Instant: £250
Super: £499

Tripping lightly across the seven league bootprints left by the mighty Giant Emulator and his trusty servant, Fairlight, comes a whole new breed of baby-size machines, all offering their own humble interpretation of that all-pervading new philosophy, Sampling.

The gist of this "Sampling" idea is that sounds of any kind can be recorded, and then replayed by a keyboard. The keyboard can change the speed of the playback, thus altering the pitch of the recorded sound; this enables the intelligent keyboard to replay the recorded information in tunings that correspond to the relative notes on the instrument. Thus melody. Clever, eh?

This isn't a phenomenally new idea; in the early 1970s, the Mellotron used a series of tape-loops to exploit its possibilities. But it wasn't until the arrival of the messianic silicon chip that the idea really took off. With the advent of chips, PCMs, and digital technology in general, it became possible to record or "sample" sounds and store them electronically. Having the information about the sampled sound already encoded makes it much easier to deal with, making for more efficient synthesising, and more accurate playback of the recorded sound.

At the top end of the market are such mind-boggling machines as the aforementioned Fairlights and Emulators. These give very high quality reproduction of sampled sounds, because their parts are larger (always useful, so I'm told) and can work faster. Think of their tiny chips as (lumpy) recording tape; the quicker the tape runs, the better the recording quality. But all this fast encoding/recording requires expensive components, which is why these Computer Musical Instruments cost three arms, a leg, and an £8000 mortgage. (Well, there's a bit more to it than that, but we'll let it pass...)

This new generation of sampling toys is, in relation to the big boys, amazingly cheap: the Super Relay will retail from about £500, while little brother Instant Replay should cost half that amount. Obviously, for these prices, signal-to-noise ratios are not extravagant, nor are bandwidths (the "breadth" of frequencies that the machines can reproduce) oceanic in size. But the things they can do... both myself and the Ass Ed found great amusement in singing rude phrases, and then playing tunes with them. This is what Technology is all about.

The Super Replay

Quite simply, these new EH machines are digital tape recorders. They enable you to record any sound, and then instantly replay it, either using the unit's repeating loop, or else triggering the sound through the trigger input. This jack socket can be fed with anything, from the specially provided EH touch-sensitive External Trigger Pad, to the audio outs of a Linn drum; reputedly, any number of pulses, tones and squeaks will activate the replay, which will retrigger every time it "hears" a new signal. This feature means that scratching effects like the fast repeat echoes of Duran Duran's "Reflex" can be achieved with great ease. It also means, if you are so inclined, that it will say "Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-bottom" if you hit it right. By the way, it's not just us at One Two; the manual actually recommends that you do such things, and who are we to argue with the Electro Harmonix Corp?

As for the "occasional" keyboard triggering, the IR needs a carrier tone of 1000Hz fed into the External Frequency jack while the actual signal is being sampled/recorded. This note is not audible on the recording as it acts merely as a locator against which the keyboard identifies the pitching of the Instant Replay's signal (1000Hz is C, two octaves above middle C, and the IR signal is playable for an octave on either side of that.)

In spite of EH's reticence, this method of triggering from the keyboard works quite efficiently. It demands a pure tone from the keyboard to drive it properly, and will take no nonsense from chords and their ilk (the sound disintegrates). Obviously it is not as lush as the Super Replay, which benefits from the multitracking available on the pricier machine, but it does also work. So, if you want to know what "Three Blind Mice" sounds like sung by a fart, then this could well be the machine for you.

Although their frequency responses do not exactly take your breath away, these two digital replay units are important machines. They will bring into the price range of the ordinary musician opportunities to exploit new sounds, opportunities that previously were only open to very, very rich people. There is a danger that they could be treated as mere gimmicks, which would be a great shame as they have the potential to change the sound of that most potent of potents, cheap music. My only hope is that the mind of the cheap musician can cope with these imagination-expanding devices.

