Samplers are amazing.
The ability to record an existing sound, riff or loop and use it in your own work changed the music industry forever. That gift also introduced a myriad of other problems; technical as well as legal, but for now, we will focus on only the good stuff and interact with some cool things.
Since I don't own a iOS device, I could only try the Sampulator.
Here are my thoughts about it..
The Good
Sound: the sample quality is superb. The small progressions and chords available are fresh and interesting, and give you a strong block to build with.
Interface: the interface is clean, concise and functional. Sounds are organized according to their type. Controls are easily accesible, and the interactions are very simple.
Save/load: you can save your session and load a few example ones – they are actually pretty good.
The Bad
Precision: when recording, it's quite tricky to add the sample you want to trigger exactly in the subdivision that you want it to.
Variety: as I said, the samples are very good, but they are very hiphop/rap oriented. You eventually hit a wall and creating more diverse loops becomes impossible.
Key learnings
Inspiration: I originally wanted to create some sort of "city scrambler" (city noise sampler tool) for my upcoming Sampler assignment, but after interacting with a regular sample player and recorder, I kinda want to try something else.
Samples themselves are important: the quality of the samples can determine how good of a composition you can make.
Sound compatibility: sounds have to match each other in some way so that when you add a bunch of them, something listenable can come out.
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