Akai S950 Operator's Manual page 10

S9500 - BASIC SAMPLING ARCHITECTURE
Before we explore the workings of the S950, let us first see how it functions
as there are n few things you need to know about which will make your
understanding of the instrument a lot clearer.
There are basically two things you can have in the S950 - SAMPLES and
PROGRAMS. A sample is a digital recording of a sound. The sound can be
anything from a car crash to a flute. Once you have a sample or a collection
of samples in the S950, you want to be able to play it from the keyboard (or
any other MIDI controller such as a MIDI drum, guitar or wind controller or a
MIDI sequencer). To do this, the sample<s> must be placed in KEYGROUPS and
these allow you to map the sample out across the keyboard within a PROGRAM.
FIG. 1 Basic sampling architecture of the S950 - samples into keygroups
mapped out across the keyboard range within a program
The simplest program you can create is to have one sample that spans the
entire keyboard range. Alternatively, you could assign that one sample to dust
one key or you could have any number of keygroups assigned to individual keys
with separate samples in each of them. You could also have a program which
uses two samples, one spanning the bottom two octaves, the other spanning the
top three octaves. It is also possible to have two samples in one keygroup
each of which are sounded using keyboard dynamics where soft keystrikes plays
the one sample and hard keysstrikes play the other - this !s known as VELOCITY
SWITCHING.
Having done that, each keygroup can have its own envelope shaping, filtering,
fine tuning, vibrato and pitch sweep effects, individual output assignment and
each keygroup can have its own MIDI channel and even the simplest sample can
be radically transformed within a program. Furthermore, because any changes
made to an individual samples keygroup within a program do not affect the
actual sample data itself but are only sound processing functions, you can
have many, many variations of one sample to create an even greater range of
sounds which can be recalled at the touch of a button.
But, how does all this work? Let's find out.
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