The Light of Day

In praise of dirt-dead simplicity
KeithHandy posted in Producing, Tools on May 26th, 2007

One thing I remember reading among the user reviews for Tracktion is that one included plugin, an extremely bare-bones sampler, is too limited to be useful. I’m going to take a contrary position to this (what? me? take a contrary position??) and I’ll tell you why.

Under the umbrella interest of music, the sub-interest of sampling is not really in the “passion” league for me. If it was, I would have a beef with all the things this plugin can’t do: It can’t change the timbre of the sound in response to key velocity (it only changes the volume of the sound). It doesn’t respond to pitch or modulation wheels. It can’t loop, so your sounds better be long enough for the notes you’re going to play. You can’t set a release time; it either cuts off abruptly when you lift your finger, or for something like drums you can select “ignore release” so the sound always plays all the way through.

It’s about as “dumb” as you can get and still be functional; what you see on the screenshot above is all there is to it. The box on the left starts off empty, and you click “add”, find a sound on your computer, and then slide the green and white arrows to whatever part of the keyboard you want to assign it to. That’s it.

But instead of thinking of it as a retarded sampler, I think of it as editing on speed. Because what am I actually doing? Just triggering existing sounds at certain times in a song, which I could do by just importing those sounds into the project and putting them where I want them. Obviously it would not make sense to assemble a drum part for a whole song by importing a wav file every single time a drum is hit. So this is kind of like direct injection: hit the key, presto, instant imported sound. And then you can edit painlessly, because it’s laid out musically on a piano roll.

Samplers will always sound like samplers, so stop trying to make them “expressive”. When I want nuance and timbral variation, I’ll pick up a guitar. This is a cool, quick and dirty way of getting a simple drum or mellotron part down. Here’s one such drum part I just did:

The above song, Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts, is still in the “putting things down” stage; what’s most lacking still is the electric guitar, and probably some additional supporting vocals. If you want an amusing point of reference for how it has progressed so far, this older version had a hastily done drum machine and synth bass part, just as temporary placeholders.