GrimeDUBBIN Yep. I found a copy of Future Music from 1993, a UK electronic music magazine. An Akai sampler was £4500! Now....use any number of DAWs for £100 or so and some cheap USB hardware. Insane......
Like an old movie or show with the real old phones on the stick - stand. All the periods of phones and their ringer have to match the time period of the movie. Then there was the old gray box at the drive in - a spiders house. One would hang it on the driver'-side window and drive off after the movie tearing out the cord. Oh well. Then now it's all like a fine component emulated from within a PC or a Mac.
Oh man, I wish that Soundforge looping tool was available in more DAW's. Getting to see the waveform and matching it with other zero points is genius design.
I find that it's doable in audacity by zooming in and looking for zero points, but soundforge does that automatically which is pretty cool. It doesn't look like it's free though which is a shame, unless it has one of those infinite free trials that I love so much.
Fl Studio has direct wave player that automatically samples a note from your own sample library or another Vst and Edison loop functions helps you cross fade or loop at zero points
Had a Yamaha TX16W with 1.5 MB of RAM and an Atari ST. The TX16W was hell to operate so it was faster and easier to transfer samples over 5 pin MIDI, use a sample editor on the Atari to find the right zero-crossings for the loops, and then send the sample back again over MIDI. Oh, and 1.5 MB was enough to load an entire Grand Piano patch or Orchestral Strings. Downloading a 1 MB sample set from an ftp-server with a 1200 baud modem could take 6 hours... and then you'd pray the download wasn't corrupted or you could start all over again. Those were the days... when "patience" was part of the skill :-). Thx for the vid and the walk down memory lane.
I use Renoise, a tracker-based DAW with an advanced sampler. Its VST counterpart, Redux, is Renoise's sampler repackaged as a plug-in. It's fun to make music using as efficient a filesize as possible, especially by drawing your own waveforms with the mouse.
This gets me thinking of music on the Super Nintendo where every single sound in every single song had to be a looped sample, and I'd be surprised if there was even a megabit available for all of the audio. Fascinating stuff.
is that true? i was under the impression there was a built in soundcard and all the music were essentially tracker files. but maybe that ended before the Super Nintendo
The sound was restricted to 64Kb - although it is a 8-bit sampler in theory, in practice the 'samples' were limited to be not much more than a single wave shapes - all sounds and melodies were created through modulation - DSP programming: load a wave, change pitch, add noise and delay - on 8 independently programmable channels.
SNES had 64kb for music samples. Some more clever folks would do things like chain songs together which means they could beat the 64kb, but it had to be clever and not stutter the game.
When I listen to some crazy work that was done with samples in a lot of 90's hip hop it's hard for me to imagine actually doing some of that stuff without visualized waveforms and stuff that let's you easily break it up into a thousand individually adjustable bits without getting too lost.
that's why it sounds more soulful and dynamic. Everything isn't quantized to the bpm and they did things by ear. Some people had good ears. A lot of fancy gear and software doesn't make good music. Being limited will force you to get creative. That might be good music.
Some of the best beatmakers of the '80s, and even the early '90s, were limited to pause tapes -- 4-track tape decks, looping a sound over and over on each track, then layering the loops to get a full beat. The dedication and creativity!! Q-Tip, Public Enemy, 45 King, Prince Paul & De La Soul, etc... most of it didn't remain pure pause tape when it was being released on a label but the bare bones beat was often created on a tape deck. The introduction of the SP-1200 allowed beatmakers to experiment further, but within what we now see as a really restricted realm of techniques. They had to be creative, and they really had to play the beats out, not arrange them neatly in rows on a screen. If you can't see it, you've got to feel it. And a bit later Akai's MPC series allowed them to take it even further, playing it all out with pressure-sensitive pads, low- and high-pass filter, making the sounds really sing, but still playing it all out by hand. In my opinion many of the very best hip-hop beats are from the '90s and were generally made with an MPC 60. Good article on pause tapes if interested: daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2019/04/pause-tape-production-feature
@@dustybeijing If I may add, they (DJs) also used to literally scratch the records with a pin in the perfect spot to make the needle jump and loop. Watched a DJ at a local (long gone Record Shop) working on samples from old records that way, and looping beats as well.
as a full-time musician that has primarily worked in tracker software for 20 years (openmpt, previously modplug), sample looping is still part of my every day life, and i always feel like a genius when i set down the loop points and it feels completely natural. quite some time ago, openmpt added a "crossfade" feature that automatically fades the start/end of a selected section into itself for looping and it's an absolute godsend for longer samples.
Wow, this is actually how I make 60% of my sounds. I record things with a field recorder, chop up the recordings and loop them, or just one-shot. I barely use synths.
It is a really cool and creative way to do sound design. I've always wanted to really get into recording my own sounds. Had a project planned where I use only my own sounds, but never quite got around to it. Recently, I've mainly been using kontakt sampled instruments and Ample Sound's guitars and basses to make more organic music.
I owned a lot of hardware samplers over the years, starting with the Ensonic Mirage and ending with my Emu E64...Then came Gigastudio and then Kontakt software samplers, and the world was forever changed. I have a specific memory of sampling my acoustic guitar on my old Akai S3000 and all the hours involved trying to get smooth loops.I'm so glad for current samplers like Kontakt. It is night to day from what the primitive hardware based samplers used to be.
@@askdad3450, personally, I never liked it. Gritty maybe fine for a few sounds, but when all of your sounds are gritty, including ones that should never be like strings and horns, I found it very limiting.
It's always interesting to think about the way technical constraints shape a piece of art. With the ability to do basically anything in a daw now, it is very fun to impose constraints on yourself to see what happens.
I'm a 20-something music and sound effects hobbyist, never touched a hardware sampler in my life, and I use this technique all the time to extend clips from Freesound that are either too short to begin with, or only have one little snippet that's actually usable. The DAW I use has all these sample looping features built in, and it seemed a natural choice for that sort of task, so I had no idea this was a lost art or that most DAWs didn't have that built in! But then, I use Renoise, which is well-known for its oldschool roots. This video made me appreciate Renoise all the more!
