How To Create Your Own Sample-Based Virtual Instruments for Composition and Sound Design

1. Course Overview: Welcome to the complete beginners guide to sampling. This course for musicians of all levels is a comprehensive guides or audio sampling and virtual instrument creation for composition and Sound Design. My name is Steve lifted and I'll be your instructor. I've been creating music electronically for over 30 years, and during that time I've gained experience designing sounds and composing and producing music using a variety of software and hardware samplers. The course contains over two hours of video lessons and as in-depth and detailed explanations of using sample engines and how the different elements work together. How to take any sound and make it playable across your midi keyboard. Why and how creating your own sampled instruments can really help define your own unique sound. How to use noise reduction, waveform editing loops, round robins and velocity layers to make ultra realistic sound in virtual instruments. How to use envelopes, low-frequency oscillators and filters to modulate your instruments. And how to layer sounds and add effects such as delay and reverb to make your sounds more interesting. During the course, you'll see every step taken in the creation of four unique sample-based instruments. This is a deep dive into all of the common elements of instrument creation and sound design using samplers, whether you are brand new to sampling or an experienced sound designer, beat maker or producer. This course will help you to really understand how to construct exactly the sound you're looking for and make super realistic sample-based virtual instruments from scratch. We'll be using the built-in samples within Logic Pro X. Throughout the course. I've included a short introduction to Native Instruments contact at the end to show how you can apply the concepts you've learned to any sampler and know precisely how to use it to get the sound you need for your compositions. So join in and learn the art of sound design for music production using sampling to create any sound you can imagine. 2. 1 Introduction: Hi there, my name is Steve method and this course is gonna be an Introduction to Sampling. Now, in this course we're going to look at what sampling is and why you would choose to use it. We didn't look at exactly how sampling works. We can find out how to get samples, including recording our own. We're going to take the samples and maintenance of playable instruments and will actually be not just talking about it, but actually making insurance. So we can play along as the course progresses. We're going look at sound design techniques and how we use modulation and envelopes, filters and effects to create interesting sounds from the samples we got from the sounds of the report. And then we're going to look at how we can make more interesting and realistic instruments using round robins and velocity mayors, stuck in sounds on top of each other to make a really interesting. Now throughout the course with Libya creating a whole range of sampler instruments. And some of those instruments have been used to create the trap you can hear playing in the background now. 3. Prerequisites: So what do you need to get the most out of this course? While you're certainly going to need a computer and you'll need some kind of digital audio workstation. Throughout this course, I'll be using logic, but this will work in any digital audio workstation. I will be using the logic specific samplers. But really the idea of the course is to teach you the concepts of sampling and how sampling works. And that should translate very easily on to whichever sampling engine you choose to use. There are good sample engines built into most of the popular DAWs. As I said, I'll be using logic, but I know that able to turn and Cubase and others like it has got very similar and fully functional engines within them. Right at the end we're going to look at different sample engine, one called contact, which is separate to your digital audio workstation. And just really just to show you how the concepts and the techniques I've shown you throughout the course runs can translate into different Sampling engine. I would definitely recommend that you listen to the course on headphones. Certainly you're going to want headphones or very good speakers to create silence and to do any kind of sound design. Ready to hear the nuances and to hear things like noise in the samples. Finally, I would recommend that you use some kind of midi controller keyboard is absolutely possible to create samples and to play your samples even without the use of a midi controller keyboard. But it will make things much, much easier for you. 4. How sampling works: So what exactly is sampling and why would you choose to use it? Well, if you've taken my previous course, which is an introduction to synthesis and sound design. You'll probably recognize this diagram on here. This is the common architecture of a synthesizer. And we can see that we have an oscillator, filters, envelopes, low-frequency oscillators and amplifiers, and all these things combine to create sound. Now the sound is actually generated at the oscillator right at the beginning of the synthesizer. And it's triggered typically by a midi controller keyboard or a keyboard on a, on a harbor synthesizer. Sampling simply replaces the oscillator with audio samples. So it takes actual audio files that have been recorded, typically from either an instrument or some other kind of sound. And uses that as a sound source rather than the oscillator that you would normally get inside a synthesizer. But the rest of the items, the rest of the architecture is actually very, very similar. And certainly if you're well-versed with using synthesizers, you'll find that sampling has gotten a lot of common ground. That briefly explains how sampling works, but why would you use it in the first place? Well, opens up a whole realm of possibilities for you to be able to create instruments that you can play on your midi controller keyboard. It could be an instrument that perhaps that you don't own or perhaps there's one that you haven't learned yet. And as long as you can get a single note of that instrument and you really can play on your keyboard. It's also often used with hardware synthesisers, perhaps older analog hardware synthesizers that don't allow you to store presets. It allows us to create very realistic sounding instruments. And so quite often you'll, you'll find sample libraries online. Vst instruments that you can use to play, play very realistic kind of orchestral sounds or guitars bases, other kinds of instruments that can be hyper-realistic. It can be used for very complex sound design to create unique instruments for your own compositions. Perhaps taking several sounds and synthesisers and filters and amplifiers and LFOs and combining them together to make very interesting and unique sounds for your composition. Or perhaps it's just for some found sounds that you've made. You really can make an instrument from any noise that you can record. 5. Getting samples: So the first question to answer is, where do we get our samples from? But by far, the easiest way to get samples is to go and find samples that somebody else has recorded and they're prepared to license them to you. So there are a number of places online where you can go and get samples. Some are free and some are commercial. They're paid for. Usually pay for subscriptions or you pay, pay per sample or per sample pack. For free sounds, we have freesound.org, the Free Music Archive, Pixabay. There are many, many others online. Just look for, for royalty free samples. And you're looking for samples that have got some sort of creative commons license. On the commercial side of things, there are a number of different options. Here are some for you to go check out. Spliced.com is very popular. This is a subscription service. You have new cloud.com, loop masters.com, ADSR, sounds.com. And these were a mixture of a subscription services or you can go and buy sample packs from these places. The other option and certainly the one that I'd recommend is to learn to record the samples yourself this way you can know that your sounds are absolutely unique. Now, it doesn't take a great deal to go and record sounds. Of course you can use a proper mike setup, maybe just a simple condenser mike or a dynamic mic of some kind. You might have something already. You might prefer to go for a really complex Mike setups with close mikes and room Mike's and get very complex about it. Then you might want to start recording different articulations and round robins, and we'll talk about some of that a bit later. But actually, it really doesn't take much to record a sound. Now, you could plug-in instrument later on we'll be playing with some samples that were I plugged in it plugged a guitar just straight into my audio interface and just recorded my guitar. You could use your phone. So your phones have got a very good voice recorder, whether there's an Android phone or an iPhone. And that's perfectly, perfectly acceptable to use. And the other option is to use something that's a bit more designed for the job. So something like this, which is a just a simple field recorder. These go from very, very cheap like this one, too much more expensive devices. But there are a whole number of ways to record audio. And for the purposes of this course, if you just want to follow along, probably the laptop or the phone that you're watching this on has got a microphone and some sort of voice recording software built into it. And that'll be perfectly fine for now. 6. Our first instrument: Logic Quick Sampler: Okay, so here we are in logic. I've just got a completely empty project open. I have not done anything to it yet. What we're gonna do is we're going to create our first sample instruments. So what we'll do is there are some samplers built into logic. We're gonna be using two of them on this course. So the first one we're going to use is something called the quick sampler. And it's about basic sampler, but, but really is quite, quite feature-rich. The great advantage of, the great advantage of quick sampler is, is really, really quick too, to create an instrument. And then the instruments that you create with quick sampler can be used in the more complex sampler later on. So to open up quick sample, I'm just gonna go down here. And from this drop-down list, at the moment, by default is loaded the electric piano. From this list here, I'm just going to go down and choose quick sampler from this, from this drop-down list here. And this will open quick sampler here. So let me, let me just zoom in a little bit here so you can see it a bit better. So this is the quick sampler. There's probably a bunch of things in there. They look quite familiar to you if you are used to working with synthesisers. Really, as I say, a sample engine is very, very similar to a synthesizer. The big difference being how the sound is generated. In a traditional synthesizer, we would use oscillators or perhaps a wave table to create that initial sound source. Then we'd use the filters, which you can see here, the amplifier, the envelopes, and perhaps some low-frequency oscillators, LFOs to really shake that sound. And that's exactly what we're gonna do here. We're going to start off with a really, really simple instrument. And actually we're going to record it ourselves. Like I said, this is my by far my preferred way of getting the samples, which I'm going to use for sound design. So handily or handily for us, we have a recorder built into, into quick sampler. So if I click up the top here and click on recorder, I will get this record button will appear in the middle of the interface. Now, what you need to do here is by default there is no input setup. So what you'll need to do is just drop this down and choose your input. Now you can either input directly from your audio interface or from some other microphone you've got, you've got plugged in. Or you can input from a bus. So you might route some other instruments through sample from that. We're going to, I'm just going to choose input two, which is where I've got the microphone. And this is so simple. Now I've got a large diaphragm condenser mic in front me. It's not a very expensive condenser mic, but it's absolutely enough to record the samples we're going to do so all I'm gonna do is I'm going to stop talking. I'm going to play a sound into this microphone