Sampling modular synth oscillators with E-MU E5000 & Sample Aid

Published on Sep 27, 2014 Phil Tipping

"...or how to prove emu + ocd = rsi
Looping & truncating raw VCO waveforms with no attack, decay or filtering - previous video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TS2...) [video 2 in the playlist below] showed how to sample complete voices so no looping was reqd. These waveforms can be used for building new voices inside the E-MU or by routing them back through the modular. They were captured earlier using Sample-Aid to step through each note, so the repetitive Arm & Place button pushes are still needed, but this time no auto-truncation was used so all samples are 1 sec. long.

The example shows one of the 40 pulse-width variations (10%, 12%, 14%... 88%, 90%) taken from the pulse output. Each sample is looped & truncated to approx. 2000 samples using E-MU's auto-correlate function plus manual tweaking by ear & watching the graph. The waveforms are simple so the tweaks were fairly consistent until the lower octaves where the size had to be increased. The lower notes were also harder to judge by ear, but it was easy to spot incorrect loop points on the graph.

Sampling this way may seem overkill but it avoids all compromises... you just need patience :)
Easier options would be to only sample every few notes, and/or truncate them to a single wave cycle, but you'd need to experiment with each waveform first to avoid audible artefacts.

Background music was a quick lash-up just to show what the raw pulse waveforms sound like with no further processing apart from the E-MU voice defaults. The E-MU was set to multi mode, with a few pulse variations assigned to different channels, and driven by Sequetron."

Sample Aid


Playlist:
Sample Aid 13.15 part 1 of 4
Sample Aid 13.16 part 2/4 - sampling a single velocity to EMU Ultra
Sample Aid 13.16 part 3/4 - sampling multiple velocities to EMU Ultra
Sample Aid 13.16 part 4/4 - sampling multiple velocities to EMU Ultra
Sample Aid 11.16 - Sample mode, microKORG, EMU Ultra E5000
Sample Aid 11.18 Velocity Cross-Fade microKORG on EMU Sampler