I worked at guitar center for a while and we had a keyboard that would let you sample anything and edit it right there on the thing. You could do it for 256 custom sets of sound banks with a different sound for every key. I was amazed by that thing lol I love doing virtual instruments with my midi keyboard, but I've never tried making my own sounds.
Had that A3000 myself, and very well spec'd for the money it was to. Nice crunchy FX! Also previously had an S1000 and a nice Roland S550.. Don't forget that when RAM was limited you could do things like play a 33rpm record at 45rpm to get the sample in quicker and take up less valuable space and then pitch it down..! Ah, those were the days....
I used to do sound design for sound systems used in model trains. I had next to no space to work with (I think a megabyte) for somewhere over 250 sounds in each model. Steam whistles and diesel horns could take hours to get to loop smoothly -- especially the steam whistles that had multiple chimes (think 3 or 5 huge flutes blown and overblown by steam). I used Cool Edit (which has grown into Adobe Audition) instead of Sound Forge, but the capabilities and functions were very similar. I got quite good at it, and when I do work with samples, I still do it basically the same way -- slow, steady, and small.
less than a year later than the A3000 , the Korg electribe sampler came out and made it all easier . although I still put my samples into FL studio and pitched them up an octave to save space . it was amazing the compression they used , you could fit your whole sample bank into 4Mb along with midi settings and programming .
Are you crazy? The Electribe ES-1 had the worst sample editing and management of any sampler I have owned, including the A3000, Akais and E-Mus. The A3000 is a beast which is deceptively fast to use despite it not having a waveform display (which the ES-1 did not have either). I still have and use my second one as a sample based synth. The ES-1 has a funky sequencer - it’s worth a few bob just for the x0x style programming, but it’s no sampler. Best viewed as a nice sequencer with a very limited sample playback device attached, imo. It did not sound good to me, so I sold it. I kept an ER-1, though, which is basically the same machine but with drum synth parts instead. Get an electribe ES/ER/EM just for the sequencer if you see one cheap…
@@ozzy3ml I never used it for the editing part , I can see that would be a minus . I would edit in sound forge and sample in . Did solo sets with the ES-1 as the core or the set up . Even had a simmons drum kit triggering off it . great lil beast , for sure it had its limits , most of which disappeared with the ESX
this is one of those kinds of videos i've been searching for, along with articles, for months. i've always wanted to do this since 1999 but didn't know where to start. this technique of music production definitely can yield amazing results with extremely limited amounts of data. and a lot more that i could talk in depth on. thank you for having this video up to remind me that people still think this form of audio art is great.
Ahh the memories of looping and sequencing on my eps16+! I remember upgrading to an asr10 and eventually finding recycle had a function that would edit, chop, and send the file to my asr via midi. Slow but not as slow as the tedious task of playing by ear alone.
Granular and wavetable synthesis are nice extensions on the looping idea, and additive synthesis can take this even further. Really nice trip down memory road though :)
I don't understand why retailers brag about how large their samples are in terms of file size? I am constantly trying to save space on my hard drive and having smaller sample libraries and instruments is a huge bonus.
There are some ROMplers that I tend to avoid using because it takes so long (a couple of seconds) to load up each patch. It might have been even slower in the old days, but it was remarkable how an instrument could be squeezed into a tiny file size with careful trimming and looping.
I did a lot of sample editing & looping for my Akai S2000 back in the 90s which could only max out at 32MB. When I switched to a soft sampler SapleTank I still utilized looping. For both I used Bias Peak for editing and it was tricky to get a clean looped sample. DSP Quattro on the Mac was good at crossfade sample looping. Now I'm on a PC and still looking for a good waveform editor for SampleTank but I can't find one.
One of my mentors had an E-Mu Ultra, or whatever the keyboard version was called, and had created a sample library that was unreal! That was such a valuable tool!
Yeah and the reason the ultra still rocks is the filters. And the modulation matrix, you can assign a huge number of modulators to any source, I use my emu often as a multi oscillator synth. You can stack and detune upto 64 oscillators to a single key and use continuous controllers to shape the amp and filters adsr also each sample(oscillator) can be any pitch and sound. It’s the ultimate reese machine.
I still do this all the time :) - and I also switched from the Yamaha A4000 and A5000 to software, but still very often use small samples with loops and envelopes like you show here - nice video by the way!
I use one-shots all the time in my Vospi tracks. I love them. Some people even do it unknowingly :) using certain Serum patches, for example. The sound of that is very familiar to someone who grew on 90's pop music, which would be me. Some of the artist knew about all the features Dan've described and were delighted to create unusual sound instead of trying to recreate the source faithfully; the limitation became a stylistical choice and even an imprint of an era.
That whole ending section I was struggling between closing my eyes and listening to the music or voice or information or opening my eyes and follow what you were doing. Wow, very well done. Thank you sir.
This is amazing! As a sound design grad student, we need to loop sounds to implement them in wwise, which is hard as hell in standard DAW’s. Thanks for this one!!
Just did that myself attending school for Bachelor of Science Degree in Audio Production courses. We did 1-3 sec one-shots and 15-30 loops of ambience. foley recoring.... all in Pro Tools and Logic X...so much fun. I'm pretty sure that's the path i am taking aftergraduation. Sound design has always fascinated me.
@@djelbert23 Would you mind answering an in experienced Logic X user's question? Does logic have the audio editing features (in sound forge) Dan mentioned in the video? I'm wondering what else I would need to do this kind of thing. Like that Falcon software? Or can logic do all that?
In FL Studio you can do this using Edison which is a stock effect plugin to edit audio, I do it all the time, i’m pretty sure it can also be made on other DAWs like Ableton Live
I hear you. I work in sound effects with *stereo* files and zooming right in (Nuendo in my case; I do have - and paid for Reaper but on my setup I checked with pink and found coming out my mains: TC Konnekt 48, the low suffered much. I had to solve this by choosing outputs farther down the "hierarchy" which brought my low end back) again, zooming in as far as possible makes this quite a chore. When I do 'design' pads I split the file somewhere in the middle at a perfect zero crossing, make sure my DAW isn't using it's built in fades, take the "B" side over ahead of the "A" side and cross fade them. Voila! The perfect loop.
