Unit 35 - Sound Creation and Manipulation - LO3 - Sam Hayes

Using Samplers to Create Tracks

My Piece called "Squid Unk":
Sam Hayes - Squid Unk

This is my final piece with the red tracks showing the sampled tracks that I put into a sampler and played into my track with a keyboard. The blue tracks are the sample sounds I've put into my track straight from the audio that I've cut and edited manually and the green tracks are my synthesizer tracks that I inputted using MIDI. The white track is my example of using patch bays to create a sound in reason and use it as a slave device for logic pro.
I have arranged my song to have a developing structure with a changing melody in the second part going back to the first melody after; showing an A0, B, A1 structure. I made sure the texture of my track increased throughout to show development, with parts sometimes cutting out to vary dynamics more.

The sampler I used in this unit was the EXS24 as in this, I would be able to set a sound I've recorded as either all the notes at different pitches, or as specific notes on my keyboard to be able to lay my keyboard as specific as I want. The first sound I put into the sampler was a kick drum hit I recorded. From here I could then modulate the sound any way that I wanted, including adding effects, effecting envelopers to change how the attack, decay, sustain and release effects the sound. I wouldn't change this that much for a kick drum hit though as it is an instant sound and I'd want it to hit straight away.

I already had some samples that I had recorded before that I used in my piece, but as I wanted more samples I could use, my peers and I worked together to record some sounds in the stairwell in our college to be able to have some interesting reverberant sounds. We recorded multiple tracks of each recording at different levels of the stairwell, with one microphone recording the direct sound right next to it, and the other either on the same level or one or two levels down. This meant we had lots of interesting sounds and effects on our recordings that you wouldn't get in other places.

Selection and Regions

I also recorded some samples of a drum kit on my own and I manually searched through the tracks to find the best sounds. When I found a sound I liked, I would cut the audio file right before the sound and cut it off right after the tail end of the sound cut out. This meant that I would have the full sound without clipping from the sound or any sounds before. I then converted those regions to audio files so I could out them into my sampler and have them as inputs on my keyboard.

Editing Parameters

When I put my sounds into the EXS24 sampler, I could then use its editing parameters to change my sounds. I didn't feel the need to change much on my sampled sounds as they were mostly drum tracks and I wanted them to sound fairly real, but on my hi-hat sample, I used a lowpass filter at 12bB to cut out some frequencies I didn't want. I also kept the sound polyphonic with 16 voices to make sure that no natural panning was lost and I also panned my shaker audio slightly as to free up some space in the centre of my mix. I also edited all of the volumes of my tracks so the layers sounded right together with no individual tracks popping out too much over the others, so I could get my desired texture and timbre.

Acoustic Theory

Acoustic theory comes into the editing of my samples as every sound is made up of combinations of sine waves meaning that all the sounds I recorded from the kicks I sampled to the shaker I entered and edited manually will be combinations of these sign waves in different patterns, all with their own fundamental frequency and overtones. I was able to edit this though by using an EQ on the sampled tracks as to cut out any frequencies that weren't harmonic and didn't sound right in the recording.

Sample Start and End Points

I also took some audio tracks I liked such as a shaker and put them into my piece and cut them and edited them specifically through my piece, copying and pasting them where I wanted them throughout my piece using the alt key and dragging the sounds to where I wanted to place them. This is an example of editing sample start and end points and sample looping.

Loops

I used loops in my piece using the looping function in Logic by clicking the top right corner of my recorded parts and dragged them to be as long as I needed. This meant I could loop my sounds accurately and perfectly in time with my piece without having to loop every part manually. I would also be able to loop any sample recordings as well as my synths.

Creating Instruments

Samplers have the ability to use the samples you've recorded and create full instruments out of them. This can be done through multi-sampling, which is used so that you can set specific keys on your MIDI keyboard to certain sounds so that you can create your own custom sampler instrument. To keep all this sampler audio collected neatly, you would want to organise all your audio files together and set them into a specific folder so that you can load up your sampler instrument at anytime from your sampler's preset menu.
Logic's samplers will often have the ability to change velocity layer, which means that it can adapt your sound depending on how hard you press the key when using a MIDI keyboard. This means you can play your samples as soft or as hard as you want.
A one-shot sample is a sample that isn't looped and is one sound on its own that is triggered when a MIDI keyboard is played. Examples of one shot samples may be a snare drum or kick drum, like what I've used in my song.
I wanted to keep all of my sample files organised so I kept them all in the same place in the same folder. This meant when creating my instruments, it meant that I could find the samples I wanted quickly.

My Examples

Here are two examples of my use of sampling in my track. The Hi-Hat Tap sample is an example of me inputting an audio recording into the EXS24 sampler and inputting into my song using a MIDI keyboard. The Shaker audio sample is an example of my edited recorded audio that has been imported into my track and then copied and looped to where I want it.



Hi-Hat Tap Sample Example


Shaker Sample Audio Example