Music Engineers: What's a sampler do exactly?

Factual Questions
1

Getting tired of using Acid Pro on my computer and looking for other ways a making beats, I’m wondering just what does a sampling machine do?
I hear it all the time how it’s used by Dre and other Rap artists. Is it basically a loop machine? Or can you do other stuff with it too?

Thanx

2

A sampler is a hardware or software based device that takes sound samples (like a WAV file for instance) and allows you to trigger the sound via a keyboard. It revolutionized studio and home recording (along with MIDI) by allowing a proficient keyboard player to play any instrument realistically. All of my work is done with samplers which you can hear at this site:

www.mp3.com/danbrown

3
      • A sequencer “attaches” a sound file to a MIDI note or hardware actuator. So you hit that button, you get that sound.
  • To sample one sound and then synthesize it to all the notes up and down a (piano-style) keyboard, you need a synthesizer. The synth changes the note of the sound lower or higher. A sequencer is not a synthesizer, but it is possible to buy the two together.
  • If you have a Soundblaster card (Dolby 5.1 OEM costs ~$35 US now) you can use soundfonts, which are basically like custom MIDI banks. If you have sequencing software that supports soundfonts, you can program soundfont bank switches just like MIDI bank switches (Cakewalk Home Studio & Sonar are two that do). To make your own Soundfonts, you use the free Vienna soundfont studio software from Emu/Creative. It’s complicated, I downloaded it because I thought I’d have to use it, but then found that there were roughly 100,000 soundfonts on the web for free, of basically everything. Soundfonts do support both single-play and looping of sound files, though. So if you hold a keyboard key down, teh sound can be set to play once, or play over and over as long as you hold the key down.
  • You can use soft-synths instead of a Soundblaster card to play soundfonts, but soft-synths suffer from lag when playing live and Soundblasters don’t–at all. SBL’s certainly aren’t the best soundcards out there, but they’re cheap and for soundfonts they rule. People with much more expensive setups often keep an SBL on one PC, just for when they need to use soundfonts.
    ~
4

Before I get accused of not knowing what I’m talking about, I’ve been using sampling and drum machines before PCs had Windows (I’m 29 yrs. old and produced several amatuer rap tracks)… OK, on we go…

Acid is essentially a high-tech sampler - on steriods. Acid does what many of us wished samplers could do back in the late 80’s.

Samplers simply take digitized audio and allow you to play it back at whim. No offense to DougC, but don’t get confused about samplers and synths. Synths make sounds from nothing. Samplers without input from either a disk or audio input make no sound on their own. Playing a sampled piano has nothing to do with synth. Sampled instruments are just a single note being played faster or slower (for realism, they usually sample each octave or even more split up than that). If I boot up my sampling keyboard (Ensoniq EPS), it can’t make any sounds on its own. I have to either load them, or sample them from some other source (Mic in, Line in). Samplers also don’t automatically stretch sounds to match beats. Yeah, that’s right, back in the day we had to fine tune our beats to match the tempo. Want to change the tempo after programming a bunch of beats? Have fun retuning all your samples to stay on tempo.

I don’t want to start a war, but with the right AUDIO card you can get such low buffer times that you can’t tell (ok, maybe barely tell) there’s a delay between hitting a key (or turning a knob) and hearing it from the PC.

Notice I didn’t say SOUND card. Sound cards have MIDI sounds built in, but you’re pretty limited to those sounds. Audio cards (see M-Audio) are made for professional audio applications, NOT games or home theaters. There is a difference.

Check out Reason 2.0 does Hip-Hop for a GREAT software solution for sampling and sound synthesis emulation.

5

No, a sequencer is a piece of software, or hardware, that allows you to record and play back MIDI data. When you hit the play button in, say, Digital Performer all you get is MIDI sent out to your MIDI outs. What you do with that data (play a DX7 synth, control lighting, etc.) is largely irrelevent to the sequencer itself.

As PumiceT wrote, synths and samplers are two different things, though to be fair, wavetable synthesizers are a little bit of both.

In my opinion, for studio work, there is no real use for a hardware sampler anymore. Software allows you much more freedom, flexibility, and ease of use for a fraction of the cost of a hardware unit. If you are using a good quality audio interface, then sound quality should not be an issue either.