and we're going to capture it in quick sampler. And we're going to turn that into an instrument. An easy one to do here is to use a wine glass and a pencil. Just simply hold the wine glass up and hit it once with a pencil. I was actually on my way to the kitchen to get a wine glass. And I remember that in the cupboard back from years ago. In the back of the cupboard, there was this thing called a singing bowl. So this is a brass bowl. Hopefully you can see that there is a brass bowl and it's got a wooden mallet with it. And if I don't touch the ball and hit it with the mallets, let me get this so you can see it. If I hit this, it brings up a very similar, obviously slightly more metallic sound, but very similar sound to that of hitting a wine glass or something like that. So to do this and all I need to do is just press Record button in the middle. I'm just going to hit one note with the, with the mallet onto the, onto this singing bowl here and let it play out. So a couple of things. One is to make sure that the sound is completely finished. So you've got all the tale of any reverb is all completely over before you press the stop button. The other one, and this sounds obvious, but it's to make sure that there's no other sound because even your breathing or tapping the table, I'm moving the mouse on the computer. Whatever other sounds may be coming from outside the room. They're gonna be picked up and they're gonna be in your sample. And as we start playing this instrument, you might hear the footsteps of somebody above. You sneeze and in the background, that's not ideal. So make sure your environment is nice and quiet. When you're ready. Just press the record button. Okay. You could, you could notice that the logic was actually quite clever there. So I press the record button. It took me a second or so to actually strike on the brass bowl. But it was able to detect that, that transient. So it's able to detect the the kind of background noise beforehand and then know exactly when i'd, I'd hit the ball. So what do we have now? So in here we can see the waveform of the, of the ring in bulk. I can zoom in by clicking these things and just scrolling with my mouse. I can kind of zoom in on this waveform and you can see it's quite a complex thing. And this is one of the things that really is a marked difference between traditional oscillator based synthesis and sampling. And that is that there is no way that, or, well, no, there's no way that we could create a waveform like this. Using traditional, traditional oscillators, we might be able to get some approximation of it through the use of filters and LFOs and envelopes, et cetera, and effects. But straight from the outset, the sound that we're starting with is a very, very complex waveform. So the zoom controls allow you to zoom in and out with the scroll. Well, we'll leave it there for now. That's fine. The, I guess the thing to do is just to play the instruments. So what's happened is the sample engines recorded the sample. And now if I simply play my midi keyboard, I'll be able to hear that note pitched across the whole keyboard. There we go. That's your first instrument created. It really is that simple. It's called quicksand for, and it's got the right name. Now, there are a number of things that we can do with this now, but this really is just, I'm a very simple, very quick instrument and you can see how simple it is to, to create your first instrument, to record a simple sound and be able to play down the track. Now, I could play single-dose colds. And we are. So what we can do next is we'll look at some of the other controls that we got inside the logic quick sampler. 7. Waveform and amplifier settings: Okay, So just looking around the quick sampler then, we'll, I'll point out a few things to you here. The first thing to note is that we are in classic mode here. I'll explain the other most to you shortly, but were in classic mode here. So just make sure that that is selected. Here's our waveform here. And we can, we've seen that we can zoom in and out. You'll notice here that this got this thing here. So C-sharp four, and here the root key is C-sharp four. There's actually $0.23 above C-sharp four. Now, assent is a fraction of a semitone. There are a $0.100 in a semitone, so it's very slightly, so almost a quarter of a semitone above C-sharp four. Now, this has been detected by logic. So it's actually detected that the sound of this bowl that I used for a sampling our instrument is actually a C-sharp four. So this is the famous C-sharp four on the keyboard, and it's matched those sounds up. So he's been able to detect what the, what the root key is. You'll see breaches again later in the course. Along here we have our playback direction so I can play in forward or reverse. So in forward and in reverse. So one thing that's shown us is that our sample is rather low. So we couldn't use this to trim down our sample. So just trucking on this white arrow at the end here, the right hand arrow, we can drag this down to something more reasonable. We can also move the style so we could start the sample, everyone. Let's just hear that reversed again or with the with the Sam Shelton. Okay. So we can hear that's a much more reasonable length sound. Now. Now, you'll notice that I can't change it back to play in a forward direction right now because this bar has popped up over the top, this is telling me, this is, you can see this moving as I move these things. This enables me to go in and type precise values into here. To get rid of this bar, just click this cross here, and I'm back here so I can change this back to play in a forward direction. I could also change the status of my sample. So I might want to just cut into it somewhat and I can just start here. I'm missing out the beginning, that first transient of the sample. This can be really quite useful sometimes. And again, we'll cover this as we create more instruments in this course, you'll see that we've moved the start position of our samples is, is quite a common thing to do. We can also fade it by moving this thing on the top-left and we could be, could fade out. Now, obviously this instrument has already gotten a kind of natural fade out built into it. But if we were to have an instrument that played a continuous amplitude or a play that a continuous volume, we might want to fade in and out too, just to make the, make it a little less harsh. We can also achieve very similar thing with the envelope or with the amplifier envelope. Which let's move on to have a look at the amplifier envelope. So down in the bottom right-hand side here we have the amplifier envelope. This by default is an ADSR envelope. So this stands for attack, decay, sustain, and release. And by adjusting things within this graph here, we can adjust the amplitude of the sound over time, so the volume of the sound over time. We can, for instance, if we were to increase the attack, it would, it would mean that the volume would slowly ramp up at the beginning of the of the sound offload, press the key, and then continue on as normal, normal course. So with the amplitude or with the, sorry, but the attack set at 0, it renews straight away. If I was to increase that attack slightly, we don't get that initial harsh transient and the kind of gradually moving to the sound or gradually, gradually increase the volume. Now this is quite a short sound, so we're not going to get the full effect of that, but we certainly will use the amplitude or the amplifier envelope later on inside the amplifier. Then we also have polyphony, so that's the number of voices that we can play concurrently. So at the moment this is set to 16, which is the default means that I can play 16 bells all at the same time. We've got pan, which is simply R stereo, stereo field. So we can move it to the left and to the right. And then we have the master volume here, as you'd expect in the amplifier section of any synthesizer. Next, then we have some pitch. So we could, we can tune our, our instruments style. Logic has done a very good job of identifying exactly the pitch of this note. But there are definitely instances that we want to just fine tune the pitch. We can also add some glides. So Let's have a look at the pitch phone so I can, I can de-tune things. I don't want, wants to do that. For instance, using an LFO or something. We'll look at that again, Lisa. So I've got my cool space and this goes in semitones. And then I'll put my phone picture. She's incentives listed before I sent is 100th of a semitone. We have glide, which tells you expect would basically synthesized as a sound in every pitch between the two keys that you press. And the gliders is setting the number of milliseconds it takes to get from one pitch to another. So if I set this to around 1 thousand, that's about a second between pitches. Okay? So that is the pitch section. 8. Filter controls: Then switch on a filter. So if you've used any kind of synthesizer, any kind of EQ, you'll understand these filters. There's a number of filters built into the quick sampler. By default, it's a 12th decibel per octave low-pass filter. And as I start to play, you'll hear how this would typically use a low-pass filter to remove some of the Harsha, higher frequencies. The filter off, the filter on. Okay, so we can hear the sum of the high-frequency has been removed. We have residents. Residents just adds a little boost just before the, just before the cutoff. This exactly the same as any of the synthesizer. How we can get all sorts of interesting noises of that. Let's just set those back to there and then there's some dry. So there's some kind of quite subtle. But boats overdrive on the filter. And then the other one worth noting here is the key scale. So what this will do is it will adjust the filter depending on where you're playing on the keyboard. So it will shift the cutoff of the filter relative to the key that you're playing. 9. LFO controls: Finally then we have the LFO. So we use it LFO on a sample engineering in exactly the same way as we would do in a normal synthesiser. So we have two LFOs and they can have a number of different wave forms, as you can see here, sideways triangles. So wave, square waves and we can have some randomized as well or randomly generated signals. So this will give us the frequency of the LFO, how fast or slow the Ellis, the LFO is oscillating. We can also tie that to if, if we, if we click this little note here, it goes yellow. This will now tied to the, to the tempo which is set within, within Logic. My tempo currently is set to 110 beats per minute. So when I click this, you'll notice that it's changed from hurts to note values. So eight, 16s, 32s, all the way down to very, very long notes to very, very short notes. So we'll leave that around 16, the 16th note. What we'll do is we'll just attach the LFO to something to see exactly how that works. Now the way we do that is down here. So we might want to set the target to be the, let's see. The picture is a nice simple one. So we can say that we want to adjust the pitch by $0.10. So that's added a little bit of vibrato. Let me just wrap that up a little bit. So just to kind of an extreme value. So you get some better idea of how that's working. So we go from really extreme and maybe that's something that you want to do for the sound that you're trying to design, right down to something a little, a little bit more subtle, just to add a small vibrato effect. And that's quite nice. We can also set a fading. So we can say, how long should the sound played before the LFO starts? We're going to use this later to add a little bit of vibrato to an instrument. But we're just gonna let the, let the sound play for a couple of seconds or seconds, second half, and then introduce some vibrato. And this is quite a common thing, particularly amongst the string players, whether the note will sound and then gradually they'll introduce some, some vibrato on the string. Okay, so that just about covers the different modulation types within the, within the quick sampler. The last thing to look out then in this section, is to look at the one-shot and the slice. 