Ahhh.. makes me miss my Mirage. I had a HUGE library for it. The trick for "clean" samples in the Mirage was to take the source and play it back at 1/2 speed as you sample it - great from records. Then you speed the sample up and it was super clean. But... you used up more of the precious, little sample memory you had in the Mirage.
As an "Old Guy" I really appreciate what you have done in this Presentation. The first sampler I ever saw/heard was an 8086 PC in Radio Shack in 1978 or 1979 I believe. I was never in the position (financially) to purchase any of the Samplers that came to the consumer market but always found a workaround using things that I was lucky enough to grab. I still grab old samplers, pre amps and processors because the Sound of transistors and tubes (when they are available) just sound fantastic.
As I see it, and what Tom didn't mention, accept for the 30khz sample freq of the Roland S50 is what is actually responsible for the grit in the old samplers. The S50 is 12bit by 15 - 30khz with digital filters. The Mirage is 8bit by 23khz with analog filters. This and things like the decoders is what it's all about.
PP7628 All I know is I love my s950 and the filter is amazing! I’m not not using it much lately cause I’m lazy but I love the warm anolog sound of it. The ‘tone’ of the s950 makes an exellent sub bass btw!
I was greatly inspired by this, and I remembered having wave backups from many keyboards, that I sampled from bands and never used. Playing with kontakt I found a very nice feature you may have missed. When you edit the instrument, where you usually have DFD (loading samples directly from disk) you also have multiple options on how to resample the single note while changing pitch, and some of them are based on the old school samplers, adding grit and grain on the lower notes. Give that a look, you have many different options for resampling and they all have different characters.
P.S. it will load all the samples in memory, so if anybody will try with a normal PC and a string section with tons of samples, it will probably crash :)
Ah Cheers Tom, I've never seen anyone make the differences so clear... I'm replacing the battery in my SY77 and because of this session - the next job is to diagnose why 4 of my S50s voices are quieter. I feel properly charged up, many thanks for your time and skills....
favorite so far. i love the texture of different hardware samplers. current favorite (surprisingly) is the korg volca sample. it's clocks at 31.25kHz and only has 4mb of memory so you have to be creative in how you load your samples, especially loops or long phrases.
Tom....had me ff een text gestuurd dan! Parameter 72 TOP KEY..... set value to 61 and you're good to go...sample over het hele toetsenbord. Groeten uit Hilversum.
My favorite sampler of all time is the Akai S- 950, 8 bit, mono (I sampled all my samples two times left and right separate and put them on the same midi channel and send them to 2 outputs so it became stereo) 8 separate outputs (becomes 4 if you do my stereo trick) it's filters sound awesome and everything you throw at it becomes so fat deu to the 8 bits samplerate. And it never failed in 13 years of use. Real professional quality and a real beast !
You are absolutely right Scott, I should have looked it up, still a beast though. I used it in my 1998 billboard chard hit Secret Studio made under my act name Drop Out. Greetz Paul Z. a.k.a. neuronmind
I used to have the Roland S50. Loved it. My producer buddy had the Roland S10 keyboard. I had mine midi to my mpc20000XL. Also with a sound module. Man! I had a sick fuckin setup. He's on my fav list just because he owns one. Lol. Junkie XL for life baby lol.
It's hard to explain to people the sound of hardware vs software 🙄... but this 👍 is a great video that highlights the real energy hardware adds . Like cooking in a new cookware vs old school black steel pots 😂😂
Thanks for the Video, it has maked the first sounds the S-750 on my desk.... Wonderfull Instrument, great Sound. For People like me ist very important to get such informations from a professional musician. It took me only 3 hours after getting the package and the first samples of my analog synth were in. The machine is from a shop over 20 years only demo and the os 2.25., it´s like new...........
Perfect editing, gives really unique '80 quality to this episode and seamlessly fits to the sound of Mirage, reminds me times of rewinding to the best/favourite scene in Aliens, or something of that sort. I fell in love with Mirage :)
This was the best episode so far, thank you so much. Even if youtube/streaming doesn't provide a high audio quality, this comparison really showed some differences.
Please could you do a similar vid on the range of EMU samplers you have in your studios. I love mine but I only have the more recent models so I would love to see/hear the old Emulators in action before I lay out cash. Loved the reveal on the reverb so I might take a leap of faith and get an H9 Max :-D
Dank Tom! Echt ontzettend nuttig dit. Ik ga meteen de oude samplers weer aansluiten. Vond het altijd lastig om een toepassing voor realtime downsampling te vinden. De video is echt heel inspirerend. Zie meteen mogelijkheden. Te gek!
Its not just the samplerate... I knew I should have never sold my old gear. But I wanted that Kurzweil so bad! Another slamdunk with this one. thank you!
I'm here for your immense knowledge of sound. Went through a few of your videos and really respect your opinion and insights. Please keep the channel going!
That was so much fun seeing you lost in that manual! It reminded me about the good old days where I had to read the manual of my first digital synth the roland JV 1080 for 3 days just to get a sound out of it and into my atari! Thanks for that great sampler comparison!
