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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Sampling Synthesizers - Their History And Growth

By Tim Benedict

A synthesizer is an instrument that can generate just about any kind of sound which makes it quite easy for a musician to create new, exciting music. Since its invention, the synthesizer has been a boon for musicians and development over the years has led to more advanced and sophisticated models. The sampling synthesizer is one such model.

A sampling synthesizer is a type of synthesizer that stores sound samples in RAM and then plays each sound back based on how an instrument is configured. Unlike a general synthesizer, it does not produce sounds from scratch. The sampling synthesizer first starts with sounds being recorded from multiple recordings or with samples of different natural or instrumental sounds.

A sampling synthesizer (or sample based synthesizer) works differently from the additive or subtractive synthesis used in other synthesizers. subtractive synthesizers filter square or sawtooth waves to generate their sounds. Additive synthesizers assemble their sounds by adding together different sine waves.

The effectiveness of a sampling synthesizer is dependent upon the volume of the sample sounds it has since it uses these sound samples to reproduce sounds of natural instruments. The high price of computer memory greatly limited the number of sounds that a sampling synthesizer held when it was first developed, but over the years, as memory chips have become less and less expensive, the amount of sounds samples increased so that now there is much greater flexibility and quality to the instrument.

One of the advantages of a sampled synthesizer is that it requires less processing power than a conventional synthesizer. This is due to the fact that the sampler only needs to reproduce its stored samples while a conventional synthesizer must calculate its notes in real time.

The sampling synthesizer has clear benefits over analog synths as well. Whereas an analog model must have a larger chip set in order to produce multiple waveforms at once, the sampling synthesizer does not. Thus, the polyphonic quality tends to be significantly greater in the sampling synthesizer.

When the sampling synthesizer was first developed, the price of memory and processing power made it very expensive. Improving technology enabled the introduction of comparatively affordable samplers like the Roland D50 and the Korg M1 in the late eighties. The Korg M1 also introduced the music workstation concept.

An example of early sample based synthesis is found on Stevie Wonders album "Secret Life of Plants" recorded in 1976. He used the synthesizer to make melodies from recorded natural sounds. In the tune "the first garden", Wonder used sampled bird chirps as the lead instrument in the song.

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