10. One shots: So the one shot is not going to really work with that much in this course. But the one-shot means that every time I press a key, moment in classic mode, when I press a key, soon as I come off the key, the sound stops according to the ADSR envelope or the amplitude envelope that I have set on the bottom right here with one shortly will always play to the end. Even when I take my finger off the key there. So you can see the sound is continuing to ring out and it will always, always play to the end of the sample. Now, this is really useful for drum sounds. So this is a common use for it is to use on drum sounds. Because you, That's a typical kind of instrument where if you hit a drum, it will still ring. Our symbol is still ring out even if you go hit it again, so you don't want to go. Clipping that sounds short. Necessarily. You might want to continue hitting it. 11. Using filters, LFOs and effects: So let's, let's use the LFO's and the filters to do some sound design with our simple belt, though it's quite a useful instrument right now. There's a lot more that we can do with it is simply a sound source. So let's, let's use our LFO and let's maybe change the target of our LFO. But first of all, let's set our filter. So okay, So we've, we can use a low-pass filter here. Maybe we can use the LFO to do something fancy with that. So let's, let's change that to be our filter cutoff. And you can see here that this is the amount that we assigned to our LFO is shown with this kind of orange outline around the filter cutoff here. So if I press a note now, It's moving the filter cutoff with the LFO as, as, as the note place. I'm just automating that for us. You can really think of an LFO is just something that's automated new adjusted adults. So I could easily achieve that effect just by clicking with my mouse and wiggling it as I, as I press a note. But one, that's not very accurate and two is means I can only play with one hand. So we're using the LFO to automate that. We might want to automate many things the same time. But here we can do this. We're going to change this to be, sorry, I clicked the wrong thing. So bipolar, we're gonna change it to be I've run the lifespan and our depressor. Nope, I get this much more interesting. Okay, so thinking back to our synthesisers, the, the, one of the bits on the signal path chain for a synthesizers effects now, commonly, when you use a software synthesizer has got effects built in quite a lot in the graphics built in. But of course you can add your own on just inside logic or inside your DAW. Now, the logic samplers don't have any effects built-in. It really is just what you can see here in the quick sampler. But that doesn't stop us from adding effects afterwards. So some samplers like contact have some quite complex and effects built-in inside, inside logic, but we're just going to add effects in the usual way. So let's, for example, maybe let's add a reverb. So I'm going to use the Valhalla super-massive, which is absolutely incredible. Free reverb plugin. This is going to just on my, on my sample instrument here. Let's just pick something from here. Let's pick the Horsehead nebula. This effect is now being played, um, or will affect any sounds that I placed through the Pixar plus. So let's listen to this. Okay? So you can see that we've gone from a simple bringing, bringing to this. So you really can achieve a lot with sampling. And we're going to take this even further later on in the course. But it really is a fantastic tool for sound design and a real way that you can do. You can make your music, make your composition stand up by using unique sounds that only you have. In the final section on kinda quick sampler. Then we're going to have a look at how we can use loops and slice loops up to, to create sounds using loops. 12. Slicing loops and samples: Okay, so the last thing to look out inside the quick sample is a really great feature that enables you to take audio file, slice them up and assign different slices with the audio file to your keyboard. This is a really great technique for taking longer audio files are a little snippet of music, perhaps some music that you've written, slice and dice up and being able to play that in interesting ways. So as I mentioned earlier, there are lots of places to go get loops online. I would definitely recommend writing your own loops and try it out with here. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to use the loops from within logic. So in logical and press O on the keyboard or click on this little loop icon, which is, sorry, which is up here. This is going to open up this loop inspector for me. Then I can simply drag either an audio file or a loop from the roof and splitter into, into the quick sampler. So I'm going to choose this liquid disco auto wire guitar. I'm going to drag that in here. When I go to drag something in here, you'll notice I've got these two boxes, pop up original and optimized. Original is going to bring it in exactly as it's recorded, optimizes, going to optimize it for loud dress and normalize it is going to search for loop points. And it's going to crop any silence from the beginning and end of the loop. Now, because I'm dragging this in from Apple Loops, I know that it's already optimized for loudness or know that there's no silence either end, I want to create my own, or I don't necessarily want to or need to search for loop points. So I'm going to drag it into here. And you'll see that it's just an audio file, right? So it's an audio file and it looks like a sample and exactly the same way as we've seen it before. Now. That sounded much more like the original, but it's just talking down on the keyboard. This is actually something that's interesting to point out, is that you'll notice that the speed of the sample, we didn't really notice it so much with the, with the bell sound. But it's very obvious here that as we use a sample, the sample engine could do one or two things as we move up and down the keyboard. Now, typically, a lot of sample end-users, this is the only way in order to play a sample or a low pitch, the sample engine will simply play the sample more slowly and this is what's happening here. So if I play low down, simply playing back the sample at a slower speed and that generates a lower pitch. And if I play at the top of the keyboard, it's playing much faster in order to generate a high pitch. Now, the logic sample is, I've got some pretty clever technology built into them. This is access using this button here. What this button will do is, it will, it will allow you to adjust the pitch but keep the speed of the sample the same. So now when I press something to the bottom, it plays at the same speed, but it's still a lower pitch than something if I played it and stop the keyboard. Which is very, very clever, is not so good. In my experience at extreme ends. You don't wanna be too far off the original pitch and we see how it will see later how we get around that. But the one way to get around it at least. But the, but it's certainly very clever and the buffer. Now why are we using a single sample or we can only use a single audio file. So for now we'll leave that switched on and that allows us to get a pretty cool effect from an audio file. Anyway, the point in this section is to look at how we can play individual sections of that audio file now so to do that, we're going to click on this button up here, says slice. This is going to give us a slightly different view overall GFR. And the most obvious thing here is that we can see these markers here, which are the slice points in each slice is assigned to a key. So we've got C1, C-sharp, D-sharp, E, 1F1, et cetera. What this means is that when I press this key, it will play this section between these two markers. So we'll play from here to here. So if I press D-sharp one is going to play that that portion. If I was to press E to I would just get that bit of the sample. We can take our samples and we can slice them up and we can map them onto the keyboard. Um, I'm gonna do it in a fairly simple way. So you can see that logic has tried its very best to put samples if I'm going to go through and just remove some of these. So I'm just going to right-click on the markers and just remove them. The ones that I don't want. So let's just try and find sensible smallest set of sensible samples. So that will move this here. All I'm doing is just trying to slice up the sound just at the moment by I, by what looks like a sensible set of wave shapes of a reasonable size. We can properly that one as well. Maybe move this one here and remove this one. And probably remove that one too. So what I've got now is across my keyboard and I've got a set of samples. One thing I'm gonna do here is just, I find it a little bit easier. Is Darren here? I've got this box here that says chromatic. I'm gonna change this just so it's all the white keys. That means I don't need to press the, the sharps and flats because it doesn't, it's not really related to pitch anymore. So it's going to always play its original pitch, but it's going to use the keyboard as a way of just being able to say your trigger this sample, trigger that sample. So when I press C one, press D1, E1, sorry, you want to press F1, G1. In fact, that one seems a bit on the server as well. So G1 now is going to trigger this sample A1 and B1. I can now play this in interesting ways. Or I've got the potential to play in interesting ways. Whether I can do that or not is a different matter. But you'll notice that every time I press a key, it restarts the sample. So if I press this a, okay, so I could play something perhaps like this. Okay, So I'm not the greatest composition ever, but you get the idea. So it's just the slice and cyclic sample. It just allows us to take a, a audio file of arbitrary length. Don't go too long. This is eight bars and allows us to kind of slice it up and then use the keyboard to play sections of that sample. Okay, before we move on, we're going to make one more instrument inside the quick sampler and look at how we can use loops. 13. Our second instrument: Loop points: Okay, so for our final session inside quick sampler, we're going to create another instrument. And this time we're going to create an instrument that plays for as long as we've got the keys held down. Now, I'm going to use this really, really battered and worse for wear Ukulele. So I've got this here. It's in the right state. Absolutely. Can't play. It doesn't matter. But is held together with stickers. I think that's the only thing holding it together. But this is one of the beauties of sampling, is that I can't play the ukulele, but if I sampled by ukulele, I can play it. I've played. And you can easily get access to sample libraries, which are all sorts of instruments from whole orchestras and orchestral sections to very expensive grand pianos on, in some of the most impressive and kind of famous recording studios in the world. I think there is a certain beauty to samples, which you play yourself. You can really, it's like having a time machine. You can go and play a sample that you played years ago and be taken back to that time in that place where he recorded that sample. And it's a lovely thing to do. And I often find that, that's instruments that are quite badly played can make some of the best samples. Now, you can never tell with a sample what it's gonna be like until you've actually created the instrument from it. So you could, you can record something. You think this is gonna sound fantastic. Drop it and it just doesn't work as a sample. So if that's happened to you or if it happens to you as you're practicing the things that we do in this course. Don't worry, okay, probably happens. I don't know, one in five times, something like that to me. You're just go to all the effort, record a thing. You'll drop it into the sample engine, which doesn't work. And for that reason I would definitely recommend using, in fact a quick sample is a great tool for this. Use it using some experimental audio file. So rather than, you'll see later, it can be quite time-consuming to record all the samples we need for a really sophisticated and complex instruments. Just record a few first and drop them. Or even one and just enter a quick sampler and just play the thing to see if it's going to work out for you. If you get if you can get the chance. Okay, So all I'm gonna do is I'm going to play this ukulele into this microphone, and the same as we did with the bowl before. And I'm going to play it quite badly, but I'm going to use it to demonstrate to you one that even a badly, badly played instruments can sound quite good. And to that, we can, how we can use loops within our sample to find loops, points within our sample just to continuously play that sample while the keys pressed down. So that's the noise doesn't stop when the sample does. So I'm going to just pop