Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Why Sampling Synthesizers Have Become So Popular

By Tim Benedict

The advent of the synthesizer has revolutionized the creation of music. Since its inception, the synthesizer has developed into a much more useful and complex device than that which it started out as. These innovative instruments are capable of producing nearly all musical sounds. Several variations, including the sampling synthesizer, are available.

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.

Sampling synthesizers store sounds as pre-recorded samples rather than sounds recorded in real-time and use less processing power than a digital synthesizers. This makes them a much better instrument than either an analog or digital synthesizer.

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.

Initially, the sampling synthesizer was incredibly pricey. With the introduction of models such as the Roland D50, the instrument began to become more mainstream and obtainable for the non-wealthy musician. The Korg M1 is another good example, particularly in that the workstation concept was here first seen.

A great early example of a mainstream artist utilizing the sampling synthesizer is Stevie Wonder. The chirping bird sample which was the primary sound of his song "The First Garden" was created with this instrument. It was used to record other parts of one of his 1976 records called "Secret Life of Plants", in which the aforementioned song was released, also.

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