What kind of sampler...?

March 18, 2005 12:11 PM

Say you played synth semi-competently with a band. And say your responsibilities were to play fuzzy, low-end bass melodies, but occasionally you wanted to trigger noisy textural sounds simultaneously and manipulate them with effects--would you run your synth through a rackmount sampler, play with two synths, or buy a tabletop device (ex: Electribe) to add texture?

To give you an idea of some sounds/bands we're influenced by:

Devo, Pere Ubu, Man or Astroman?, Can, Wolf eyes, Brainiac, Fennesz, My Bloody Valentine, Theoretical Girls, Swell Maps, .....

Could I make samples in Soundforge, dump them into the Electribe and then trigger them with the synth keys (Juno 106)? I'm actually a guitarist posing as a synth player so excuse my ignorance. I'd like to make the synth as interesting as possible without relying on huge rackmount effects or lugging around a ton of dorky, complicated gear. The Electribe seems pretty powerful for a small sampler, plus it would be nice to occasionally have sequenced parts the drummer could ape. Hopefully this isn't too confusing, and any suggestions (or descriptions of how you've seen it done before) would be great....

posted by dhoyt to media & arts (10 comments total)

i see no problem with a setup such as that.

what you'll want to make sure of is that the electribe can work with zones (ie, allows you to specify which keys you want to map to samples in the keyboards) -- it'd do no good to have a sample playing across the entire keyboard, when you weren't expecting it.

on the downside, you will still be having sound being output from the juno (which, if i remember right, has a pretty sparse midi implementation, so it's unlikely you'll be able to say "don't send this key to the internal sound generation, but only via midi") you *could* solve this by purchasing a controller, and use that to trigger either just the electribe, or the electribe and the juno, although i'd be inclined to forget about triggering the electribe from the juno at all and just using the built in pads on that device.

personally, i'd go the two synth route, because you really don't want to be playing the juno through a controller (as imho, that's an absolute waste of a lovely analog board). for the second synth, you could buy something like a casio at goodwill and run it through some decent effects -- if you're going to run like a multi-effects on stuff anyways, i personally feel that the original tone really doesn't matter a heck of a lot -- not enough that you're gonna want to spend big bucks on a second synth.

plus playing with two synths looks cooler, and hell, if you're in a band, a non-zero percentage of your job is spectacle.
posted by fishfucker at 12:45 PM on March 18, 2005

although reading the last paragraph of your [mi] i'd say go with the electribe. I'm not sure whether you'll be able to digitally dump the samples to the electribe -- i'm inclined to say no, but i haven't had a ton of experience with those boxes. you may be able to use midi sample dump format, which works pretty well.
posted by fishfucker at 12:48 PM on March 18, 2005

I'd just use a mixer to decide when the Juno or the Electribe were heard... Sub-mix the keyboards and take an output from you personal diddy mixer to the PA...
posted by benzo8 at 12:49 PM on March 18, 2005

(BTW, you can grab a manual for the Juno here which will help with the MIDI set-up between it and the Electribe, if yours has been lost in the last twenty years...)
posted by benzo8 at 12:52 PM on March 18, 2005

Great input, guys. Thanks.

Could you recommend a good digital synth with a sampler built in? It would be ideal have everything consolidated. I realize the pricetag would be considerably higher (as with Kurzweils, et al..)
posted by dhoyt at 1:32 PM on March 18, 2005

You are looking at a lot more money - something like the Korg Triton.

If I were you (which I'm not), I'd build a little rack. You can pick up something like an Akai 3000XL for a couple of hundred bucks on eBay for sampling, use the Juno as a controller keyboard, or get a second controller keyboard (starting from about $50) and have the charm and expandability of a system you've put together yourself, with (as has been mentioned) a gorgeous sounding true-analog synth at the heart...
posted by benzo8 at 1:46 PM on March 18, 2005

If I were in your shoes, I'd leave the Juno front and center, do nothing but play bass lines on it, and buy something else to control the samples. It sounds like you want to minimize stage clutter; how about using a Roland SPD-S? It's a sampler with built in effects and a loop mode; you can mount it on a cymbal stand, put it next to your keyboard, and whack its big rubber pads whenever you want to trigger one of your texture sounds. Or, if you want to be even more unobtrusive, get one of these foot controllers and plug it into a rack sampler - you can set it up so the buttons send note-on messages, so you can leave all the gear on the ground and trigger samples with your feet.
posted by Mars Saxman at 5:16 PM on March 18, 2005

No idea if you can get ahold of one, but consider an Oberheim Matrix-1000 as a source for your textures. A fine analog device.
posted by Goofyy at 8:12 PM on March 18, 2005

i have a matrix myself and i concur.

of course, the oberheim sound is more of a organ -- it doesn't have the punch of a juno (which might make it a good partner).

it's not particularly awesome at sample-y type stuff -- you're looking mostly 800 of so patches of pads, maybe 100 leads, and about 100 patches of analog noise stuff.

still, i love mine.

you can probably pick one up for around $300 on ebay.
posted by fishfucker at 5:18 PM on March 19, 2005

rackmount samplers can also be picked up pretty cheaply on ebay. In fact, I'd recommend *against* buying new -- just about any piece of gear you could want, someone's probably selling used at a substanial discount.
posted by fishfucker at 5:21 PM on March 19, 2005