MOOG BASS 1
That was the thing in 1990 something. Borrow that Moog you could never afford and sample the crap out of it. End up with a floppy full of burps and bleeps with digital aliasing hissing through the fade. Of course you could spend a day making a single waveform loop to get rid of the tail, moving the HEX values 0n the LED display. Which defeated the purpose, seeing as the filter on your sampler was in no way equal to the Moog you couldn’t afford. I don’t even like Moogs.
FAIRLIGHT
Nothing says QUALITY quite like an 8 bit sample of an 8 bit sampler. 40 percent sizzle, 60 percent reverb. I think I found a use for the Fairlight orchestra hit once – in making the joke track Your Kidneys. (Which people still watch on You Tube thinking it’s a documentary).
AKAI CHOIR
Oh boy I can have 1000 identical women go AAAH in the background of my dance tracks. This is cyber.
GRNDPIANO
Actually the piano on the Mirage and the EPS16 was pretty cool. I still have my ESQ-M hardware if I wanted that, or the VSTi is pretty close. But this sample is the time where I tried to get a decent piano sound to fit in the 2MB of RAM of the EPS16 and ended up with honky tonk R2 D2.
EPIANO
I seriously don’t get the fascination with electric pianos. Seems like every software house has to have at least one electric piano VSTi. It just makes me think of SuperTramp and that’s a dark, dark place to be.
909KIT
I didn’t much like the 909 drum machine when it came out. The 808 was defiantly electronique, but the 909 just failed at being a real kit. Those squelchy toms y’know? Anyway, you could be ambivalent by dissing the machine and then secretly sampling it, and I did.
727KIT
Man, that New York Latino Disco boom was short lived. Glad I didn’t end up buying one of those. Have I ever used this sample bank? What is a clave anyway?
SOMETHING.K25
I am glad I have a folder full of Kurzweil samples. Now all I need is a K2500 synthesiser from 1996 and I’m set!
VIOLIN
The violin is an exceptionally expressive instrument which takes years of practice to master. This, on the other hand, is shit. Press key, make violin. Press again, make same violin. Samplers were just the worst idea ever when you think about it.
2VIOLINS
That chorusing effect of two samples at once is simply marvelous! My God, what a living breathing effect that is!
BURPS
I’m keeping this one. It’s ahead of its time.
FUNKYDRUM
Ah yes here it is, the complete bottom of the 1990′s music catastrophe. No matter what you were doing – from country to opera, there had to be that fucking horrible Amen Beat shoved through the whole thing. Remember ‘remixed rock’? Every tired old rock cliché with Funky Drummer run underneath it. God what a piss weak decade.
ARP2600
Funny thing that I went to all the trouble of finding and sampling the ARP, when to listen to it now it could have been any generic analogue synthesiser at all for the excitement it brings. With old synthesisers you’re better off taking a photograph to capture the dust and wood grain. The Wikepedia page is just a list of people who used one. Depeche Mode has four. Thrill me.
BELL
Lucky for me I owned a real DX-7 synthesiser or I’d probably have a entire folder full of samples called bell, gong, boing, clang, ping and all the other noises that FM dished out. I think this is a real bell, it’s hard to tell when it’s 8 bit.
SAX
Why in the name of all that is holy did I collect a sample of a saxophone? What was I going to do with it? Something for a soft core sex scene set in 1974? For God’s sake, a sampled saxophone. The thing is wretched anyway, even without the ineffectual 2 second alternating loop. I have never used this on anything.
I should just delete this whole damn folder. Nuke it from orbit.