In the age of the instant, Samplenerd revisits the practices of yesteryear!
In the age of instantaneousness I wanted to revisit the practices of my forebears and create a track using the method of yesteryear.
Why bother?
Well, two reasons actually. 1. I wanted to experience the working process of those recording from samplers back in the 1980s and into the 1990s. I wanted to know what it was like to have to sift through a whole bunch of floppy disks, load, wait, play, choose, load wait, play, choose, repeat!
2. With all our sounds today quickly accessible via hard disk I wanted to have a greater appreciation for the sounds that were available back in the earlier years of sampling and see how usable they are to my contemporary ears.
I chose the FMS library which consists of 50 presets, created for the legendary and still much loved Emulator II..
I also wanted to ensure that I bought brand new old stock quality disks. It’s kind of become lore that disk quality started to subside in the 1990s. So I was keen to only buy the oldest new stock I could get. Even so, I still found that the drive failed to load some disks so these were discarded.
In use
A USB 3.5 floppy disk drive. Ableton 11. Digital piano as MIDI controller and 50 floppy disks containing the library and Kontakt to load the samples into.
From startup to sample load the Emulator II typically takes around 24 seconds
Notes from the project
- Some longer samples (Santa Fe) won’t play fully at first key play as the disk drive is still loading the sample. In fact it took 5 key press and hold attempts for the full sample to play. As seen in this screenshot. This is because the disk drive can only process so much information at once.
- Some disks saved presets OK but then failed to load during the project.
- A finer appreciation of the samples bring contained on the disk. As each one has to be loaded separately.
- 25 to 30 seconds from selecting load disk (Kontakt) to sample sounding. (Which is on average the power on to sample load the of the E-MU EII.
- It was fun to capture the texture and bring out some of the subtleties of a few of the sounds in the FMS library. To do this I used the dual EQ from Trash 2.
- Drum kits took the longest to load, having the largest number of samples.
- One disk took so long to load (3:31) that it eventually crashed the program! I have been sat at the computer now for 20 minutes and haven’t recorded a single note!
- Some samples will load in under 10 seconds. As quick as two to three seconds for some.
- Noticed with acc guitar and bass alright delay on note sounding. Didn’t notice that with drums yesterday…
- ERROR:could not load sample (unsupported format) !
- On average 13 seconds to load
- Had to remember that many disks had VARIATIONS of the SAME sample. Slow attack, delay, short / long release etc.
- When you take the disk out the sample goes with it! Showing the program is reading the sample live in-play.
- 23 seconds loading time
- 21.33 seconds loading time
- 16 sec loading time
- Disk integrity: Dysan ✓
- Imo FMS library fared best with the synth sounds: character, stand up today for vintage sounds.
- Cost to buy disks and USB drive total: £120.13 !!
Conclusions
Admittedly the project was fairly costly! But I’m glad I did it. Would I want to go back? In a word no. It’s kind of frustrating to come to load a disk and it’s decided not to work. I can see now why studios often kept back ups of their sample libraries. I enjoyed the tactile nature of them though. When you hold a sample on physical media you really feel like you’re holding the sample as an object. Which is cool. I will add that today’s practice is not only a lot more expedient, it is also a lot cheaper.
A box of 3.5 floppy disks would cost you around 12.99 to 21.00 back in the late 80s. Remember a box of 10 equates to only 14MB!
So to hold the FMS library = 70MB . You’re still looking at nearly 70 pounds!
Whereas today of course you can get over a terabyte for less than that. Proving – as we know, memory costs continue to decline.
So yes, it was an interesting project, but Samplenerd won’t be returning to 💾.