Good old donation ware Wavosaur has pretty much the same workflow. Loads up VST effects and has algorithms etc. Apart from the 'aged' Borland interface it's not a bad piece of kit for making loops - but instrument sample patches as well. SFZ files anyone???
wierdly i still do allot of this kind of looping in renoise... sweet mercy i wish that thing had a version of that loop tuner... it would actualy change my life!
these kinds of sample libraries are the reason hardware workstation synthesizers still exist. And if I get one, I'm not really paying for the keyboard itself, but mainly for the library that's been made over decade to be easily and intuitively playable by a keyboard player. To load fast, and even if not sounding 100% realistic, will be easily crafted with simple ADSR curves and a bit of reverb into what you want... one can always worry about the details later, but when composing, you just need the idea of the sound that's good enough that it translates to your composition. No need to worry about key switching to get the correct bowing direction on your first violins... I'm not trying to replace an orchestra here, just trying to compose stuff an I want some simple orchestral color thank you very much! :D
Sound Forge and my beefed up Yamaha A3000 served me well for years! I am still always impressed how easy it is now, to slice up a sample and midi map it across a keyboard (literally one mouse click in Ableton, for example)
This is just like what I was doing with MED/OctaMED on the Amiga to write countless songs in the early 90s. I made my own musical instruments from mixing, editing, or synthesizing samples.
I loved that sampler, Still got mine, and only break it out occasionally for creating soundscapes, because the fx processors in it are absolutely awesome for sound design even by today’s standards. Really easy to use as well.
I used to own that sampler! Very flexible, easy to upgrade, and replaced my Akai S1000. Ended up using shortcircuit and sold the Yamaha, but I think I will be going back to hardware soon enough. The touchscreen Akai live looks the business, but I might be happy with a slightly earlier model .
1:07 I guess _Right click > Glue items_ would be faster if you want to edit samples in Reaper. Can't pick the path or filename though, so you'll have to find it in the project directory. The larger point - that DAWs and audio editors are optimized for different workflows - remains.
Oh, the nostalgia : -) I started out doing this on a Roland S-330 and then later an ESI-32. Now I use the TX16Wx VST sampler in Reaper although creating loops like this is something I've not done in a long time. Watching this vid makes me want to do it again.
Dear Dan, First of all, you have a new sub! Now, I just want to say that given your knowledge and your experience, your persona, the way that its projected from your videos, seems so humble and totally not self centered... which is rare in real life, let alone on youtube :-)
Another great video. Thanks for sharing Dan! I always like seeing people's different approaches to sampling, and I really like the carefully curated minimalism you describe here. Inspires me to sample my acoustic. I think I tend to over-complicate sampling processes (Sample every note, at every level, perfect ideal recreation, etc.) and miss some of the much more minimalist and creative approaches that can create new instruments. Cheers
Dan Worrall uploads a video to a topic I'm only very remotely interested in. I watch the video. The video is interesting af and brings a lot inspiration to me. Thanks, Dan! 💜
Yay! A3000! I still have mine, and I still use it, but only as a sample library. I should probably buy a good library plugin, but I can't be bothered. the Yamaha still works.
I still use this method until this day, i sample some of my VST preset to 1 wav hit and layer them with some synths it adds a lot with less processing power needed.
amazing vid! an amazing example of whats possible with this format is any of the romplers from back in the day, i swear my jv-2080 puts out some of the most amazing sounds in my whole collection.
Speaking of hardware samplers, I saw some people on another video commenting that they used to speed up their vinyl player and slow it down on the sampler so they could save a few seconds of sample space.
You could also do that within the sampler: pitch up, resample, then pitch back down. But you lose high frequencies of course, as you effectively end up with a lower samplerate.
You got yourself a new member! Excellent way of explaining, I really enjoyed it. Indeed, midi sample transfer was eh, an option. I used it once or twice on the old S950 I remember. Took ages.
@Dan Worrall on Reaper once you trim and fade the audio clip just select the item and glue it, this will create a new audio file with out destructively changing the original file ✌🏽
@@DanWorrall No problem, personally I don't think it would really matter at that point, you already have a new one once you have glued the item anyways 🤷🏽♂️, plus you always have the orinal to start again from, in case you want to back track.
Ah, that's taken me back to the joys of my Akai S2000, linked to an ancient Mac via SCSI, using MESA... having previously spent years doing everything via the front panel (and having got to the point where I knew the sample editing menus so well that I knew it was 3 across, 13 down or whatever to the loop edit page, and then when I got a sampler with a bigger display I was much slower as you needed to check a lot of things visually instead of it being pure muscle memory.
Ah, Random Access Memory Lane. My Akai s900 is still on a high shelf in the basement, a place of honor. In those days having a 3.5 inch disk drive was like having the whole world at your fingertips. And we hadn't even heard of waveform visualizations, but we had a big scroll wheel and were happy we had it!
Takes me back to the Amiga tracker days (though I used ScreamTracker on PC) where looping samples like this was pretty much like doing it on a hardware sampler, having to input the loop start and end point locations as pure byte offsets
My friend had a Yamaha sampler. He loved it. I had Akai s3000xl. Eventually bought Akai 6000. I miss that work flow. Assigning cot off to pitch bend etc.
I'm still in awe at being able to record audio. An Atari 1040 with an Akai S900 kept me going for years. Mind you, I still edit the audio as if 1gig cost £1000 (which it did).
A short stint of about ten years! I've tended to skip versions when upgrading over the years, but that might be pushing your luck. Try it and let me know... ;)
i guess it depends on how you make music...i still use a pre-sony version of sf and im really happy reaper lets me set it up as my external editor. theres things i can do really fast in sf that reaper just doesnt do...someone said limitation can be a good thing; theres something symbiotic in how mixing down a stem frees both system resources and human resources ;) im learning to be destructive and limiting my alternatives. but i still use an old dos tracker for stuff and record into an asr10 for no provable reason...what do i know.
Great video, interesting to hear some body talking about old school sampling and how things used to be, takes me mack to my Akai s01 and S2800 days :-) :-)
Yeah... I've still got my Echo Ranger too! Back in our day, E-Mu - Emax were the hw samplers of choice. I like Reaper. Easilly the best DAW. But I too cut my teeth on Soundforge, though sadly my version is now, no longer supported and Soundforge isn't cheap. I do miss it so much, a great editing tool.
