I was sixteen when I bought my first sampler. So that would have been 1987. I’d done a film when I was 7 years old (so in 1978) and my parents said I could have my fee when I was sixteen. I had decided I wanted to try and become a film composer and a friend of my Dad’s who was a film composer was giving up to become a lorry driver (portent). So he was selling his beloved Kurzweil K250XP sampler expander. What he was selling it for conveniently tallied exactly with what my fee was which I was led to believe amounted to £1,500.
Ferris Bueller had beaten me to having a sampler in your bedroom by a year, but his was an EMU Emulator II and didn’t have the orchestral capabilities of my one. So… so there.
Other than the awesome orchestral samples tt had about 8 seconds of RAM based mono-sampling time I think at about 12bit depth. What my parent’s friend had failed to tell me was that there was no way of actually saving any samples I made unless I bought an apple mac. I was fresh out of movie fees so it is nuts to think that I used to pull up a sequence on my Atari and re-sample everything I had used every time I loaded a song. I did this until getting my next sampler an Emu ESI-64 in 1997. Ten years of re-sampling madness. I guess maybe a contributing factor to me becoming au-fait with transients and tight sample editing. My muscle memory on that mammoth would have made a court stenographer out of me in another life.
So i’ve been doing this a while, and what seemed like a really cool thing to buy back in 1987 proved to be a shrewd investment in my future, not only because it gave me my own form of music-tech education (I’d forgone a formal college education) but also because of it’s limitations. The only way around such strict hinderance was to lower a bucket into the well of inventiveness and hack my way through my very early career.
Over the years I have gathered a bunch of hacks, tricks and strategies – usually based around a gadget of some sort – to get me through a sample project successfully. Whilst I’m certain we won’t be making samples like this for long I think I’ll always pride myself on the hand-made approach. It’s kept my attention and enthusiasm for 37 years and the idea of forgoing such endeavours for a series of prompts takes away the magic really. Grabbing some fluctuations in air pressure out of the ether and turning them into a musical instrument of my invention and making.