over here into the recorder mode, exactly as it did before. Choose my input, which is number two from my audio interface. That's what microphone I can see. It's picking up sound here. So I'll press Record and I'm just going to strum this a pluck 111 note a couple of times into the recorder. And there we are. So that's our recorded sound. Let's pop over to probably one shots. Easiest way to here this back. You can see it's slowed the sample down. So let's make sure we click this button here. Okay, so let's go over to classic here. So you can hear. It's not really a playable instrument. So let's put that on. We can, we can follow the tempo here, or we can set a speed. So we can just play it back at the speed that we recorded. By choosing this follows tempo here, what it does is it tries to match the tempo of the sample with the door, with the beats per minute. You've got sitting in logic, which at the moment is 110. So I'm going to uncheck that. You can see that that's pretty close to what we, what we note that we sampled. It sounds pretty good. First, firstly, I'm going to do is I'm just going to chop the end of it. So I've got a lot of extraneous noise and the end here, so I'm just going to excuse me, I'm just going to this one. The cut, the suborder while I was doing there as I was hitting the cross rate. And we'll come to that now. When I play this, if I, even if I hold the key down, it will continue to loop. Now, I can I can stop that from happening. So I could say no loop. I could I could have it loop, just go round and round and round. I bought this can do is going to play the sound all the way from the star, all the way to the end, but it hits the end, is going to go back to the start. However. Sometimes when you're creating instruments, the start of a sound that transient bit at the start of the sound is not something that you want to repeat on a loop. So within your sample or whichever sample this is, you will be able to define loop points. Let's have a look at how this works. So these blue points I get in quick sampler by dragging these kind of circular or semicircular arrows, I just define a loop point within here. So I can say that when I, when I play this, what I want to do is I'm just going to loop between here and here. So when I press my, press a key on the keyboard, it's going to play this first section. The first blue section is saying they're going to continuously play this section in the middle until I release and then screenplay the rest. So let's listen to that. And then it stops. So let's get rid of this. I'm quite okay with that. Now, there are a number of different things that we can do so we could get it to loop forward. And that makes sense for a sound like this which has got a transient on each block. We can, we could reverse it. So we could say, okay, let's, let's play the loop in reverse. We could play to the end on release. And if I increase the the release on the amplifier envelope gets in there. The reason we didn't, it didn't, although it was set to play with Lisa reasonably inherit is that the that the release part of the ADSR envelope was shorten the release section. So by lengthen and that means we always get to hear the end of the end of the sample when this is set. Another thing we can do is set the store Turner. And so what this is going to do is going to play backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards or forwards inside that loop section like this. So in this particular sound that sounds a bit daft to be honest. But actually that's pretty useful if you're creating pad sounds actually the, it can add some variety inside your loops. So for example, something like a violin, a bowed instruments. If you choose a loop section that is just a kind of steadily bowed violin and you're not getting that beginning byte of the bow or the tail off at the end, then actually it sounds exactly the same as foreigners and reverse. So you could just add a little bit of variety inside your loop. In our instance, we're going to just keep a for loop. And as I say, this means that whenever I hold a note down, it's going to continuously play that loop until I let go of the key. And then because I've got this thing set to say Play to end on release. It will play the end of the notes. Okay, So that's pretty good. It's quite a realistic sounding instrument. But it is always playing to the n. So perhaps with them on that, if I uncheck that, it's just going to play out for the rest of the ADSR envelope somewhere around here. Okay, and just to finish this off, just because we can, Let's add some effects to this again, I'll go for the supermassive and we'll just choose a preset from here. So let's go and have a look. It's like a median reverb, bright room. That's probably okay. Okay. Really simple, very badly played ukulele. We've got really quiet. I wouldn't even call that use y. So that was a really quite a nice sound. So just by adding some looping and adding a bit of reverb to that. We've got to the kind of instrument that would be incredibly difficult, if not almost impossible to create just using a normal kind of analog synthesizer. Okay, so that's it for, for quick sampler. In the next section we're going to look at the logic sampler used to record EXS24. But now called logic sample, it's an overall in the last year or so. So we'll dive into that and we'll see the extra features of that Scott to enable us to create even more realistic and complex sounds. 14. Noise reduction: So we finished with quick sampler for now. What we're going to look at in this section is the logic sampler. Now, logic samplers are much more sophisticated sampler. And it's a similar system inside things like Ableton Live, which has got the simpler and the sampler. In logic. It's the quick sampler. And the sampler sampler used to be called EXS24. As I mentioned previously, it's now just called Sampler, which makes it a little bit confusing. But we will see that it's got many, many more features which allow us to create much more realistic and varied instruments. Things like being able to play different audio files, different audio faster, different keys on the keyboard. To be able to play things like round robins, and be able to look at velocity layer. So playing different samples depending on how hard we hit the keys or how fast we hit the keys. So we're going to start with some samples. Now what I've done is I have recorded my guitar. And all I've done is I've recorded six notes of the guitar here, and I've just played every open string. I just plugged the guitar directly into my audio interface. And so we have a sample file which sounds a bit like this. So as I said, played every open string and I've let every street, every string just kind of bring out until it decayed away to nothing. Okay, That's repeated across all the strings. Haven't bothered to play them all to you. But very simple, very clean sounding guitar effects or anything like that on it. So sampler works slightly differently and that we, what we really want to do is load multiple audio files into the sampler. So the first thing that we'll need to do is we'll need to chop up the audio file that we've got. Now, logics got a few things built into it as have other doors. But before we do that, there's something that we just need to deal with that is this noise. Now, if you're wearing headphones, you're here, there's much better than if you're not. But right at the beginning of sample, in-between, everything is, there is noise which just simply comes from the guitar. It's a, a pretty low static noises. You can hardly hear it right now. But one of the challenges we have with sampling is with noise. So although when I play a single note, you're hardly hear the noise at all. As I start to build up and play more and more notes on my keyboard, that noise are really, really start to build up. Because it's not just a note that's playing, It's the noise as well. Now there are a few solutions to this. There's various bits of software available that will help us to reduce that noise. I'm going to show you a few of those now. So the first of these is completely free. It's a program called Audacity, and this is a really, really full featured wave table editor. Now this is quite a bit of a learning curve to it, but it is free. And it will allow you to really go and edit in some details. Any audio file. You can go and get that from our Udacity team to org. There's a slightly more advanced version from Adobe cord, Adobe Audition. It's a very similar thing as a wave table editor. You can, again, you can do lots and lots of things in this waveform editor, if you like. You can do lots of, lots of things. Sid all derby audition the same as you can with Audacity. One of the features being noise reduction. There is some specifics offers as well that's available for noise reduction. One of those are very popular. One is called RxNorm by isotope. This is a piece of software specifically designed to remove noise, background noise from audio. Very sophisticated software. And again, a bit of a learning curve. For this course. I'm only be using one by cord, browse free by clever grand, I didn't get down cleft ground.com. This is a really simple Noise Reduction tool, is really, really easy to use. That's what we're going to use to remove the noise from the audio file that we got. So again, it's really important that you do this and pay attention to it because the more notes you play, the more noise you're hearing it build up and it'll become really very noticeable. So back in logic them, to use bias-free, I will just make sure that I've selected the audio file I wanted to work on. And I will just select a little bit of noise at the beginning of the file. So let's, let's just open up the wave editor here and just make sure that we've got a bit of looping noise at the beginning. So this is just going to loop round and round and round on that, on that noise. Hopefully you can hear that. Like I say, if you've got headphones on, I'm sure you will. So I'm just going to add it as a virtual instruments. So I'm just going to add this effect here. I'm just gonna go down and choose cleft ground from here plus three rows. Friday, I'm not quite sure how you say it. This is so simple to use. So all I do is just play the noise and just press this button and hold it. And what frost-free will do, it will, it will learn the noise and it will remove it from the rest of the track. So just hold this in for a few seconds. Let it loop around a couple of times. They will learn the noise. And the noise has been removed from the track. Okay, so let's stop playing that. Let's take it out of loop mode. The next thing we need to do is we need to chop up these six nodes here. I'm going to chop them up into into separate audio files. 15. Chopping audio: So there's a few ways we could do this. We could use the snipping tool to go do this. So I could go and choose the scissors. And by holding down the command key, my cursor will turn into a pair of scissors and I can go through, and I can chop this wave form up into separate files. There are some tools that can help us with this inside, inside logic. And as I say, there are similar tools inside whatever DAW you're using. If I dropped down, this function has menu here. I can go to remove silence. It's going to pop up this window here. It's already done a pretty, pretty good job. You'll notice there's 30 regions. Don't worry about that too much right now, but I'll come and I'll explain what these other regions are later on. But in here, the most important two things are the pre attack time and a threshold. So by adjusting the threshold, just says, how quiet should it be before it starts to before chops off up. So you can see that increase the decibel. It is going to make these shorter and shorter. What I want to do is adjust this so that it's picking up the, the sounds that I want and cut inside. So anything inside the blue box is going to be kept. Anything outside of a blue box is gonna be removed. So 41 seems about right. That's looks to be chopping things up correctly. It's non-destructive so you can still drag the edges of the audio file. It will recover that. I'm also going to set the pre attack time. So I'm going to set this to around 2.5th. So let's go and let's just type this 0.5. What this is going to do is it's going to find where it thinks the beginning of the audio file is. And it's going to leave 2.5th at the beginning of the audio file. Now, this is actually really important because it is the very start of a, of a sound which is called the transient, which can make a real big difference to the sound you want. