I’d like to put forward three major eras in the cultural development of digital sound sampling. You can slice it many other ways but this trio will be useful here.
● The first era was one of fidelity – the idea that sampling could recreate and replace traditional physical instruments. Early sampling was technically limited and expensive and that role was quickly disproven. Over time the high end improved, but the low end quickly filled with cheaper and less realistic devices. The value of the sound soon became a matter of the instrument itself – for example that the AKAI samplers had a particular warmth, different to the Ensoniq’s grain.
● That soon led to a second era of infidelity. Given that samples were unrealistic, what surrealism could be crafted? From a naturally occurring starting point, what audio sculpture leads to an unnatural sound event? The sampled sound became just part of synthesis – to be reversed, slowed, sliced and disguised.
● The third era came from the expansion of recording time, from seconds to minutes and then up to the hours of the computer based DAW. There came samples of entire riffs, mashups, drum loops and other musical instant cake mix. The sample expanded from a sound event to a compositional event.
Dedicated hardware samplers declined at the end of the c20th – around the time that Kontakt was first released and the last AKAI S6000 rack came and went. There was no advantage in buying a computer based instrument when computers were increasingly portable and allowed precise on-screen editing.
That trend has slowly reversed with the latest MPC’s, Octatracks and similar groove boxes. There’s plenty of 3rd era compositional samplers out there – but they’re over to one side of this story. On the other side are the Motifs, Fantoms et al. I’m here to talk about 2nd era sampling – the act of creative infidelity.
(The AKAI MPC is curious – originally a Linn Drum it was first introduced in 1988 for a whopping $5000. The black culture of the MPC starts much later … which would seem to be the effect of fleacore.)
Personal History
We (Severed Heads) used recording tape to perform ‘sampling’ before digital devices were available. We’d learned from Stockhausen, George Martin and others how tape samples create surreal textures and rhythms. For that reason our third (compositional) era came first. Sampled textures came later and were a huge relief from the basic synthesis available at the time.
In 1985 I reviewed an AKAI S612 and plonked down an orchestral pomp over some tape loop work (in my defence I was temporarily stuck in London with very little resources). After having a Mirage rack stolen and a few missteps with some remarkably dull Roland samplers I settled on the Ensoniq ASR-10 rack as weapon of choice – the epitome of infidelity. But that went in the great band crash of ’98 and everything was software until 2013.
My love of sampled textures was rekindled in 2015 by the Roland XV5080, a machine which oozes so-called ‘fidelity’. First sold in 2000 it replaced the S700 series, moving samples ‘behind’ the S+S synthesis of the time, expecting that sound to be filled with AKAI CDs … the prime ‘fidelity’ of the late 90’s. (For some reason the recent XV5080 software version lacks this feature, which makes it worthless to me).
You can instead fill that space with short wave, hisses, metal impacts and so on. I love the juxtaposition of these noises with the tightly confined sound of the machine itself. It’s like a comedy duo – a straight man playing against the comic. Surrealism is only noticeable in relation to the real.
The V9000 ‘variphrase processor’ became Roland’s last rack sampler – soon re-housed in the V-Synth, a virtual analogue hybrid with samples. To a certain extent this marks the death of the second era, and the hegemony of the groove box/workstation axis.
I think the Fantom XR rack from 2004 was the last affordable workstation sampler of the period. The mind numbing difficulty of feeding sounds into this spoiled brat, the flaky display, the finger twisting to save a patch – all of this crap is forgiven when creating the sound of a food blender slammed against a string section. The problem is that Fantoms became the high end of Roland’s range, where fleacore has breathing difficulty. Too big … too small … where could the creative find their place?
The Resurgence
In 2007 the Blofeld was perhaps the renaissance, having 60Mb sample memory alongside the virtual analogue and wavetables. I filled this small device with the sounds of bees and air conditioners. The fact that the sounds stayed when the machine was turned off changed their identity – they became central to the sound of the machine. Probably also because it’s so bloody hard to get samples on and off the damn thing.
Korg’s ModWave has a similar virtue – seemingly as an afterthought. The samples lift the machine from being not-as-good-as-software in that they can be a library of exotic tones, textures, impacts and glows – the tones that wavetables cannot provide. There’s plenty of pianos of course – but infidelity is on tap. WaveState of course is all samples. Unlike the older Wavestation, they are your samples and you can have 4Gb of your own personality ready at boot. These synthesisers do not seem to be very popular (analogue being the mainstream), but I hope will have influence on the way that young people work with samples. I hope they are the fleas for the future.
Notable software includes Arturia’s Pigments and Spectrasonic’s Omnisphere. Even Vital can carry a sample.
Whataboutism
I’m not able to review everything, so your favourite toy might be missing. What about the Nordwave 2 (at AUD$4000) or the Prophet X (at AUD$5300) … I don’t see this kind of expense feeding into the current culture any more than the first MPC at $5000 … fleacore will be needed first.
The 1010 Bitbox is a Eurorack sampler which probably has a place in this discussion – someone else will have to take that up.