Redmatica’s software would automatically create smoothly looping points for you. It could create crossfades or also use resynthesis if needed to create the perfect looping points. I keep an old iMac just to run Autosampler.
Did this as well back in early 2000 with Sound Forge 6 for my Alesis QS7, it played back samples burned in 8 MB PCMCIA cards. The fun part was mapping the samples in Alesis own Sound Bridge software, writing down how far stretch each note would be, then send the sample to burn in the cards.... that would take a while.
Good video. My SY99 came with a generous 0.5 Mb sample Ram. It could be expanded adding another 5 boards to 3Mb at 152 GBP per board. I couldn't live without SoundForge.
I remember how luxurious it felt to have 4MB of RAM in my Soundblaster AWE-64 soundcard and how you could use Cool Edit/Sound forge/Goldwave for trimming and looping in order to cram an entire GM soundset (128 instruments) into a 4MB soundfont. The pianos always sounded very plinky plonky, but at the time it felt like wizardry. I am full of admiration for early sample manglers who had much less RAM and no visual feedback of the waveforms.
This took me back! I used to use SoundForge with a couple of A3000s (with the output expansion boards) into a 32 channel Allen & Heath mixer. Later I managed to get a JP8000 and that was it. Still a trance producer 20+ years later :)
Thank you for all of the very thoughtfully done and informative videos. I was wondering what reverb you like the best. I noticed that you had sparkverb loaded. I have been auditioning many free and demo algorithmic and convolution reverbs (flux's verb v3 being at the top end of what I could consider). What have you found to be the most natural sounding (especially at very long times) or the most musical versatile that I could consider? Thank you for any suggestions. And thank you for making such great videos.
Sparkverb can be nice on synth parts, as can Valhalla Vintage Verb. Also use Valhalla Plate and UVI Plate a lot. FabFilter Pro-R gets a lot of use, especially for small room, early reflection type settings. I used to use the Lexicon PCM plugins a lot, but increasingly find myself picking one of the above instead.
@@DanWorrall Thank you very much - I have really been enjoying trying/comparing all of these different reverbs (I had previously not really appreciated how different reverbs can have such different strengths). It's been great! One question: is that you narrating the sparkverb overview video?
@@DanWorrall I don't know if you're involved with UVI beyond doing videos, but I very much enjoy your informational videos and I think they are lucky (or smart) to have you involved in doing them. Thank you
I looped for hours on the Emu Emax II. It was fun. Still got this machine. Great rack sampler. Terrible small display :o) I wish a great sample editor in Cubase.
This throws me back! When I was using hardware samplers, I used WavAkai98 to select samples to send to my trusty S2800i over SMIDI. And you're right, it's very slow. But this video also reminded me of how much I loved Sound Forge. It was fun improperly looping something to make drum sounds and other oddness, or the satisfaction of looping something correctly and thinking "effing finally, now another keygroup." Thanks for the trip down memory lane, though I still do have some hardware samplers. I never forgot. It's fun to loop, imho.
I did this just last night when a sampled synth note I found was too short, I like using alternating loop direction on more unusual sounds to add to their uniqueness.
The evolution of music and audio equipment over the years is fascinating.
GrimeDUBBIN Yep. I found a copy of Future Music from 1993, a UK electronic music magazine. An Akai sampler was £4500! Now....use any number of DAWs for £100 or so and some cheap USB hardware. Insane......
Facts
@@edwardbyard6540 Damn!!! Huge difference!
I was thinking the same thing bro!!!
Like an old movie or show with the real old phones on the stick - stand. All the periods of phones and their ringer have to match the time period of the movie. Then there was the old gray box at the drive in - a spiders house. One would hang it on the driver'-side window and drive off after the movie tearing out the cord. Oh well. Then now it's all like a fine component emulated from within a PC or a Mac.
Oh man, I wish that Soundforge looping tool was available in more DAW's. Getting to see the waveform and matching it with other zero points is genius design.
I find that it's doable in audacity by zooming in and looking for zero points, but soundforge does that automatically which is pretty cool. It doesn't look like it's free though which is a shame, unless it has one of those infinite free trials that I love so much.
Fl Studio has direct wave player that automatically samples a note from your own sample library or another Vst and Edison loop functions helps you cross fade or loop at zero points
I can't think of a daw that doesn't have something very similar.
@@At3eS Oh man, I had been using Caustic for a while, didn't know this. Thanks for pointing it out!
This feature is in built in abletons sampler instrument and is fuckin easy to use
The OP-1 certainly keeps this technique alive and kicking.
In a painful way, though. But I took my time to loop them beloved samples of mine. That's where I learned what Dan is telling here...
And for only $1300!! What a steal!
PO K.O. 33 is much more faster and easier in that matter :)
Should that be alive and clicking? 😁
@@DeathTrapProductions I LOVE when people talk about OP-1 bcs comment like yours will definitely pop up in the reply section lmaoo
Had a Yamaha TX16W with 1.5 MB of RAM and an Atari ST. The TX16W was hell to operate so it was faster and easier to transfer samples over 5 pin MIDI, use a sample editor on the Atari to find the right zero-crossings for the loops, and then send the sample back again over MIDI. Oh, and 1.5 MB was enough to load an entire Grand Piano patch or Orchestral Strings. Downloading a 1 MB sample set from an ftp-server with a 1200 baud modem could take 6 hours... and then you'd pray the download wasn't corrupted or you could start all over again. Those were the days... when "patience" was part of the skill :-). Thx for the vid and the walk down memory lane.
had my apartment robbed, PC and backup HDDs taken... 15 years of processed samples, cut and faded in SoundForge... so many hours
Ouch. Sorry to hear that :(
I love the way the music becomes ever more fascinating and sophisticated underneath your nonchalant VO...! Very cool!
I use Renoise, a tracker-based DAW with an advanced sampler. Its VST counterpart, Redux, is Renoise's sampler repackaged as a plug-in. It's fun to make music using as efficient a filesize as possible, especially by drawing your own waveforms with the mouse.
This gets me thinking of music on the Super Nintendo where every single sound in every single song had to be a looped sample, and I'd be surprised if there was even a megabit available for all of the audio. Fascinating stuff.
