Akai S950 Operator's Manual page 91

Note: before you can do this, the program has to have been created and the
sample name used in REC or the sample currently selected for editing has to
have been placed within that program. For example, if the sound you are
sampling or editing is called SNARE 1 but the program DRUMS 1 does not
contain that name
effectively monitor the sample you are working on.
EDITING A THE START POINT OF A SAMPLE - a useful tip
It is often necesaary to trim the start points of a sound to eliminate any
extraneous noises that may have crept in before the sample. This is easy
enough to achieve
particularly percussive sounds and, in particulaar, drums and percussion, the
start points must be very accurately set otherwise the samples may start late
and affect the 'feel' of a piece of music. These days, especially with dance
and pop music, rhythmic perfection is extremely important and if drums are
late by even a few milliseconds, the quantised perfection of your sequenced
parts falls apart. The problem is, even the most critical ear and the S950's
AUTOMATIC START POINT function is sometimes not accurate enough to detect a
slight delay so here's how to set the start points more accurately.
Go into EDIT SAMPLE and select the sound you wish to edit. Let us. assume
that it was sampled at C3 60. Ensuring that Page 02 is set to 'Monitor', play
the selected sound on C1 on your keyboard so that it is playing two octaves
down. When you do this, you effectively slow the sample down and any slight
delays at the start point will be accentuated. Move the start point until
there is no delay - you w111 find that samples edited in this fashion are
much tighter in a strict tempo piece of music.
If you are not using a keyboard to play your samples, you can use the PB
button and the sample can be transposed down two octaves using Page 03 of
EDIT SAMPLE. The same applies if you are using a drum machine or drum pads to
trigger the sample.
Naturally, this doesn't only apply to drum or percussion sounds - any
sample will benefit from this technique.
SAVING MEMORY IN THE 5950
One of your main concerns if you are trying to cram as many sounds into the
5950 as you can is to make economic use of memory. The 5950 has several
fetaures that makes such a thing easy.
To begin with, always select the optimum bandwidth for the sound you are
sampling. It's all too tempting to sample everything at full bandwidth to
ensure that the sound is crystal clear but this is wasteful of memory,
especially on sounds that would not benefit greatly from the increased
bandwidth. For example, what is the point of sampling a bass drum at full
bandwidth when it is unlikely that there will be many frequencies much above
lOkHz - it would be better to sample it with a 10k bandwidth to save memory.
By adopting this approach for every sound you sample, you'll be amazed at how
many samples you can squeeze into the 5950.
It is also important not to waste sampling time 'so select your sampling time
in REC mode carefully. This is not .a big problem, however, as you can always
shorten the sampling time if it's too long by changing the end point in EDIT
SAMPLE. By going to Page 10 of EDIT SAMPLE, you can discard the unwanted end
point and free up more memory.
in any of its keygroups,
and is described
you will
in EDIT SAMPLE.
72
not be able to
With some sounds,