Modulate This! - News, Tips and Links for Electronic Musicians and Producers

Ableton's Summer of Sampler offer: Buy Live 8 and Get Sampler Free + New Sampler Move + Free Samplification Audio Pack for Sampler

I Love Sampler!
I’m a huge fan of of Sampler, Ableton’s advance sampling instrument.  I was recently corresponding with an artist who was considering Live and I wrote this about it:

“Ableton Sampler breaks with the classic sampler metaphor and supports a more immediate and "organic" workflow than other hardware or software samplers. This workflow is well suited to turning found sound into musical instruments. If you add Sampler to a rack in Live you can then easily assign 8 performance knobs to just about any parameter within Sampler.”

Sampler is simply a fantastic tool for helping you make your tracks more creative and unique. For sound designers it’s interface makes for rapid tweaking.

I just received some info from Ableton marketing.

Promotion
”Every customer who buys Ableton Live 8 before August 31st will get Sampler, Ableton's advanced sampling instrument, absolutely free. Sampler, worth 99 EUR/129 USD, combines traditional sampling features with advanced sound design functions.“

Details: http://www.ableton.com/summer-of-sampler

New Movie
Ableton has also produced a new move “Making sounds with Sampler"—which shows “how Sampler transforms a single piano note into an organic, modulating synth bass”. Watch on YouTube.

Free audio pack for Sampler
”Samplification All Sampler owners, old and new, can also download the free Samplification audio package, which offers Construction Kits, Live Sets with drum clips, new Instrument Racks, new lessons, and sounds from Puremagnetik, Cycling '74 and Sonarte's Sound Objects Lite collection. Samplification is a Live Pack—450 MB download, 950 MB installed and requires Sampler and Live 8.0.4 or higher.”

Samplification is available here: http://www.ableton.com/samplification

3rd Party Tutorials:
I also want to mention that there are some nice video tutorials out there to help you learn Sampler.

• Nick’s Tutorials: Sound Design and Creative Audio Manipulation in Ableton Live
• www.musicsoftwaretraining.com: Sampler Mini-pack

Mark Mosher
http://www.modulatethis.com
http://www.markmoshermusic.com
http://www.twitter.com/markmosher

KONTAKT 3 Now Available

Native Instruments has released KONTAKT 3. It now comes with over 33GB of sounds and 1,000 individual instruments. These instruments include orchestral, band, world, urban beats, vintage synths and more. KONTAKT 3 has a new "Performance View" that allows you to quickly tweak sounds.

This video offers a nice tour of the new library and tour of new features.

Other new features include:

• Reworked wave editor for intuitive looping, slicing and destructive sample editing
• Multi-break point envelopes per sample
• Vastly improved navigation
• New effects including tube amp, cabinet simulator, rotator
• MIDI loop drag and drop into host application

The product is now available now in stores and the NI Online Shop. Full version: $449.-/ €399., Update from KONTAKT 1 or 2: $149.- / €129., Crossgrade: $279 / €249.- (from all KOMPAKT, INTAKT, KONTAKT Player versions, including 3rd party sample libraries with included NI sampler).

To learn more:

• KONTAKT 3 Product page

SampleRobot - A Fast Way to Clone Your Old Hardware Synthesizers

Looking for a way to sample your hardware-based keyboards into your software sampler? Take a look at Sample Robot. It's a software utility that lets you clone musical instruments by automating the process of sampling external instruments so you can build software versions.

The software uses MIDI to programmatically send note-on messages in various keyboard ranges and velocities to your external instrument. It then records the output of the instrument into samples files. These files can then be imported into software samplers.

A new version 2.50 has just released.  According to the press release:

"With the new generation 2.50 of
award-winning audio software SKYLIFE SampleRobot it is now even easier and
faster to clone musical instruments. In addition to the new Project Wizard a
lot of functions have been included to make SampleRobot an indispensable
creative tool for composers, music producers and sound designers.
Furthermore all SampleRobot products include hundreds of megabytes of high
quality and rare synthesizer multi-samples."

Learn more by visiting http://www.samplerobot.com/index_b.php