Making Music
  Computer Music Software and Hardware

Velocity switching

But simply having a different sample for each note is not always realistic enough. With most acoustic instruments, the timbre of a note changes with its volume. Louder notes tend to have more high harmonics and often a faster attack time. So we could go another mile and sample each note at several volume levels. On playback, the MIDI velocity determines which sample is played.

This process is known as velocity switching and is set up by selecting velocity points so notes with a velocity below, say, 80 will trigger one particular sample and notes with velocities above 80 will trigger another. This feature works particularly well with drums because their tone changes quite noticeably the harder they are hit harder.

You can do wild and wacky things with velocity switching such as assigning totally different samples to each velocity value. Try it with drum samples so that each time you press a key with a different pressure you'll get a different drum sound.

Velocity crossfading

Velocity crossfading uses a feature found in many samplers called reverse sensitivity or reverse velocity which reverses the way velocity normally works so the softer you play, the louder the output.

To use this feature, you'd set up a string sample, for example, with reverse sensitivity and combine it with a piano sample. When you play with average pressure you'll hear both piano and strings, when you play hard you'll hear mainly piano and when you play soft you'll hear mainly strings.

Layering and stacking

Layering or stacking is simply assigning different samples to the same key to create mega combination sounds. Of course, you can combine this with velocity tricks, too, so different velocity levels play different sets of samples.

Key splitting and zones

Samplers have many features to help you set up and organise samples. One is the creation of zones, sometimes also know as key splitting. It simply involves dividing the keyboard into several sections or zones, say into octaves, and assigning a different set of samples to each zone. This is useful in performance as it enables you to play several sounds from one keyboard but it's not such an essential feature if samples are being triggered on a computer via MIDI. However, many samplers use the zone concept to help with the organisation of layers and the setting of velocity levels.

As well as splitting the key range into discrete zones, many samplers allow you to overlap the zones. You could split a keyboard into three sections; the lower playing strings, the upper playing piano and the middle section playing both piano and strings.

Extras

Once upon a time if you had all the above features in your sampler you'd be a very happy bunny. Nowadays, however, most samplers have many extras such as built-in filters and effects, LFOs and envelopes. In fact, many have essentially all the features of a full-blown synthesiser except the sound is generated by samples rather than oscillators.

But the main strength of a sampler remains its ability to convincingly reproduce acoustic instruments and natural sounds, and the flexibility of its programming makes it an invaluable instrument in the studio.

For more info... Sampler lists: http://www.zicweb.com/scripts/get.php?i=15&lg=us http://machines.hyperreal.org/winky/0033.html?Winky Sampling resources: http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/Recording/Sampling/