You can really see the looping effect if you load up the soundfonts in a DAW
You’re not alone in that
is that true? i was under the impression there was a built in soundcard and all the music were essentially tracker files. but maybe that ended before the Super Nintendo
The sound was restricted to 64Kb - although it is a 8-bit sampler in theory, in practice the 'samples' were limited to be not much more than a single wave shapes - all sounds and melodies were created through modulation - DSP programming: load a wave, change pitch, add noise and delay - on 8 independently programmable channels.
SNES had 64kb for music samples. Some more clever folks would do things like chain songs together which means they could beat the 64kb, but it had to be clever and not stutter the game.
When I listen to some crazy work that was done with samples in a lot of 90's hip hop it's hard for me to imagine actually doing some of that stuff without visualized waveforms and stuff that let's you easily break it up into a thousand individually adjustable bits without getting too lost.
that's why it sounds more soulful and dynamic. Everything isn't quantized to the bpm and they did things by ear. Some people had good ears.
A lot of fancy gear and software doesn't make good music. Being limited will force you to get creative. That might be good music.
Some of the best beatmakers of the '80s, and even the early '90s, were limited to pause tapes -- 4-track tape decks, looping a sound over and over on each track, then layering the loops to get a full beat. The dedication and creativity!! Q-Tip, Public Enemy, 45 King, Prince Paul & De La Soul, etc... most of it didn't remain pure pause tape when it was being released on a label but the bare bones beat was often created on a tape deck.
The introduction of the SP-1200 allowed beatmakers to experiment further, but within what we now see as a really restricted realm of techniques. They had to be creative, and they really had to play the beats out, not arrange them neatly in rows on a screen. If you can't see it, you've got to feel it. And a bit later Akai's MPC series allowed them to take it even further, playing it all out with pressure-sensitive pads, low- and high-pass filter, making the sounds really sing, but still playing it all out by hand. In my opinion many of the very best hip-hop beats are from the '90s and were generally made with an MPC 60.
Good article on pause tapes if interested: daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2019/04/pause-tape-production-feature
@@dustybeijing If I may add, they (DJs) also used to literally scratch the records with a pin in the perfect spot to make the needle jump and loop. Watched a DJ at a local (long gone Record Shop) working on samples from old records that way, and looping beats as well.
i think that when i listen to The Prodigy's first album, Experience. the busy work astounds me, such commitment
majority of music is made without looking at it
as a full-time musician that has primarily worked in tracker software for 20 years (openmpt, previously modplug), sample looping is still part of my every day life, and i always feel like a genius when i set down the loop points and it feels completely natural. quite some time ago, openmpt added a "crossfade" feature that automatically fades the start/end of a selected section into itself for looping and it's an absolute godsend for longer samples.
Simple no nonsense tutorial. Straight and to the point just how I like. Subbed
Dan you are a beast teaching tricks and ways of doing things. Im really glad you take some of your time to make these videos for us! cheers mate!!!!
Wow, this is actually how I make 60% of my sounds. I record things with a field recorder, chop up the recordings and loop them, or just one-shot. I barely use synths.
I almost only use synths. Probably will try stuff like this sometime to get out of my comfort zone!
It is a really cool and creative way to do sound design. I've always wanted to really get into recording my own sounds.
Had a project planned where I use only my own sounds, but never quite got around to it.
Recently, I've mainly been using kontakt sampled instruments and Ample Sound's guitars and basses to make more organic music.
Synth collecting gets expensive, but one shots are cheaper (especially if you make them yourself) and can get you some pretty unique sounds
Your voice is lovely. Loved watching this. I enjoy watching people use older and newer samplers of the past.
So I should do videos on Reason 4 from 2007?
I owned a lot of hardware samplers over the years, starting with the Ensonic Mirage and ending with my Emu E64...Then came Gigastudio and then Kontakt software samplers, and the world was forever changed. I have a specific memory of sampling my acoustic guitar on my old Akai S3000 and all the hours involved trying to get smooth loops.I'm so glad for current samplers like Kontakt. It is night to day from what the primitive hardware based samplers used to be.
Ken R.B. Had a mirage also
Still got the discs😂 gritty
I have four Mirages for 32 voices of 8-bit character that Kontakt doesn’t have. I’m sorry.
@@askdad3450, personally, I never liked it. Gritty maybe fine for a few sounds, but when all of your sounds are gritty, including ones that should never be like strings and horns, I found it very limiting.
@@tenthconcept , not a fan, but as long as you like it, thats all that matters. Go make some great music!
It's always interesting to think about the way technical constraints shape a piece of art. With the ability to do basically anything in a daw now, it is very fun to impose constraints on yourself to see what happens.
I'm a 20-something music and sound effects hobbyist, never touched a hardware sampler in my life, and I use this technique all the time to extend clips from Freesound that are either too short to begin with, or only have one little snippet that's actually usable. The DAW I use has all these sample looping features built in, and it seemed a natural choice for that sort of task, so I had no idea this was a lost art or that most DAWs didn't have that built in! But then, I use Renoise, which is well-known for its oldschool roots. This video made me appreciate Renoise all the more!
I worked at guitar center for a while and we had a keyboard that would let you sample anything and edit it right there on the thing. You could do it for 256 custom sets of sound banks with a different sound for every key. I was amazed by that thing lol I love doing virtual instruments with my midi keyboard, but I've never tried making my own sounds.
Had that A3000 myself, and very well spec'd for the money it was to. Nice crunchy FX! Also previously had an S1000 and a nice Roland S550.. Don't forget that
when RAM was limited you could do things like play a 33rpm record at 45rpm to get the sample in quicker and take up less valuable space and then pitch it down..! Ah, those were the days....
I used to do sound design for sound systems used in model trains. I had next to no space to work with (I think a megabyte) for somewhere over 250 sounds in each model. Steam whistles and diesel horns could take hours to get to loop smoothly -- especially the steam whistles that had multiple chimes (think 3 or 5 huge flutes blown and overblown by steam). I used Cool Edit (which has grown into Adobe Audition) instead of Sound Forge, but the capabilities and functions were very similar. I got quite good at it, and when I do work with samples, I still do it basically the same way -- slow, steady, and small.
less than a year later than the A3000 , the Korg electribe sampler came out and made it all easier . although I still put my samples into FL studio and pitched them up an octave to save space . it was amazing the compression they used , you could fit your whole sample bank into 4Mb along with midi settings and programming .