This shows perfectly the point that in many cases, the "nice" sound isn't the one that inspires you, or necessarily works better for your track. Sometimes "filthy dirty" samples are much better than polite pretty ones. Like the Hans Zimmer quote "NOW we're scaring the children!" :O)
S-50 came out in late 1986. Mine definitely didn't come with the Digitizer Pad waveform editor either. It was optional. It had color monitor output not just monochrome. Need to dig mine back out. Been hooked on my Sequential Prophet 2002.
Love the gritty sound that came out of your DS50 and That Mirage is such a dirty beast. Add to that the sampler in Cubase sounding tasty as well, and there really is a surprising difference amongst samplers. Certainly didn't expect Kontakt and Cubase to be so different. Fabulous demo, thank you, Tom.
It is pretty amazing to see how Tom uses samplers as an FX processor, personally I never though about it!. At least in a ¨Sound Design¨ context. Thank you very much once again for sharing this knowledge Tom!
A friend of mine back in the late 80s had one of these.. He used the Atari computer to access his Mirage. With that said, it is possible that Ensoniq/Atari made a software program or some third party software company. Maybe that would help to access that beast..but good luck trying to find a working Atari.
incredible!!! I had an Yamaha S50 sampler myself, but for the reason of being too complicated and the little sampletime I gave it away to the thriftshop :( luv your tutorials Tom
Probably what you describe as grit, has to do with 4 factors: Sample Rate, Bit Depth, Dynamics Curve and Interpolation Algorithm (or the lack of). But you have a point that older samplers didn't produce antialiasing, because they were not converting their output to a specific frequency (like 44100Hz f.e.) digitally. Great videos, I can't possibly begin to imagine how much time you must spend cleaning the dust off, all this hardware synths - that's why I moved to software :)
Love it, awesome video! Roland tend to EQ their amps - that gives that distinct bottom end with a lot of their products. The D-50 has a similar flavor. Love hearing the difference between 8 bit and 16 bit samplers - even if they are sampled at similar 30Khz - that bit crunch :)
Emmanuel Florac S612 and S700 are 12 bit. I think the S612 uses 12 in its name for this reason. S612 is my favorite of the early samplers... I have three ;)
Oh man. I adore my Mirage keyboard, but I have no illusions about how much easier we have it now. I remember when I got it, everything I sampled was really, REALLY distorted. I seriously thought it was broken! it wasn't until I pored over the manual for hours that I realised that there was a hardware gain switch on the input so you could sample from vinyl.
These videos make me want to get out all my old hardware samplers again - I picked up quite a few when you could get them for next to nothing on eBay, but only a couple are in the studio at the moment. The Akai X7000 is a particular favourite, just because you can sample a sound and start playing in just two button presses, with gloriously murky 12-bit audio. The original 12-bit Ensoniq EPS is great for gritty, beefy percussion and the traditional Ensoniq glitchy sound mangling (loop-point modulation!). The Sequential Prophet 2000 has awesome squelchy/shrieky analogue filters, though the interface is a migraine-inducer. I've also got a Roland S-50 with the questionably useful pen tablet, but I've never really used it all that much (it's a time-consuming beast to work with). And even though it's more of a "clean" sampler, the Akai S3000XL still adds that wonderful Akai punch to everything that comes out of it.
LMAO the mirage part.. it is basically a synth made for software engineers. Have you used the soundprocess OS with it? The S50 in low register sounds like perfect vintage 90s sci-fi low budget atmosphere
I sample my old analog synths into my sy99 and it is one of the greatest things ever. I know these approaches are old and a bit time consuming but it's so much fun and you really get unique sounds.. especially with the sy99 power!!! Tom, do you have an sy99? I would love to see your approach Thank you, great videos as usual
You may definitely check out the full flagship of Steinberg HALion, it has several quality degrading options to sound like those vintage samplers you showed here. Not to mention that this is the only software sampler that can sample like a hardware.
Different algorythms, Maestro keeps highs and pops out some kind of aliasing at low pitch, the Roland has a nice sound, darker. Both are really good Thanks for sharing !
hi tom. i love this episode. was great that you checkt the new sampler-track, as i did wrote the last time about it that its a way for pll using the old sample-tech. to get it more oldschool sounding i love to reduse the resolution to 12bit and other fun stuff, to get the a bit closer to the lovely 80s sampler. the part that was mostly fastforwarded made me smile ;) but the sound what you get from that maschine is just worth the time. thx for the videos ! joerg
Hi Tom. I started sampling on software sampler sampletank and then kontakt and then I found out they were not multitimbral! Boy was I surprised! Then I got a Akai S3000xl and I found out I could run SEVERAL instruments at the same time! Oh boy was I pleased. I then found a few more hardware samplers and found that they could do the job so much better and we're more fun to work with than software. 😁😎🇨🇦. Ps. Hello from Canada.
As far as my knowledge of Kontakt goes, you can map the key number to the lowpass filter cutoff, amount of saturation and sample-rate reduction, so that the lower notes you play, the more and more distortion you add to the sound.
