STUDIO STRATEGIES
In the first of a regular monthly tutorial series from ACM, pro tutor Shea Stedford combines analogue signals and virtual convenience
ACM tutor Shea Stedford on multisampling technique
I think it’s fair to say that analogue synthesisers do have a certain quality to them that software synths lack. Anyone who tries to justify this claim is usually bombarded with rebuttals from software advocates stating that today’s softsynths can match a hardware analogue synth’s richness and depth – and while I do agree in a practical sense, that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a solid square wave from a Sequential
Prophet-6 or the bowel-quivering low end of a Moog Voyager!
However, as much as I love the sound of ‘analogue’, a hardware instrument is downright expensive, and you’re always going to be restricted by a particular synth’s limited functionality. This begs the question: why not have your cake and eat it too? Why not take those raw, phat sounds from a cumbersome hardware synth and bring them into the flexible, recallable world of software?
That’s exactly what I’m going to do in this tutorial, by multisampling individual notes from an Arturia MicroBrute before importing said samples into Native Instruments’ powerful Kontakt sampler. You’ll find my multisamples and edited Kontakt patch in this issue’s Tutorial Files for you to download, and there’s also an accompanying video tutorial so you can follow along, step by step.