For a while now I've been meaning to sample my hardware synths for use in NI's Kontakt. There are a number of reasons for this: better portability (a laptop with a software sampler somehow is easier to carry than a big synth
), backup in case the hardware fails and in some cases, additional polyphony and multitimbrality options. For example, I love my Doepfer A100 modular but I'd really love to play chords with some of the sounds. Also, my JX8P only has six voices and when you play big chords with lots of release in the sound then you'll quickly hear the new notes steal from the still sounding ones...
So anyway, once every months when I got the enthusiasm and energy I started sampling a sound, but this was really frustrating because typically it would involve:
- Recording several notes (to make it easier I programmed a range of notes into my sequencer and recorded those while playing back the midi)
- Splitting the audio file, naming every file so I could easily recognize it (C1, G1...C6)
- Trimming the silences from each file
- Finding loop points
- Importing it all into Kontakt and creating an instrument
Anyway, this was so much (dull) work that I never got into it (especially preparing the individual files and looping them). And when I did, I did only sample two notes per octave since doing more would drive me nuts. Also I didn't create very long loops since I had to try and listen to them all.
However, I have recently discovered Skylife's Sample Robot software which is abolutely fantastic! You tell it to sample a number of notes over a range of octaves (and you can even set it to do several velocity ranges per note). You can specify note length and (hooray!) whether it should be automatically looped. Export is possible in several formats although I still prefer wavs which import easily into Kontakt.
I've already sampled several sounds of my JX8P and A100 (if you're interested I'll put some of them up here as the wav files or the NKI instruments for those who have Kontakt) and this program is a huge time saver and makes the whole process fun again. Interestingly, you can also use this program to sample VSTi's and acoustic/electric instruments (although I haven't tried that yet).
It's by no means a perfect program: the whole GUI looks very much dated and it takes a while to get used to it. I've also encountered some bugs and other strange behaviours which I hope will be fixed in the upcoming new version. Still, even in its current version it has helped me considerably.
The JX8P hadn't seen much action lately and I really miss polyphony on the A100. Being able to relatively quickly 'get' their sounds into my DAW environment and still keep their analog quality by sampling lots of keys for long periods is really exiting. Recently I layered two JX8P pads with a digital pad sound from the M3... Pad bliss!
