Edit that preset! A blogg about synth, e-mu sampler, music and pillows

Exploring the lost art of sampling

 Listen to a short jam here: E-mu Oberheim patch 

Well.. i guess i have made it pritty clear that i have fallen totaly in love with the sampling techniqe.   So i thought i could share my progress in learning the lost art of sampling .

Few days ago, i needed a kind of a lead pad.. a pad that sticks a bit out.  so i turned to my nova.. found a preset.. tweaked it a bit.. and made it fit for the track.. it sounded ok.. but too mellow and rnb'ish.. so.. i turned to my emu..   i sampled a 5 sec clip of the sample down..  copied it up and panned the two similar samples in each direction.. then i fine-detuned the one sample to around +6, found a very good looping point and made crossfade between the loopingpoint to avoid too fast transition,  applied amplitude envelope, a 4-pole low-pass filter, with an filter envelope.   I also did some dsp threatment on the sample like, normalizing.    First the result was a bit flat.. but after working with the filter envelope.. and amp envelope i found the right curve.. and it made miracles..

 the pad got a more edgy characteristic sound, and fitted my dnb track even more.  and that emu-filter actually kicks the bottom of the nova filters.. i am almost sad to say.. but its a killer!!!

I am going to apply a slow lagged random lfo on the fine-tuning on both samples.. so they can drift to get a more analouge feel..

With a slow lagged random lfo, i mean a LFO that is feeding out random values, with a lagproessor smoothing out the transition between the values.. giving it a kind of smooth "sample and hold" modulation.  Since its random, the two samples will not be modulated to the same value. Which will ensure it sounds more natural.

 The emu have revealed it self as a superb padmachine.   emu together with some va/analouge or softsynth turns out to be a killer combination!!