Akai S950 Operator's Manual page 99

You will notice that as you transpose the sample more than a few semitones up
or down, the tonal characteristic starts to sound, well.. weird! This !s
especially true of
produces a sound not unlike some cheeky cartoon character whilst playing it
lower on the keyboard, your voice sound like a space alien with indigestion!
This happens because
frequency ranges and these stay constant on the real thing. When you take one
sample of such an instrument, those resonances are transposed with the sound
and this gives the sound its unusual character. Of coure, this side effect
can be used to great creative effect and voice samples in particular can
sound beautifully ethereal played high on the keyboard or disturbingly
ominous when transposed down a few octaves. If you want to get round this
problem, however, you will need to resort to MULTI-SAMPLING. This technique
requires that you take a sample of the instrument every few semitones and
then map these sounds across the keyboard so that, at any point, the
transposition is never further than a few semitones away before the next
sample is heard and so the resonances and tonal quality remain constant over
the whole keyboard range (see Fig. 4>. Instruments that need multisampling
are things like pianos, strings, voices. guitars, oboes and clarinets amongst
others but some sounds can get away with only one sample across the whole
keyboard.
FIG. 4. Mapping samples (S1-S6) across the keyboard range
Having sampled your sounds and edited them and mapped them out across the
keyboard it doesn't end there because once the signal goes through the DAC
and is back in the analogue world, you can do some analogue things to it like
shove it through filters and amplifiers. If you do that you can also add
envelope shaping and generally treat your sampler like a synthesizer to
radically transform the sound. You can also bring certain samples out of
their own individual audio output so thet they can be further modified on e
mixer - all sorts of possibilities suddenly become available and one single
sample can be the basis of any number of variations.
And that's it basically. Of course, it can get a lot more complex than that
but hopefully, this should help you understand what is happening inside your
5950 every time you poke around in EDIT SAMPLE or EDIT PROGRAM or play a note
on the keyboard.
voice samples where
certain sounds
79
playing higher
have unique resonances
up the keyboard
in certain