The sampler is perhaps the most versatile musical instrument ever
devised. It is the chameleon of sound synthesis. While it has no
actual sound of its own, it does a very good job of imitating any
other sound you can make, and mapping that sound to a musical keyboard.
The first musical instruments that existed solely to emulate other
musical instruments were the Chamberlin and Mellotron. They were
large, mechanical machines with keyboards. When you held down a
key, a strip of audiotape would play back a prerecorded sound. Each
key played a different tape, featuring the same instrument playing
the appropriate note.
This allowed keyboard players in seventies rock bands to sound
uncannily like they had some violinists or even a choir hidden behind
the stage they were playing on, which is what many people thought
they were actually doing. Unfortunately, these ambitious machines
were prone to breaking down, so the best way to listen to their
distinctive sounds these days is to buy a sample CD of them, which
can be played reliably on their modern counterpart: the digital
sampler.
The digital sampler turns any sound fed into it into a series of
numbers, and then turns those numbers back into the original sound
again. This is exactly the same method that CD players use, known
as pulse code modulation (or PCM for short). The main difference
between the two devices is that while a CD player is content to
merely play back the sound on a compact disc, a sampler can also
record sounds via a microphone.
The other big difference is that a sampler has the ability to play
a sound back at a different pitch. You can, for example, record the
middle C of a piano and play it back slower or faster to make it
sound like a B3 or C#4. However, you would soon notice that once
you play the sample back at more than about half an octave from its
original note, it starts to sound unrealistic. High notes will be
tinny and too fast, whereas low notes will sound muddled and very
slow, not at all like a real piano.
This is where key zones come in: a different sample can be used every
few notes. If, for example, you sample the C and F# notes of every
octave of a piano, the result won't be perfect, but it will at least
sound OK. For less expressive instruments like electric organs, the
result will sound very much like the real thing. The drawback of
key zones is that several samples are required to capture the sound
of just one instrument, taking more time and effort to actually
sample and taking up more space in the sampler's memory. This
drawback is outweighed by the benefit: a much more realistic
reproduction of the original instrument.
Modern samplers go even further than this, using two dimensional key
zones: one dimension for the notes, and another for the dynamics
(dynamics being a fancy term meaning "how hard you hit the key").
Sampling every note of a piano at various different dynamics provides
a much more realistic emulation of that instrument (after all, its
expressive dynamics are what make the piano more popular than its
predecessor, the harpsichord), allowing the musician to play the
sampler's keyboard in the same expressive way that she would play
the original piano. However, recording every note of an instrument
(or even one in every three or six) at several different volumes,
then mapping the results into a sampler, can be a very tedious and
time consuming process.
Even before samplers could record the dynamic range of an instrument,
several companies had realised that many people using samplers would
want someone else to do the actual tedious sampling for them. The
result was the sample CD, a compact disc full of sounds that someone
else had painstakingly recorded so that the musician didn't have to,
usually available in the various native formats of the most popular
models of sampler, with the key zones already mapped out. Retailing
at a price much higher than albums, but significantly lower than the
actual instruments they more or less captured the sound of, these
became popular enough to warrant the existence of companies that do
nothing but make them, and mail order retailers that do nothing but
sell them.
These days, anyone into sampling has a lot of options. You can buy
an old sampler that has such low fidelity that it has a unique
character all of its own that colours any sound it plays back, or
you can go to the other extreme and buy a new software sampler which
can effortlessly render a surprisingly good imitation of a grand
piano in surround sound. Somewhere between the two extremes lies
the CD quality Akai S1000, one of the most popular hardware samplers.
Its format is still the main standard for sample CDs, even though
many modern samplers - both hardware and software - have surpassed
its limitations.
Another choice is whether to record an instrument yourself, or buy
a sample CD. The latter is far easier, although the license will
likely impose restrictions on how you can use the samples, and it
can be expensive.
Instead, you could forget instruments altogether, choosing to record
a quote from a film or a bar or two from someone else's song. While
paying royalties can eat into your profits, that didn't stop Fatboy
Slim from building an entire career out of remixing and recycling
other people's riffs and vocals. Public Enemy and Pop Will Eat
Itself were experts at taking snippets of other people's music and
films, putting them into a new context where they would complement
their own original work. With his debut album Endtroducing, DJ
Shadow even went as far as to make the whole record out of samples
of other people's work.
Yet another option is to make your own original samples of things
other than musical instruments. This is arguably the most important
ability of the sampler: to turn any conceivable sound into a potential
musical instrument. Binary's album Brick Wall Music, for example,
is made exclusively out of the sounds of things lying around in his
house. In the inlay card, he proudly proclaims "No musical instruments
were used on these recordings. Sound sources come from everyday
objects and found sounds manipulated digitally."
Although sampling can be a tedious, time consuming process, and it
often offers a less than perfect reproduction of other instruments,
the sampler truly is the most versatile musical instrument. It has
also changed the sound of music, from every hip hop song that samples
Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band's cover of The Shadows's Apache
to every composer who uses a sampler to help him sketch out ideas
for his latest classical composition.