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna leave 2.5th and they get in them, they're going to adjust that to bite it to suit. At the beginning of each clip within, within sampler, that will become clear a bit later on. So let's press Okay on this and you'll see that it will chop my audio files up. And now I just need to go through and delete any bits that I don't want. I can just highlight them and delete them. So there's some little slices here where it's not pick those up quite right. 16. Preparing and exporting samples: Okay, so once we've reduced the noise and we've chopped all the samples up. The final thing that we're going to want to do is to rename each of these, each of these sections. So the way we do that in logic is to press Shift and N. And that will now allow us to rename each section. Now, try to give these sensible name so I could just export them all with guitar dash, roar, underscore 1, whatever. In each side, each one. However, if you rename your sections with sensible names, then you will find it much, much easier later on inside the sample engine to be able to identify which file, which audio files should be mapped to, which key. Not so bad right now we're going to have six audio files. We know which ones are the highest pitch or which one is the lowest pitch. But as we come on later to look at things like round robins and velocity layers. Or if you're working with many, many, many more sample files, it's not uncommon for very large sample files to perhaps even have a separate audio file for every single key of the keyboard. You will find that naming these sections, although it's quite tedious and actually can be automated in things like Reaper. But although it's quite tedious, will save you hours and Alice later on, if things don't work quite according to plan inside your, inside your sample engine. So anyway, all I'm gonna do is I'm going to name these with the name of the notes. So this is the highest pitch note here. Now this maps to a E3. So I'm just going to call this e1, E3. The next string down on a guitar is renamed them all select them all highlighted the next one down. So just shift them. And again, this one is going to be a BTU of B is the second highest string on a guitar. Hit Enter, hit the right hand arrow, shift. And again, to rename this one, the next string down is then a G and this is a G2. Hit Enter, right again. I'm going to do a D string, so this is going to be shifting. This can be a D2 and then hit Enter. And then we're going to have a. So this is gonna be A2 and A1 rather, sorry. Right hand arrow again. And the final one then is going to be what? Okay, So what I, all I need to do that is just highlight all these files. So let's just zoom a little bit here. I can just drag, highlight all of those Right-click Export as audio files. And I just go and choose a folder. And you'll see that the region named forms the file name. So I'll, what I'll end up with is a bunch of files with the current farming. So I'm just going to put them into a new folder. Click Export, and all my files will be exported. Okay, so once we're done with that, we can we'll mute this track for now and just collapse it a little bit there. It's time to bring those samples into our sample engine. 17. Our third instrument: Logic Sampler: So what we're gonna do is we'll move to track one. And we're just gonna, we're gonna load the sampler instruments. So you'll find it in here. In this section here. You'll see it's called sampler multi-sample. Not the greatest name, but it is what it is. So this will load up the sampler. You'll see this looks fairly familiar. Now one thing I'm gonna do is sometimes it can store some information in there, some settings from, from previous session. So I'm just gonna make sure I just got to here and just click on this record default. And that will make sure that everything is set back to the factory default settings. Let me just zoom in here a little bit. Hopefully you'll be able to see that a little bit more clearly. Okay, there we are. So this is the sampler. It's made of various sections. We'll go through each of them over the course of the next few minutes. But each section is you can, you can toggle them on or off. So just by hitting these yellow buttons here. So let's just collapse them all apart from the synth. So you can see in the symptom we've got a number of controls in here. So we've got the, the pitch, either tuning the course, tuning in the fine-tuning. We've got two filters. Interestingly, in the filters that we can have the filters run in series, I apply filter one and then filter two. Or we can run them in parallel and then blend between the two filters. So that's, that's a pretty interesting feature. We've then got the amplifier controls that you'd expect. The balance or the pan for moving the sound to the left and right. We've got the volume control. It this bottom section here, which we can switch on or off using this Details button, we've got a bunch of other controls. Seems like the number of voices that we want to play any one time. This is the polyphony. The glide, the pitch bend I, how many semitones we want to pitch bend by when we use the pitch wheel on our, on our keyboard and various other level controls inside there. Let's switch that off for now because the first section we're going to look at is the mapping session. This is the section that allows us to take those audio files that we've created and we've chopped up a map, those two particular keys on the keyboard. 18. Mapping samples: Let's have a look at the mapping section. This will open up this view here and we've got a keyboard across the bottom, and this is where we're going to drop our file. So the easiest way to do this is to go and grab the audio files that you've created from, from finder. And go and just drop these into here. And just, you'll notice they get bigger and smaller as you move up and down as you're dropping them in. Just make them a reasonable size. Just covering one or two notes like this. And this will allow us to move things around as we need. Now. There are a number of auto mapping tools that you can use inside sampler. I have had mixed results with them. So if you want to try them, you can go into here and you can go to Auto Map. And one that works reasonably well is auto ultimate museum pitch detection. If I click that, you'll see that that is done a reasonable job for us. The other way to do that is to just pick these up and drag them around. So what this has done is it's taken, are, let me just zoom out a little bit. So it's taken our sample files and a stretch them across the whole keyboard. So if I play a note in this section here, you can see that any notes I play between SN2 and E2 is going to play this sample. And you know, I played between G1 and b1 is going to play the a one-sample and it's going to obviously pitch shifted to the right pitch. Anyone between F2 and H2 is going to play the G2 sample, etc. And then anything that is below an F sharp one is going to play the E one sample. And anything that's above a D3, it's going to play the E three sample. Now, you'll have noticed across the bottom here, if I zoom in a little bit so we can see this. As I click these samples, it highlights a sample, but it also highlights a note on the keyboard. And this is really important. This is called the root key. This is why we take the time to name our audio files, our sample files. So you need to tell the sampler what nodes the sample was originally recorded at a, what's the original pitch of the sample? And this allows it to then pitch correct in either direction. If I play either side of that note. This is set using the root key here. So I can go and change this to be whatever I want. But as I say, I want to just go through and make sure that y1 root key is E1. For the A1 sample, the Ricky's, A1, D2, D2, etc. If that's not right, it will sound very strange. You can see actually that my guitar was slightly off pitch because the auto tune tool is actually pitched it down. Naught point, naught, $0.06. Okay, so now we have the, the samples mapped across the entire keyboard and I can play them. So that works pretty well. But one thing that you will definitely notice is there is a bit of a lag. When I hit again. You can see when I hit the key. So there's a bit of a lag between when I hit the key and when I, when I actually hear the sound or when you hear sound. Now, this is, this is because of the delay that we put at the start. So when we chopped up the audio files, we allowed 2.5th at the start of the audio file, and that'll become clear now, the way we just need to go and adjust the waveform, whether the sample starts to play. We do this inside this section here called the zone, and this is our waveform editor, if you like. So let's just try and make this a little bit bigger. If we can do that, drag it from the bottom. Okay, so we can see that if I zoom in, we can see that. Just scroll on here. Okay? So if I look at the stars of this preform, I can't seem to struggle with the zoom control a little bit, but we'll get there. We'll get there. Okay, So you can see that the sample actually starts playing here. And if I play something down here to activate this, you can see that's where the leg is. So all I need to do is just drag this in to somewhere near the start. Now, you can see that if I'd let it just chop at the beginning of the sample, I may well have losses, little bit of information that the star, and that is actually the sound of the The string being hit by the pick. And it really adds a lot of realism to the sound. If you sample a piano, you can actually hear the there's a very, very, this is a tiny amount of time. There's a very small lag between you hit Enter key on a piano and then the hammer coming up and actually hitting the string. Now, a lot of, a lot of sample libraries that I've used over lost some realism by really chopping the front of that off that little bit of transient at the beginning. By including that, certainly add some realism. But you do lose a bit of immediacy when you hit the notes. So there is always, this is why it needs to be done by you and this is why we leave a big gap. Because you need to adjust this by it because I can actually see that it probably starts around here. Definitely feel that it's not very responsive when I hit the notes. So I probably just want to cut into this a little bit, but I want to make sure that I leave some. What I've done there is kind of, it's a balancing act between the responsiveness of the instrument and the, and the realism of the sound. So I'm going to leave it about there. I'll just need to go and do the same across all the other, all the other samples. So here's y1. I'll drag it around there. It's just a matter of fiddling and play in the play in them. We've already done this one until it sounds about right. So again, we want to just drag this in to bit too much. So I'm bad. Okay. G2, this quite a long, transient. Lot of information here, but it's not very responsive. And same for B2 is quite short transit on this one anyway. And finally on E3 again. So you get the right compromise. And it really is a compromise, the right compromise between the realism of the sound and capturing that first bit of information and having it being responsive enough to play. There we are. So that's how we, how we adjust our waveforms for each sample. If I just scroll back up, we can see on here, we can see we have our guitar mapped across the keyboard. Now. You'll see that those are vast amounts of keyboard being covered by a single sample here and at the top and the bottom. And certainly a better thing to do would be to record many, many more nodes. So I just recorded the open strings just to keep it nice and simple for this course, if you are going to actually produce a sample library which you are planning to perhaps sell or pass on to friends or even using your own tracks. I would definitely recommend recording many, many more samples. It's not always necessary to record a sample for every single note. But probably, maybe to go up in fifths or something like that and just make sure that you've got many, many more samples if you're planning to play a particularly high or particularly low. Now in this case, for a guitar, it's actually not very realistic to play below an E1, right? Because that is the lowest possible tone on a guitar. We'll leave it there for now. But again, it's the, a bit of