop points are again modulated, and do horrible things. In general it is designed to do the kind of performance tasks that we would do in 199x. These are fun. Try it. Fuck sounds up.
Arturia has just released an official looking reproduction of the Emulator 2. Pretty as it may be, it doesn’t do this stuff, because the Emulator 2 didn’t. Pish. Not good. But for some reason their CMI V does do this. I would once recommend that, but there’s too may controls. TAL Sampler just gets on with the tumult. It uses SFZ sample format. Same as Alchemy and Falcon and a few others. Everyone should, it’d save a lot of mucking about.