Are you crazy? The Electribe ES-1 had the worst sample editing and management of any sampler I have owned, including the A3000, Akais and E-Mus. The A3000 is a beast which is deceptively fast to use despite it not having a waveform display (which the ES-1 did not have either). I still have and use my second one as a sample based synth. The ES-1 has a funky sequencer - it’s worth a few bob just for the x0x style programming, but it’s no sampler. Best viewed as a nice sequencer with a very limited sample playback device attached, imo. It did not sound good to me, so I sold it. I kept an ER-1, though, which is basically the same machine but with drum synth parts instead. Get an electribe ES/ER/EM just for the sequencer if you see one cheap…
@@ozzy3ml I never used it for the editing part , I can see that would be a minus . I would edit in sound forge and sample in . Did solo sets with the ES-1 as the core or the set up . Even had a simmons drum kit triggering off it . great lil beast , for sure it had its limits , most of which disappeared with the ESX
this is one of those kinds of videos i've been searching for, along with articles, for months. i've always wanted to do this since 1999 but didn't know where to start. this technique of music production definitely can yield amazing results with extremely limited amounts of data. and a lot more that i could talk in depth on. thank you for having this video up to remind me that people still think this form of audio art is great.
Really miss my Ensoniq ASR-10R, finding zero crossing and the realistic sound getting noticed. Horn section stabs, etc.
Ahh the memories of looping and sequencing on my eps16+! I remember upgrading to an asr10 and eventually finding recycle had a function that would edit, chop, and send the file to my asr via midi. Slow but not as slow as the tedious task of playing by ear alone.
Granular and wavetable synthesis are nice extensions on the looping idea, and additive synthesis can take this even further. Really nice trip down memory road though :)
Agreed!
Agree I haven't thought about soundforge since windows 95.
I don't understand why retailers brag about how large their samples are in terms of file size? I am constantly trying to save space on my hard drive and having smaller sample libraries and instruments is a huge bonus.
There are some ROMplers that I tend to avoid using because it takes so long (a couple of seconds) to load up each patch. It might have been even slower in the old days, but it was remarkable how an instrument could be squeezed into a tiny file size with careful trimming and looping.
I did a lot of sample editing & looping for my Akai S2000 back in the 90s which could only max out at 32MB. When I switched to a soft sampler SapleTank I still utilized looping. For both I used Bias Peak for editing and it was tricky to get a clean looped sample. DSP Quattro on the Mac was good at crossfade sample looping. Now I'm on a PC and still looking for a good waveform editor for SampleTank but I can't find one.
Still in love with my Emu Ultra, and yes looping well is a time consuming art but when you want to use vintage gear it’s essential.
One of my mentors had an E-Mu Ultra, or whatever the keyboard version was called, and had created a sample library that was unreal! That was such a valuable tool!
Yeah and the reason the ultra still rocks is the filters. And the modulation matrix, you can assign a huge number of modulators to any source, I use my emu often as a multi oscillator synth. You can stack and detune upto 64 oscillators to a single key and use continuous controllers to shape the amp and filters adsr also each sample(oscillator) can be any pitch and sound. It’s the ultimate reese machine.
I still do this all the time :) - and I also switched from the Yamaha A4000 and A5000 to software, but still very often use small samples with loops and envelopes like you show here - nice video by the way!
I use one-shots all the time in my Vospi tracks. I love them.
Some people even do it unknowingly :) using certain Serum patches, for example.
The sound of that is very familiar to someone who grew on 90's pop music, which would be me. Some of the artist knew about all the features Dan've described and were delighted to create unusual sound instead of trying to recreate the source faithfully; the limitation became a stylistical choice and even an imprint of an era.
Thanks for touching on this subject, comes in handy now with the whole resurgence of oldskool samplers
That whole ending section I was struggling between closing my eyes and listening to the music or voice or information or opening my eyes and follow what you were doing. Wow, very well done. Thank you sir.
Excellent video Dan. I think you nailed the idea of 'The lost art of looping'.
This is amazing! As a sound design grad student, we need to loop sounds to implement them in wwise, which is hard as hell in standard DAW’s. Thanks for this one!!
Just did that myself attending school for Bachelor of Science Degree in Audio Production courses. We did 1-3 sec one-shots and 15-30 loops of ambience. foley recoring.... all in Pro Tools and Logic X...so much fun. I'm pretty sure that's the path i am taking aftergraduation. Sound design has always fascinated me.
@@djelbert23 Would you mind answering an in experienced Logic X user's question? Does logic have the audio editing features (in sound forge) Dan mentioned in the video? I'm wondering what else I would need to do this kind of thing. Like that Falcon software? Or can logic do all that?
In FL Studio you can do this using Edison which is a stock effect plugin to edit audio, I do it all the time, i’m pretty sure it can also be made on other DAWs like Ableton Live
Gotta respect a clean and carefully kept sample library! Yet more proof that more technology doesn't necessarily mean better design. Great video.
I hear you. I work in sound effects with *stereo* files and zooming right in (Nuendo in my case; I do have - and paid for Reaper but on my setup I checked with pink and found coming out my mains: TC Konnekt 48, the low suffered much. I had to solve this by choosing outputs farther down the "hierarchy" which brought my low end back) again, zooming in as far as possible makes this quite a chore. When I do 'design' pads I split the file somewhere in the middle at a perfect zero crossing, make sure my DAW isn't using it's built in fades, take the "B" side over ahead of the "A" side and cross fade them. Voila! The perfect loop.
Good old donation ware Wavosaur has pretty much the same workflow. Loads up VST effects and has algorithms etc.
Apart from the 'aged' Borland interface it's not a bad piece of kit for making loops - but instrument sample patches as well.
SFZ files anyone???
this takes me back - using an even older program called GoldWave on Win 3.1 and Fastracker II looping samples in DOS
TRITON ftw!
wierdly i still do allot of this kind of looping in renoise... sweet mercy i wish that thing had a version of that loop tuner... it would actualy change my life!