thought that you put into the Realism could really make a big difference. So this is how it sounds now. 19. Modulators: Okay, so another thing that we can do is to look at the, the modulators and see how we can use that to add a little bit of realism. I mentioned before that quite often string players in particular, we'll add some vibrato a little bit later. So they will play the, play the note, that note ring for, for a short while and then add some vibrato. So let's see if we can do that within using the modulators. So here we have LFO one, so we will use an LFO for this. Just want to do that. While I'm here in this modulator section, you'll notice that I take my finger off the key, finishes very abruptly. So probably we want to just drag and release a little bit, maybe a little bit more. Okay, so back to the, back to the vibrato. So we're just going to add a little bit of vibrato using LFO one here. So we're going to make this a, a sine wave. Will, we will, we will set the rate to around, That's probably fine around the forehead spark, something like that. And that is just four cycles a second. We're going to set a little bit of free time. And so we're going to let the note ring for about, about a 2.5th, something like that. Before the vibrato starts to take effect. Now, if I play something now, we're having no effect at all. And that's because we haven't assigned the LFO to anything. The way we do that within the sampler is through the mod matrix. So in here is just a simple table of all of the sources of modulation that we have. And we can continue to add those and we can add more LFOs. We can have more envelopes over here. But what we didn't need to do is we need to assign the, the LFO to a particular target. So we're going to set the target is pitches fine. But we don't need to do it by the mod wheel. We're just going to have nothing there. So we can have an LFO affect their pitch and we are going to affect the pitch. Bye, bye small, about five to $0.10. I mean by that. So now if you listen carefully, you'll hear that when I hit a note, the will have about a 2.5th are exactly a second half. Actually. After I hit the note, the pitch will start to wobble slightly to simulate vibrato. Let's listen to that. Okay, so that covers that. So that's our basic first instrument. We've seen everything within here. So we've looked at the synth and the things that we can do in that. We have looked at the, the mod matrix to set our LFO. Lfo itself. As I say, you can add more LFOs and envelopes here, we adjusted the amplifier envelope and we just had the LFO. We had a look at the map, and this is how we've mapped our sample files into across the keyboard. And we at the, the zone or the waveform editor. There's our first instrument using the sampler. It's still a fairly basic instrument and something that we probably could have got somewhere near achieving with the quick sampler. But obviously, with the quick sampler, we would've had to use a single audio file, a map that across all the key. So this does make it slightly better, slightly more realistic. But there's lots more that we can do yet to really make our instruments realistic. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to look at a thing called round robins. 20. Round robins: Okay, So as I mentioned, there are a number of ways that we can use the sample engine to make our insurance that little bit more realistic. We looked at adjusting the sample length before and Anika a little bit of a brighter. So I'm making sure that we kept a little bit of the transient at the beginning of the beginning of the note, without compromising the responsiveness. And adding a little bit of a fake vibrato using an LFO. There are another couple of things that we're going to look at and these are velocity, velocity layers and round robins. So the first of those we're going to look at is round robins. But basically we're going to create an instrument with both. A round robin is at the moment when, when we created the last instrument, every time we press a G2, G2 sample place. And it's the same sample every time. Round robin allows us to switch that sample out and play a different sample each time. And adds a little bit of realism because every time you play a note on a piano or player, a string on a hop, you play it slightly differently. Even the best player in the world, even the most consistent plays in the world. Well, it will sound slightly different each time you play it. Round robins tries to help us emulate that. So let's start off with a blank instruments, so I've just restore it back to factory settings. This time I'm going to drag in some, some samples and you'll see that it's exactly the same sound as before, but I've named them slightly differently. And you'll see that as I as I bring them in. So I'm just going to bring the, bring the samples in here. So again, it's just open strings. But you'll see that they've been named slightly differently. So we're going to look at round robins, that we're going to look at velocity layers. So that's what the R and the Beast and force. So this is gonna be round robin one. So this will all become much clearer as we go through and build this instrument out. Now, many of the commercial site sample libraries that you buy will have many velocity layers, many round robins, and many, many different audio files. We're just going to create a cut down version. So we're going to stick with these six open strings of the guitar. We're going to create three round robins, are going to create two velocity layers. Let's start with round robin. I just, we've done this before. I've just dragged the items in. I'm just gonna go to zone just to be quick. Although I could go and drag these things around so I can, I could maybe get the Y1 and I could drag it down to two here. So at the root key to E1 there. Now, one thing, I don't really know why, but one thing I have noticed that the sample sound better pitch down, that they do pitched up something if I'm really going to spend my time and I really take my time to do something. I'm going to set the root note as the highest possible note here, and everything below it we pitch down. So for A1, I would set my root node to be root node to be a, sorry, a one. And that'll be the highest note that I could play. And I would pitch down from there. For now. Just for simplicity, I am going to use the automatic, I'm going to Automatic using pitch detection that will spread it out. It's exactly the same as we saw in the previous, the previous lesson. So I just need to go through each one now and just do my sample chopping. So again, I'm going to retract down from the bottom. Let me make that a bit bigger. Try zooming in again. I'm actually successful. I don't. So I'm just going to drag my star across to the transient. So let's try and get the high about. There. Seems fine. Next sample strike that to you about that seems fine. Again, just trimming this beginning of you could do this when you chop the samples up. But I find that if I didn't do that work anyway, I'd rather do it in the sample engine because it gives me a little bit more, a bit more choice. Well, if I chop them up in in the door, create audio files, I can go and extend that transient if I fear it needs it. So I prefer just to leave this gap at the beginning. Just do that work in the engine. Okay, so let's close that down and go back to the good back to the mapping editor. Okay, so there's my samples match across the keyboard. Again, I will just be sure to go into the modulators and just add a bit of room. Okay, so let's close that again. Now. Although this sounds quite realistic. Similarly for something that's recorded fairly quickly, the what you'll notice is that every time I press a key, if I keep progressing, progressing the same key, I get, yes, a very realistic sounding note, but I get exactly the same every time. If this is particularly noticeable, if I keep repeating it. Because it doesn't sound like some of them actually playing guitar. Because if I was to hit the same node over and over again on a guitar, I would get a slightly different sound each time. So the way that we solve that is through round robin. So I'll show you how to do that using the groups in a sampler. So over here we have this list of groups. We're a group called group at the moment. I'm just gonna double-click that and rename it. And I'm going to call this one for round robin one. So that's my round robin one. I am going to then go and create a new group. I'm going to call this one R, R2 for Round Robin to round robin two. And now I've got a, another set of samples. So I'm going to bring those in. And these are exactly the same, exactly the same notes being played. But I just recorded them a second time. So I just played every low E string three times and let them ring out three times. I played every other open string three times and let them ring out three times. What this gives me is almost identical audio files, but with a slight difference, and it's just that slight difference in performance. The maybe hit the string in a slightly different place or a hit, It's slightly harder or slightly faster. So that's, that's the, the, all the different cell B this. So I'll just drag these in. I will just automatic them again using pitch detection. There we go. And again, I'll need to open up the zone, go through each one of these, and just chopped down a transient. So I'll just do this fairly quickly for now. By i rather than by air. If you're doing it, definitely do it by ear. But this will get us enough. You can see the transient ambiguous when that's interesting. So I kind of what you're hearing is both notes. So what I'll do is I just need to go in either mute round robin or soda round robin. I'm, I'm only here. So I think I'll probably just going to chop that off. You can see here why I do this inside the sampling tube rather than inside the door because I just want to hear what feels right. I'm going to leave these others. I'll just very quickly by ear, I buy ice or eight. Again, here's another one with a bit of a weird transient at the beginning. Just takes two. Okay? So what I have here is that there's one zone. Let's choose a different set of samples. I'm going to create a third zone because I did it three times. So I just un-solo that I'm just going to create a, sorry, a group, create a new group. I'll call this one or three for round robin three. I will get the same problem as before. I will go find my samples. So these are my round robin three samples. After I go in and do exactly the same again, I will go to zone map automatically using pitch detection. There we go. And I will just quickly scroll through these and do the same again. Again, if you're doing this, do, do take your time and actually play the notes and get it just right. So what we have here then is I can close the zones. Now. We have three separate groups. This third group of money playing one group. Every time. What I can do is I can highlight all three groups. I can go to group, and I can choose, choose, Create, round robin. But this will now do is it will cycle through these as I play a note and you'll hear that the notes sound slightly different, much, much, much more realistic. And as I said, you can create as many round robins as you want. One thing to be wary off with samples though, is the more individual samples you use, the more round robin do you use them or velocity layers, which we're going to cover in a second that you use. It is loading all of those samples in to memory. So you will start to use a lot of memory and a lot of CPU to run these things. So just those simple, simple notes. So I'm just looking at the raw files, WAV files that I've created. Just that all of those notes are somewhere around the 1.5 to two megabyte mark. So if I took an item 88 key keyboard and did one sample for every single one of those, and did three round robins of that light. You can see that I'm going to start hitting performance issue. So again, it's a compromise is a balancing act between ultimate realism. Being able to have an instrument that you can play this responsive. So anyway, so we've got our three round Robinson. So just, just watch the screen now as I start to hit this g. One of those is not quite right. It's this one here. This one didn't get trimmed down. So there we are. So you'll find that occasionally the odd mistake. So as I know I've corrected that. You can hit it on every single night. As I play it. It's just cycling through. Can you see on the group list on the left? It's just cycling through each one. Having so every time I press the notes from the, from the next. And this just adds realism, right? So it's exactly the same note, but just three different performances of the notes with just slight variations. It's just stops us having that kind of machine gun like repetitive, effective many times. Okay, so that's, that's one level of realism we've added with round robins. In the next section, we'll look at another step that we can take, and that is velocity layers. 