It could do this by beginning with basic waveforms like sawtooth, triangle, or square waves and performing mathematical operations on them to alter their shapes. Instead, it creates sound more dynamically. The Subtractor Polyphonic Synthesizer from Reason is described as an analog synthesizer, although it processes sound digitally.Ī synthesizer, if you use this word in the strictest sense, doesn’t have a huge memory bank of samples. But in other sources, an analog synthesizer is a digital device that emulates good old fashioned analog synthesis in an attempt to get some of the “warm” sounds that analog synthesis provides. In some sources, an analog synthesizer is a device that uses analog circuits to generate sound electronically. Even the term analog synthesizer can be deceiving. Figure 6.18 The NN-XT sampler from Reason Others are in special sampler file formats that are compressed and automatically installable. Some contain raw audio WAV or AIFF files which have to be mapped individually to keys.
Sample libraries come in a variety of formats.
#Mainstage 3 sampler load in samples install#
You can create your own entirely new sound bank, or you can purchase additional sound libraries and install them (depending on the features offered by your sampler). It’s possible to assign whatever sound file you want to the notes on the keyboard. Samplers can also be used for sounds that aren’t necessarily recreations of traditional instruments. The same note has a different timbre and amplitude envelope depending on the velocity with which it is played, so having more than one sample for a note results in more realistic sounds. For example, a single note can be represented by three samples where notes are played at three different velocities – high, medium, and low. There can be more than one audio sample associated with a single note, also.
Higher and lower notes can be stretched more without our minding it, since our ears are less sensitive in these areas. The pitch can’t be stretched too far, however, without eventually distorting the timbre and amplitude envelope of the note such that the note no longer sounds like the instrument and frequency it’s supposed to be. The sampler is able to use a single sample for multiple notes by pitch-shifting the sample up or down by an appropriate number of semitones. The notes covered by a single audio sample constitute a zone. In a method called multisampling, one audio sample can be used to create the sound of a number of neighboring ones. You can see that there are WAV files for piano notes, but there isn’t a WAV file for every single note on the keyboard. The NN-XT sampler from Reason is pictured in Figure 6.18. Because the sounds played are actual recordings of musical instruments, they sound realistic. When you play a MIDI data stream via a sampler, these samples are pulled out of memory and played – a C on a piano, an F on a cello, or whatever is asked for in the MIDI messages. A repertoire of samples stored in memory is called a sample bank. These clips are called samples (a different use from this term, to be distinguished from individual digital audio samples).
#Mainstage 3 sampler load in samples software#
Figure 6.17 Types of synthesizersĪ sampler is a hardware or software device that can store large numbers of sound clips for different notes played on different instruments.
Our usage of the term is diagrammed in Figure 6.17. Some sources distinguish between samplers and synthesizers, defining the latter as devices that use subtractive, additive AM, FM, or some other method of synthesis as opposed to having recourse to stored “banks” of samples. We find it convenient to define synthesizer as any hardware or software system that generates sound electronically based on user input.
How “good” or “authentic” those instruments sound all comes down to the synthesizer and the way it creates sounds in response to the messages you’ve recorded. These messages have a standard way of being interpreted, so you have some assurance that your MIDI file generates a similar performance no matter where it’s played in the sense that the instruments played are standardized. As we’ve emphasized from the beginning, MIDI is a symbolic encoding of messages.
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