Same here, I mostly use VSTi's but sometimes I like to render them to samples and loop 'em so I can use the sample fx!
these kinds of sample libraries are the reason hardware workstation synthesizers still exist. And if I get one, I'm not really paying for the keyboard itself, but mainly for the library that's been made over decade to be easily and intuitively playable by a keyboard player.
To load fast, and even if not sounding 100% realistic, will be easily crafted with simple ADSR curves and a bit of reverb into what you want... one can always worry about the details later, but when composing, you just need the idea of the sound that's good enough that it translates to your composition.
No need to worry about key switching to get the correct bowing direction on your first violins... I'm not trying to replace an orchestra here, just trying to compose stuff an I want some simple orchestral color thank you very much! :D
Sound Forge and my beefed up Yamaha A3000 served me well for years! I am still always impressed how easy it is now, to slice up a sample and midi map it across a keyboard (literally one mouse click in Ableton, for example)
This is just like what I was doing with MED/OctaMED on the Amiga to write countless songs in the early 90s. I made my own musical instruments from mixing, editing, or synthesizing samples.
I like Ableton's external editor feature. Allows you to set a favourite editor to use to make edits.
Paul Chabot what is external editor? couldn’t find info on youtube. could you please explain what is it this external editor?
great video, programs like sound forge are still integral to my work flow creating sample based instruments and hip-hop looping for use in Reaper.
Great work! You are a great tutor and I always like the choice of music, you use as examples.
I loved that sampler, Still got mine, and only break it out occasionally for creating soundscapes, because the fx processors in it are absolutely awesome for sound design even by today’s standards. Really easy to use as well.
I love the clarity of your explanations. You're very articulate!
I used to own that sampler! Very flexible, easy to upgrade, and replaced my Akai S1000. Ended up using shortcircuit and sold the Yamaha, but I think I will be going back to hardware soon enough. The touchscreen Akai live looks the business, but I might be happy with a slightly earlier model .
I remember doing similar stuff on the ol Commodore Amiga using ProTracker and OctaMed. Quite good software for it's time.
Same here! Demoscene and trackers. Tell us about the looping, yeah 😅
Nice! Nothing like novelty, ingenuity, technology and creativity combined!
1:07 I guess _Right click > Glue items_ would be faster if you want to edit samples in Reaper. Can't pick the path or filename though, so you'll have to find it in the project directory.
The larger point - that DAWs and audio editors are optimized for different workflows - remains.
Oh, the nostalgia : -) I started out doing this on a Roland S-330 and then later an ESI-32. Now I use the TX16Wx VST sampler in Reaper although creating loops like this is something I've not done in a long time. Watching this vid makes me want to do it again.
Dear Dan,
First of all, you have a new sub!
Now, I just want to say that given your knowledge and your experience, your persona, the way that its projected from your videos, seems so humble and totally not self centered... which is rare in real life, let alone on youtube :-)
I wish I knew about Soundforge's looping feature back when I was doing tracker music.
Another great video. Thanks for sharing Dan!
I always like seeing people's different approaches to sampling, and I really like the carefully curated minimalism you describe here. Inspires me to sample my acoustic. I think I tend to over-complicate sampling processes (Sample every note, at every level, perfect ideal recreation, etc.) and miss some of the much more minimalist and creative approaches that can create new instruments.
Cheers
Dan Worrall uploads a video to a topic I'm only very remotely interested in.
I watch the video.
The video is interesting af and brings a lot inspiration to me.
Thanks, Dan! 💜
Yay! A3000! I still have mine, and I still use it, but only as a sample library. I should probably buy a good library plugin, but I can't be bothered. the Yamaha still works.
Thats why i use soundforge since 90s. Best waveform presentation. Lots of tools you Need
I still use this method until this day, i sample some of my VST preset to 1 wav hit and layer them with some synths it adds a lot with less processing power needed.
great video! a3000 ,esi-32, cubase 2.8 and sound forge was all I used in the 90's. Times have changed
amazing vid! an amazing example of whats possible with this format is any of the romplers from back in the day, i swear my jv-2080 puts out some of the most amazing sounds in my whole collection.
That reminds me of loop points in FL Studio. Some people put it on their bass sounds, since they can be too short sometimes.
Graut exactly the way how i use it
Speaking of hardware samplers, I saw some people on another video commenting that they used to speed up their vinyl player and slow it down on the sampler so they could save a few seconds of sample space.
You could also do that within the sampler: pitch up, resample, then pitch back down. But you lose high frequencies of course, as you effectively end up with a lower samplerate.
Always happy to see a new video from you!
You got yourself a new member!
Excellent way of explaining, I really enjoyed it.
Indeed, midi sample transfer was eh, an option. I used it once or twice on the old S950 I remember. Took ages.
Best video on sampling on all of UA-cam!!!! also that patch is heavenly!
Ah, happy memories of trying to remove clicks when looping on my old Roland W30 sampler/workstation! Lovely vid. Thanks.
Yo this video is great. Straight to the point. No need to fast foward! Good job man!
@Dan Worrall on Reaper once you trim and fade the audio clip just select the item and glue it, this will create a new audio file with out destructively changing the original file ✌🏽
Thanks. But what if you want to destructively change the original file?
@@DanWorrall No problem, personally I don't think it would really matter at that point, you already have a new one once you have glued the item anyways 🤷🏽♂️, plus you always have the orinal to start again from, in case you want to back track.
Your harmonics samples sounded amazing in that UVI patch!
I used Rx& or Goldwave to edit my recordings. But I'm old enough to remember Acid Pro 3.0.
I have a copy of it on my windows 10 64 bit pc
Awsome video. I learned to loop this way on my ASR10 in the mid 90's
Video keeps on giving Dan, thank you. Any looping tools better than Soundforge in 2023?
Ah, that's taken me back to the joys of my Akai S2000, linked to an ancient Mac via SCSI, using MESA... having previously spent years doing everything via the front panel (and having got to the point where I knew the sample editing menus so well that I knew it was 3 across, 13 down or whatever to the loop edit page, and then when I got a sampler with a bigger display I was much slower as you needed to check a lot of things visually instead of it being pure muscle memory.
