A sampler is a audio recording device that can alter the sound it has recorded, samplers can be used to completely alter the sound or recording you put into it. The sampler has many features that you can alter, some examples of this are: attack time, decay and release time to name a few. A sampler can also turn the recording into an instrument if assigned to a keyboard, the recording will meet the pitch of the note that you play on the keyboard. An example of a sampler working is if you get a basic string instrument playing an E4 note. You could then place that audio in a sampler and assign its root key to E4, which is the same as the original note played. You would then be able to play this sample anywhere on the keyboard and it will automatically play the string instruments at the frequency and pitch of the note you played on the MIDI keyboard. There are unlimited possibilities with what you can do with a sampler, you can make the audio sound completely different from what it sounded like originally.
In the Mad Max: brothers in arms song composed by Junkie XL you can hear a very interesting sound that was created through a sampler. Junkie XL put an audio file of a string into a sampler, he then trimmed the audio to get rid of parts he didn’t want. But then he added a feature called alternate loop to the sample. Alternate Loop allows the audio to play as normal until it hits a line that ,once the audio hits the line it will reflect off of it. This means the sample will be moving back and forth constantly. But if you add reverb to this sample as well as some delay the frequency’s and tones will start to pile up on top of each over. This makes a crazy eerie sound as the individual tones of the string start to merge together. I loved this technique so much I have decided to use it in my composition, so when you hear some weird creepy strings in my composition so this is how I made them creepy strings
When you play the sample at a higher frequency the audio will speed up, this is because the wave length will be shorter giving you less time to hear the sound. It is the exact opposite for lower frequencies. With a lower frequency the wave length will be larger, giving you more time to listen to the audio and ultimately slowing the sound down. The sampler I used for my project was not physical hardware but instead it was from logic’s digital plug-in.
Reading List
Korff, C., 2015. Spotlight-hardware samplers. [online] Dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net. Available at: <https://dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net/styles/news_large/s3/imagelibrary/S/Spotlight_0315_01-vYRVHTN6pHgfTvblgvlD1MEGlGsMcLE_.jpg> [Accessed 19 May 2021].