Apple Logic Express 7 - Manual (Page 135)

Chapter 19 EXSP24 135
A Brief History of Sampling
The idea of an instrument that could change its sound at any time, and that could
imitate any other instrument, dates back centuries. By the 15th century, organ builders
had managed to simulate violins, flutes, trumpets, and even human-like sounds with
their instruments. Some years later, organs were perfected that could imitate birdsong.
Following the inception of film sound, several instruments were built that used film for
the storage and playback of sound. Motion picture sound was based on the concept of
recording sound onto the film itself as a separate track. Changes in brightness were
read via an opto-electrical mechanism, and sound was replayed. This meant that sound
was transferred to light and graphics in the widest sense. Creative musicians of the
time began to scratch these films manually, to draw waves on them, and to film
gearwheels and other things in order to produce interesting sounds from these
images.
The immediate next of kin to today’s samplers, however, was the Mellotron. This was a
very bulky keyboard instrument that used a separate tape recording of an acoustic
instrument for each and every key. Pressing a key started the playback of the
corresponding tape; after releasing the key, the tape was drawn back by a spring. Due
to the very complicated electro-mechanical mechanism used by the Mellotron, it was a
very heavy and frequently unreliable keyboard instrument.
Compared to this, the first digital samplers at the beginning of the eighties seemed
ultra-modern, but from today’s point of view they did not offer much for their five or six
digit price tag: a few seconds of sampling time, and sound quality that is surpassed by
today’s speaking toys. Nevertheless, early samplers like the Fairlight CMI and E-mu’s
Emulator are considered legendary. They had a great impact on music and on the
development of electronic musical instruments in the following years.
Nowadays, hardware samplers all sound good and are comparatively affordable.
However, this is not the end of development for samplers. With computers getting
faster and faster, it is now possible to build a fully-fledged sampler entirely in software,
making hardware samplers unnecessary. Your EXSP24 is proof of this…