(Y) Learned something new. About a decade ago I used SF to edit bell samples for a production soundbank. I still use SF for editing samples.
Ah, Random Access Memory Lane. My Akai s900 is still on a high shelf in the basement, a place of honor. In those days having a 3.5 inch disk drive was like having the whole world at your fingertips. And we hadn't even heard of waveform visualizations, but we had a big scroll wheel and were happy we had it!
I might actually make rack space for an s900 if I had one! I borrowed a s950 for a while back in the day: lovely crunchy drum sounds :)
Takes me back to the Amiga tracker days (though I used ScreamTracker on PC) where looping samples like this was pretty much like doing it on a hardware sampler, having to input the loop start and end point locations as pure byte offsets
Having to work with trying to leveling the volume on the end fade of a cymbal crash to make it loop better is fun
Amiga forever!
Beautiful video, brings back so many good memories.
My friend had a Yamaha sampler.
He loved it.
I had Akai s3000xl.
Eventually bought Akai 6000.
I miss that work flow.
Assigning cot off to pitch bend etc.
My channel is all about live looping. I still have my Akai S5000 with the big display and.. wait for it.. 40mb of ram! Woohoo! Still works hehe.
I'm still in awe at being able to record audio. An Atari 1040 with an Akai S900 kept me going for years.
Mind you, I still edit the audio as if 1gig cost £1000 (which it did).
Good old Soundforge.... I've got a really old version from way before when Sony took over for a short stint. Wonder if i could still upgrade!?!
A short stint of about ten years! I've tended to skip versions when upgrading over the years, but that might be pushing your luck. Try it and let me know... ;)
@@DanWorrall actually.... *I asked the question* my 2008 upgrade version is still eligible to upgrade to the latest!! Winner!
Excellent!
i guess it depends on how you make music...i still use a pre-sony version of sf and im really happy reaper lets me set it up as my external editor. theres things i can do really fast in sf that reaper just doesnt do...someone said limitation can be a good thing; theres something symbiotic in how mixing down a stem frees both system resources and human resources ;) im learning to be destructive and limiting my alternatives. but i still use an old dos tracker for stuff and record into an asr10 for no provable reason...what do i know.
Great video, interesting to hear some body talking about old school sampling and how things used to be, takes me mack to my Akai s01 and S2800 days :-) :-)
Yeah... I've still got my Echo Ranger too!
Back in our day, E-Mu - Emax were the hw samplers of choice.
I like Reaper. Easilly the best DAW. But I too cut my teeth on Soundforge, though sadly my version is now, no longer supported and Soundforge isn't cheap. I do miss it so much, a great editing tool.
Redmatica’s software would automatically create smoothly looping points for you. It could create crossfades or also use resynthesis if needed to create the perfect looping points. I keep an old iMac just to run Autosampler.
Those were the days, sir. I relate
Did this as well back in early 2000 with Sound Forge 6 for my Alesis QS7, it played back samples burned in 8 MB PCMCIA cards. The fun part was mapping the samples in Alesis own Sound Bridge software, writing down how far stretch each note would be, then send the sample to burn in the cards.... that would take a while.
Is this really a lost art though? I do it all the time with instruments in Ableton or for sound effects in Sound Forge.
Dan where is your promised video about LCR panning with no issues? I wait it!
I may start a quest to find the real dan ..but I fear I will have to learn c++
Good video. My SY99 came with a generous 0.5 Mb sample Ram. It could be expanded adding another 5 boards to 3Mb at 152 GBP per board. I couldn't live without SoundForge.
I remember how luxurious it felt to have 4MB of RAM in my Soundblaster AWE-64 soundcard and how you could use Cool Edit/Sound forge/Goldwave for trimming and looping in order to cram an entire GM soundset (128 instruments) into a 4MB soundfont. The pianos always sounded very plinky plonky, but at the time it felt like wizardry. I am full of admiration for early sample manglers who had much less RAM and no visual feedback of the waveforms.
This took me back! I used to use SoundForge with a couple of A3000s (with the output expansion boards) into a 32 channel Allen & Heath mixer. Later I managed to get a JP8000 and that was it. Still a trance producer 20+ years later :)
Thank you for all of the very thoughtfully done and informative videos. I was wondering what reverb you like the best. I noticed that you had sparkverb loaded. I have been auditioning many free and demo algorithmic and convolution reverbs (flux's verb v3 being at the top end of what I could consider). What have you found to be the most natural sounding (especially at very long times) or the most musical versatile that I could consider? Thank you for any suggestions. And thank you for making such great videos.
Sparkverb can be nice on synth parts, as can Valhalla Vintage Verb. Also use Valhalla Plate and UVI Plate a lot. FabFilter Pro-R gets a lot of use, especially for small room, early reflection type settings. I used to use the Lexicon PCM plugins a lot, but increasingly find myself picking one of the above instead.
@@DanWorrall Thank you very much - I have really been enjoying trying/comparing all of these different reverbs (I had previously not really appreciated how different reverbs can have such different strengths). It's been great! One question: is that you narrating the sparkverb overview video?
Yes
@@DanWorrall I don't know if you're involved with UVI beyond doing videos, but I very much enjoy your informational videos and I think they are lucky (or smart) to have you involved in doing them. Thank you
This is fantastic content. Just figuring out how to write .WAV loop points is difficult now, much less the finesse in doing it well. Thank you.
I looped for hours on the Emu Emax II. It was fun. Still got this machine. Great rack sampler. Terrible small display :o)
I wish a great sample editor in Cubase.
Thanks Ableton for greatly enhance the Sampling's and Looping Art and made it so easy to use 🙏
This throws me back! When I was using hardware samplers, I used WavAkai98 to select samples to send to my trusty S2800i over SMIDI. And you're right, it's very slow. But this video also reminded me of how much I loved Sound Forge. It was fun improperly looping something to make drum sounds and other oddness, or the satisfaction of looping something correctly and thinking "effing finally, now another keygroup." Thanks for the trip down memory lane, though I still do have some hardware samplers. I never forgot. It's fun to loop, imho.
This brings back memories of many, many hours of looping and chopping waveforms. Good times!
I did this just last night when a sampled synth note I found was too short, I like using alternating loop direction on more unusual sounds to add to their uniqueness.