21. Velocity layers: Okay, so velocity layers, velocity layers are related to the notes that's played depending on how fast you hit the key on the keyboard. So when we, if you've played with synthesizers before, if you've played a lot with in your door, you'll know that most midi keyboards or velocity sensitive. This is basically is Moody's way of knowing how hard or rather how fast a key is not to do with how hard it is to do with how fast they correlate pretty closely. Generally. The sample engine knows how, how, how fast you've hit the keyboard. And it can play a different note depending on how fast or how slowly if you've pressed the key. And you remember before I was saying that if you grab one of these samples and you start dragging up or down, it started going a bit too far. It drags out completely. So you could see that effect happening before. And I just said just make sure it fills the whole thing. It's actually adjusting this, these velocity figures at the bottom there, so we can see that it's more parties. And so these are the minimum velocity and the maximum velocity. So just highlights a one of your, one of the groups. If you press Command D or you can press Shift, you can either press Shift and press Shift and highlight all of these or you can press Command a that will get them all. What I've done is I've recorded my samples. I recorded two different velocities. So I wish I am going to call velocity layer one, hence the V1 in the, in the title of the audio file. This is me hitting a string relatively softly. I then went through and record it three times on each string again, hits and string much harder. So we can use the sample to say, okay, well, when I hit the keyboard quite softly, play the softer sample. When I hit the keyboard. More quickly or harder more quickly, I have a higher velocity. Play, the louder sample. Play the sample where I hit the string a bit harder. And again, this can add a lot of realism. This is very true, very true of stringed instruments, is very true of woodwind instruments and brass as well. And also things like drums. It's not always tonal instrument. So if I hit a snare drum quite lightly, It's a very different sound too, if I hit it very harshly. So you can have, again, as many velocity layers as you'd like. You could up to a 128. But most sample libraries will have somewhere. Usually three is a good starting. 0.5 is probably for a very expensive, very, very detailed sample library. Now, remember it's not, It's not. Well, remember the fact that all of these samples, resources from your computer and you'll start to slow down very quickly. But the other thing to remember that the sampling is a pretty good, they do optimize for this. But the other thing to remember is just how many samples you need to record and chop up and a name. So if you have, let's say, let's make the mass nice and easy. So let's say you have 25 samples recorded across the keyboard, and you have four round robins. So there's a 100 samples. And then you want to record five velocity layers. There's 500 samples that you need to not only record, but also chop up named export was audio files dragging, adjust insight to your inside your sampler. Mapping and adjust the zones, etc, inside your sample engine. So the numbers can get really big, really quick. And you'll go from having what we have now, which is at the moment, 18 files to cover are six strings and three round robins. We're about to double that to 36 because I'm going to add another velocity layer. But you can go from having a sample libraries, 36 samples in it to sample library that has hundreds, even thousands of samples within it. It can become an extremely time-consuming, tedious task. The amount of time it took to just record those samples. So it took probably about 20 seconds per string, six strings, so there's two minutes per, per run through. So I did that three times. So the little gap between six or seven minutes per Per velocity. So for three round robins of just six notes. So I did that twice out as 15 minutes just hitting a string, waiting for it to ring out. Taken a pause, hit another string, wait for it, wait for it to ring out. So it can take quite a long time to do these. And this is for, as I say, a very, very small sample set, really with only two velocity layers and three round robins. Anyway, let's, let's create a velocity. So we're going to create two velocity layers. So I've got everything in round robin, one highlighted. I'm going to just drive down from the top and I'm going to take this down to about say, 95. So this means that if I now play a key, just so what's happening is that I'm going through the round robin. But basically if I hit a key, that's a velocity between 095, I will play the sample related to that key. If I play the key harder than that at the moment, is won't play a sample, it's got nothing to play. So what I've done is I've gone through and recorded, as I said, the same again. So three round robins with three velocity layers. So very quickly I'm just going to go and add those in now. So let's see, Round Robin one velocity to, and this is why I spent a bit of time laboring the point about naming things properly. So round robin one, velocity layer two is this folder here. So let me grab those samples. Truck loads in round robin, one velocity layer to dry goes in there. You'll see that the sampler actually just makes them fit inside there. So what happens if I go to Auto Map by pitch detection here? We are. So it's actually been quite smart and it's spread these out within there. So anything if I play a D2 between velocity 0 and velocity one-to-five, it's going to play file D2 round robin one velocity one. If I play a D2 between 96127, then it's going to play a D2 round robin one. But velocity number two, and these are the notes that I struck a bit harder. It's going to do exactly the same for the others. So just go into each group. Into each group, select one sample, press Control. Drag that down to 9595 I chose. Yeah. So drag those down to 95 and I'll go and get my velocities to round robin to velocity to go ahead and grab those samples. Tracker is in cortisone, automatic, automatic using pitch detection. And then the same in round robin three, highlight one, control, a, drag that down to 95. Now you'll notice that all these match up. So what I mean by that is that also a map using the pitch detection. So this is round robin three velocity three. What I mean by matching up is that these line up in columns, it doesn't need to be that way. So you could have things like like this, for example. That's that's not a problem at all. So it can work in different ways. Sometimes you'll see this done where a sample is just doesn't sound right where samples not been recorded properly. Not such a problem if you're recording it in your, in your home studio, you can just go in and re-record that bit. But if you've hired an orchestra to come and spend a day playing samples for you. And then you get back a few days later and you find that a particular sample is not recorded properly for some reason is slightly out of tune or just didn't work for some other reason. You can actually kind of fudge it as long as it's only one or two by just Stretching other samples a little bit more. Let's just put this one back. So this one should be just check. So root k, V1. I just want to show the root key of A1 yet, that's all good. So again, I just need to go through and just go through and set these. I'll speed this up so you don't have to sit and watch me do all this again. Okay, so you can see that just one thing to show in here is you can play these sounds back without hitting the keyboard. Which can be actually tricky once you've set round robins up. Because every time you hit the keys could play different sample. One thing you can do is play using this icon here. So if I look at my, let's take this note here. You can hear that when this is the softer sample, so velocity layer one, that's going to ring out if I play between 095. Okay, So it's just a softer sample in the bottom of the string for the second. So this gives us a, some more realism. So as I, as I play it slowly, you can see that I'm accessing. Okay. So a much more realistic sounding instrument, not perfectly recorded by any means, but, but much more realistic than, than anything that we can achieve with quick sampler. And certainly more realistic than anything that we could achieve with a regular synthesizer. I'm certainly not for the same effort. Okay, so again, there's a few things we could do so before we had the nine. Okay, so we could set up a similar thing with the LFO. So we could have a LFO just change the shape of the LFO to be a sine wave. Because set the rate to what do we have it before? About four seconds, about four hertz, that fading about a 2.5th. And then again up to the MOD matrix. And we can set our LFO one. We can remove the mod wheel from there. You can set that to 8, $0.10 a minute. Right now I'll do $0.09. So again, just to give a little bit of vibrato. So when we hit the notes, it will ring out and then a little bit of vibrato will be introduced. Okay? And again, we could, we could add some effects to this. Again, in side logic sampler, we don't have the ability to, there's no effects built into logic sampler, so we can just go and grab effects as we normally would. Again, let's go again for the Valhalla supermassive. This is a free plugin. If you've, if you've not come across it, then go get it. So it's Valhalla, DSP.com. They have some incredible plugins. Two or three free plugins we to try out. Valhalla supermassive is absolutely incredible, but it's a huge reverb. So let's just go and pick a preset from here so we could go. I don't know. Let's maybe try. An echo guitar seems right. Palm mute, reverse, eighth, eighth notes. Let's try to bring this to the front and look at the mappings. We can see what's being played. Okay, So pretty cool sounding instruments. I like that a lot. I think I'll sit and tweak that for a little while longer. But definitely a playable instrument and definitely something you could perhaps using a composition of your own. So that's it for, for, for the sampler, we've covered every single section in there. What I might like to have a look at is a different sample engine. So there's another sample engine called contact. It's by Native Instruments. It is that the sampler and quick sampler, our logic specific. So you can only use those inside of Logic. Although just about or many of the other doors, Most other doors have got very similar setups and suddenly look very familiar. Like say we haven't been into detail on every single setting and nook and cranny inside these, because that's not the point. The point is to learn how sampling works, not how logic sampler works. So you see what I mean about that confusing tape? But just to prove that we're going to look at, we're going to look at creating one more instrument. And we will do that inside of contact. 