> Step by step

1. Emulating old-school sampler sonics in a modern DAW

1 For a quick and easy old-school sampler sound in any DAW, sample a chord and process it as though you’re using a vintage sampler. We’ll start with an electric piano plugin playing a simple minor 7th chord. Bounce the MIDI region in place to convert it to audio. 2 Next up, we need to convert the bounced audio to a new sampler instrument so we can play it at different pitches. The exact method depends on your DAW. Here in Logic we Ctrl-click the audio region and choose Convert to New Sampler Track. 3 A new track is created with the audio automatically loaded into Logic’s builtin EXS24 sampler plugin. The MIDI region plays back the note, but by default it will only play at its original pitch. For this project, we want to play it back at different pitches across the keyboard. 4 In the EXS24 window, hit Edit to view the key mapping of the instrument. We only have one sample, which has been

D# allocated to 4. Our original chord was a C, so we’ll go ahead and change that to C4 and extend the Key Range all the way along the keyboard. 5 We don’t want to play two chords at once, so we can set the sampler to Mono or Legato mode in order to avoid that. In Legato mode, you can use Glide or portamento in order to make one chord slide into the next, giving it a distinctive retro effect. 6 Filters, distortion and bit-crushing can all be used to add simple old-school flavour. We’ve gone with RX950 for an Akai sampler emulation. You can experiment with processing before resampling, or even add a bit of vinyl crackle for a truly retro feel.