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Greengate DS3 Sampler | |
Article from In Tune, June 1985 |
Nick Graham tries an Apple, a Broken Bottle and a Microphone? Is this the future of high tech?
In most of their adverts, the Greengate people show a picture of an Apple IIe computer, a keyboard and a microphone placed next to a broken bottle. This implies that, with a microphone plugged into the Apple, the sound of the broken bottle can be sampled and stored in the computer's memory. Once there, the sound can be played on the musical keyboard at any pitch. Simple as that - or is it?
Not quite; because it's not possible for an ordinary micro-computer to understand a signal from a microphone (let alone store it and regurgitate it as sound) without a suitable interface - and this is where Greengate come in. They have designed a slot-in card which, once inside the Apple (slot 5), can convert incoming electrical signals from a transducer into something the computer can understand and remember. In fact the sound can be reproduced at any pitch and in four-note polyphony, thus turning the Apple computer into a versatile sampling instrument. The card which makes all this and more possible is called the DS3 - and that's where I come in, because I bought one myself not three weeks ago! (mad fool! -Ed.)
Since the card would have been useless on its own, I also bought an Apple IIe and two disc drives. I didn't however, buy the musical keyboard which Greengate supply, so my sounds have to be controlled from the QWERTY keyboard. One of their promises was to produce a MIDI interface (another slot-in card) in the near future, and I decided to wait for that so that I could play my sounds from one of my two touch-sensitive MIDI keyboards.
I must admit that since I took delivery I haven't had very much time to explore the full possibilities of the DS3, so this review will be limited to the actual sampling and waveform editing of sound, leaving the extensive sequencing and synchronising capability until a later date. Before I delve into this, however, a brief description of the processes involved in sampling might be useful.
Many of you may stop reading at this point and continue further down the page because you already understand - but it's surprising how many experienced musicians don't know the ins and outs of it. This is amazing, especially as the sampling of real sounds plays such a large part in the music of today. For those interested, please have a look at the diagram, which shows all the links in the chain. (This bears particular information relating to the DS3/Apple system, but in fact this chain is true for sampling devices generally.)
Behind the Greengate - Greengate DS3
(ES Dec 84)
Greengate
(12T Sep 86)
Greengate DS3 Sampling System
(12T Nov 84)
Browse category: Sampler > Greengate
Review by Nick Graham
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