22. Our fourth instrument: Introduction to Kontakt: Okay, so in this final section we're going to look at a different sample engine, sample engine called contact six. You can find this over on the Native Instruments websites. Now contact is a paid-for products that don't get confused because there was a free version as well. But the free version is simply a player allows you to play other people's sample libraries. But contact six in order to actually create a sample library will need to buy the paid-for version. But it really has become the industry standard. So there are many others around. There's one, a particularly good one I've been using recently called highs. But you need to be a bit of a software engineer to be able to create the ones that you need to build and compile yourself. But contact six has been, or contact has been around for many, many, many years. Contract six is the latest version. You'll see it still looks a little dated when you compare it to the logic sampler. But it's very, very powerful. Um, it's, it's got a bunch of additional features that perhaps logic sample it doesn't quite have yet, including things like the effects. But, but you'll see that it works in exactly the same way. And all the, all the theory you've learned and all the techniques that you've learned looking at quicksand and logic sampler can be applied to contract six or to any other sample engine. Let's have a look at contract. Okay, so here's contact. You can see it looks very different to the logic sampler. On the left here we've got just a bunch of, of libraries which we can load in the sampled instruments from. We don't need that right now, so let's close that down. Unfortunately, the UI of contact is a little dated. And actually this is as big as I can make the screen. So this is why as I can make it. We'll manage. I'll zoom in a little bit. And let's see if we can get that all on the screen for you to see there. So to create a new instrument in context, I simply double-click inside this black space here. That's creating a new instrument. And then to edit the instrument, I need to click on this little wrench icon in the top left here. So you can see it looks very, very different, but all the things that we used inside logic sample, logic, sampler are all there. They're just a little hidden or in different places at least. But we will see that all the concepts that you've learned from logic sampler can apply to contact or Ableton sampler or Sampras IQ based or whichever sample engine you are using. And it's just a matter of going through methodically and just applying the same principles. So we know that the first thing we need is we need a sound source, same as we would with any other synthesisers. Um, and so the way we do that with a sample engineers through the mapping editor. So let's click on the mapping editor here. This is going to open up a very familiar looking screen here. Then I can drag in my samples and put them in here. And I just need to go and rearrange them here. Again, there are automatic features in here. But we can fairly simply just go through and drag things around so we can get stuff in some sort of order. So E a D. So let's go and drag this around. So we go to the E1, so we need to go find a E1. So let's just, just drag it up here a little bit. So here is, let's see, C, D, E. Here is y1. We need to go and set the E, the root key. So we'll drag that up to y1 and we can see that starts there. We then have our a one. So we'll track the root node to a, excuse me, a one. And that's there. Let's just bring up from F1 to A1. D will track down to here. We'll bring that down to D1 and set the root note to D1. G, a printer here. And we made a slight too big. We'll set the root key to G2. B to them is just here. So we'll set the root note to B2 and then we have E3, which should go to yeah, and we'll set the root note 23. Okay, so we've got our samples mapped across the keyboard. Will stretch these out to go either end the same as we did before. Okay, so now I can play this across the keyboard. Problem here already. So this is the, this is a problem. This is where I said we need to make sure we set our root notes correctly. I was playing up the keyboard. I can hear it going higher and lower as I moved up the keyboard. And the reason for that is that D2 sample here, we've actually set the root key as D1. So well done, if you spotted that what I was doing it. So let's go through check those. E3. Yes. B2, G2, D2, A1, and y1. And again, another example of just spending a little bit of time to name those regions within Logic before I export them to make sure that the region name is in the file name because I'm trying to find that. So we'll work that out without being able to correlate. The two would have taken me way more time than it did anyway. So that should be right now. This is simply an electric guitar through some effects in, through the audio interface and recorded, excuse me, recorded in logic. So that's a simple note, sounds like this. Okay, so we will add a second instrument now. And this is a kind of a path-like sent instruments. So in order to do that, we need another group that's exactly the same as we did in logic sampler. To get there we go to the group editor. We will need to add a new group. So we click here to create an empty group. So let's, let's be sure to, to stay tidy. And we will rename our renamed, our first group to guitar, GTR. And this group is gonna be our synth, so I'll call that one this way. And so the moment you can see that although I've got the synth group selected, I'm still seeing the guitar samples here. And this is a little quirk of, of, of contact rather. So that is because I have this edit or groups buttons selected, so I seek to unselect that. And then to sort of that group, or sorry, a sudden to collect, click on selected groups only. And this will give me just that empty group. If you're using logic. By default, I would just go and uncheck that and click on certain groups only. It just seems much more intuitive to me and much more in line with the way that, with logic or the way that logic works. So anyway, so I have my empty group there. Let me go and grab my pad samples. Here. I'll just drag those in. Again. This is not strictly necessary, but just to keep things nice and simple, I created six paired samples which exactly match the notes of the open strings of the guitar. Just to keep things nice and simple, it doesn't need to be like that at all. I could record it any number of notes, even a single note and just spread it across the keyboard or a different set of notes. And it would have been completely fine, just met them differently in this group. Let's scrub this one here. So this is A1. We can see the filename here. So let's go and drop that onto a one. This is actually a quicker way of doing it. You map them if you drag down and just mark them as single notes, you can just drag them around a little bit quicker to to edit stuff. So this one is B2. Goes here on, sorry, on B2. This one is G2. That goes here onto G2. This one is E three, so that goes here onto E3. Then we have y1. So down here to E1, I think we should be good. So then what I can do is I can highlight these now, because of the way that a guitar string, guitar strings are tuned, we're not the slightly different interval for the b. But if I go and highlight these four, for example, I can just drag all of those down to fill that gap. And then just drag these two out. This one, we're going to drag in both directions, traveling all the way up. And this bottom one, we will track all the way down. So now when I, I'm so sorry, let me just solo this group. And so this is what the synth sounds like. If you've done my previous course on sound design with synthesizers, then you'll recognize this path from there. So there's a few things that we would need to do to that. So you'll notice that when I release the key, then that sound stocked very suddenly. So we will need to go and fix that to start with. So we do that through the amplifier envelope. So in contact, you have a separate amplifier for each voice, for each group. So we have this group here, the guitar group. And then we have the synth group. And you'll notice the synth is set at minus six dB and the guitar set at 0. I'm not entirely sure where that is. I didn't change it, but that's just, that's just the way it is. So, um, so for the synthesizer, we'll go down, we'll click on the modulators here. We'll add a modulator, but go to envelopes. Antsr, which stands for attack, hold, decay, sustain, and release. Just a different type of envelope. If you click on this little button here, but this down arrow that will take us down to the bottom, to the envelope, we are going to set the attack to be a little longer and the release to be around about the 10-second mask, something like that. So the patcher now sound a bit, bit more potluck. And so when I release the key, that sound gently tails off. Just turn that up a little bit. I'm not sure why it's set so low by default. And then we'll do the same for the guitar, because I believe that the guitar will end abruptly as well. So let's go down and set the envelope for the guitar. So again, we will, we will, we have a envelope for the guitar created already, and we will bring that up to around the 10 second mark out a little bit of attack in there as well. So this is what they sound like when combined. So if I go and turn the grid off, when I hit a key, now they'll both play together. Okay, so we can really see that kind of combination of sounds can be really powerful and you can layer many, many sounds with each other to create a instrument that really evolves over time. It is something that you simply couldn't pick up and play in any other way. So let's just make a few more adjustments. So that guitar, I think, is a little bit. So let's just turn that down a little bit. What I might do is a couple of, a couple of extra things here. So what I might do is detuned the guitar. So I might tunica top-down one octave. Quite like that. I'd like to create a little bit more movement. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add. A chi do that in here. No, I think I need to do that in this modulator. Delete that one. I need to add a modulator with an LFO, a sine wave. And this is going to affect the pattern. This is what I wanted to do. So I'm going to, I now have an LFO. So a low-frequency oscillator with a sine wave. That is, I'm sorry, it's this one here. We can delete that one. So we have an LFO that is going to affect the pan. And what I wanna do is just move the pan. Move the guitar slightly left and right as we go. So let's go down and have a look at that modulator. Little bit fast. Let's just bring that down. Again. We've got similar things in here so we can, we can, we can fade in, fade it in a little bit. And let's just turn that frequency down a little bit more. Then. We can see the conversation here with thoughts. So bring that down. Let's just voted down a little bit. Let's see. Okay, so now we've got a little bit of movement left to right. If you're listening on headphones, you'll you'll, you'll hear that. I may have to plan underneath the pec playing and then the guitar playing an octave down, modulating left to right. I think there's a few other bits and pieces we could do here. So inside contacts, something that we don't have inside. The logic sampler is the ability to add effects directly inside the sample engine. And this is a really powerful feature of context. The reason is that of course, is that the contact is independent of the door. In fact, it can be used without a door at all. So a digital audio workstation at all as a standalone app. So it needs to have the effects built in because it can't rely on them being there from the withinside logical Cubase or whatever. So we can add some effects inside here. So perhaps we'll add some sound effects. Again, we're on the, on the guitar. We will add maybe a bit of delay. Let's just sort of it. That's awesome. You can really hear it for the group soda. And then we can add some reverb to the whole thing. So we can add inside this main effects section. Then we can add some effects. We can add some reverb and maybe choose reverbs. Fine. Let's, let's set the time up a little bit. And that's because it's a main effect of that apply to both groups. Let's un-solo the groups. And let's see what we got. Okay, so there we are. So we've created a path from a combination of a pad synth patch that we could have created in any synthesizer. And layered onto that then is a guitar that's recorded in. Both of them are bouncing down to individual audio files mapped using the mapping editor in two separate groups. And then we've applied envelopes to both some modulation through the panning. And then finally added some effects to create, I think, a really nice and useful sound. So as you can see, the basic techniques and the basic concepts apply across basically all sample engines or sampling engines, but they can be in very different places. So I would say is that this course has given you a great fundamental knowledge, a great foundation onto which you can go away and create your own sample libraries. But it's definitely, definitely worth digging into the manual of your specific sampler to really get the most out of it. But I hope you've enjoyed the course. Thank you very much for watching. And I cannot wait to hear the, the sampler instruments that you've made using the knowledge you've gained from this course. So please do reach out and share them with us. Thanks very much. Bye bye.