The Super Replay comes in the traditional tatty-but-robust all-purpose EH aluminium box ("tin" is more accurate), ready to plug straight into the mains. It offers the user up to four seconds of record time, with a bandwidth that decreases from a tolerable 12.4kHz down to an audibly dodgy 3.1kHz at maximum delay. It's a noisy little swine (EH were never very good at noise suppression circuitry), which almost certainly precludes its use in the studio. But having jollied around with it for a while, it's evident that the SR will be most useful as a writing tool; for toying with new ideas, like harmonies and second guitar parts, it seems well-suited to the role of digital notepad.

It is joyously simple to use: connect up your sound source (mike, guitar, synth, etc) to the audio input, set the recording level (or "Audio Input Sensitivity" as they call it) until the peak LED almost glows red in the loudest moments of your playing, adjust the length of time you want to record using the Pitch slider, and then press the red Record (Erase) button, bottom left. In the top right of the SR, the Record Indicator will now glow red. This shows the machine is ready, poised to record your every warble.

But it won't start until you make a noise, so make your initial note a firm, loud one, or you will run the risk of the SR not starting to record promptly enough. If you hear the unit ticking during recording, do not be alarmed, as it is only the metronome thoughtfully supplied by EH to help you play in time; it gives four clicks over the duration of the recording (the length of which is demonstrated by the flickering of the Record Indicator).

Having laid down the first signal, you can start having fun with it. Set in loop mode, the repeat will go around and around until you tamper with it. You can change the tuning by speeding the loop up with the pitch control; you can vary the signal decay time with the Drum Pad Decay Time slider; you can just play along with what you've got, altering the relative volumes of you and the loop with the Audio Input Blend To Output (catchy names these). Best of all, you can overdub yourself.

Overdubbing involves the same process as First-time recording, except that you press the Record (Superimpose) knob rather than Record (Erase). Hit a note, and it will play your first part while recording a new one. Working this way, you can build up harmonies, multitrack instruments and voices, record things at different pitches (using the pitch control to alter the timing/tuning before overdubbing), and even talk to yourself. The only limitation on this procedure is the gradual degeneration of the original signal, which begins to disappear under a welter of white noise after five or six dubs.

All these facilities may be great fun, but they hardly represent an alternative to the Fairlight. But there is one other feature: lurking in the left-hand side of the SR is a five-pin female DIN socket marked "Connect To Keyboard Synthesiser". This devious attachment, according to the excellent manual, "Allows a keyboard synthesiser with a one volt per octave control voltage and a gating signal, or a trigger pulse and ADSR voltage, to control the replay over a two-octave range." This means that by connecting CV and Gate outputs on instruments like the SH101 and the Pro-One into the Super Replay, you can use the keyboard to control the pitch of the playback: instant monophonic sampling. And it works.

While you're getting your breath back, I'll explain a little: the voltage output from the synthesiser keyboard over-rides the usual function of the pitch slider, permitting accurate modulation of the Super Replay's tuning over a two-octave range: the keys play notes, using the SR's voice. The pitch slider becomes a fine tuning device, enabling you to ensure that the playback from the keys is the same pitch as the original recording. To check this, play the note an octave up from the lowest on the keyboard, which should be the same pitch as the original. If it's not, simply adjust the pitch slider.

Despite the odd quibble over background noise levels, this machine is very impressive. As you'd expect, the duration of the recorded noise increases or decreases as you play below or above the original, but the timing problems this can cause are partly alleviated by the fact that the SR carries on retriggering if a note is held down. On voices, an overdubbed three-part harmony was made to sound most heavenly as the fingers whizzed up and down the keys. It's possible to use the synth as a sound source for the Super Replay without being bothered about using particular waveforms, filtering etc, as these have no effect on the triggering. Anyone for cheap sampling?

Instant Replay

Anyone for even cheaper sampling?
The Instant Replay offers many of the same facilities as the Super, but for half the price (around £250). it only gives two seconds of record time, but the definition (no figures were available) was OK even at maximum delay. You can record, loop, and trigger from touch-sensitive external sources, though the IR lacks the overdub option, and the mild sophistication of the Gate/CV keyboard interface. There is an alternative method of triggering from a keyboard.

Like the SR, the Instant Replay has a trigger sensitivity control, which permits you to adjust how effective your hammering on the drum-pad will be, in terms of dynamic reproduction. Unlike the SR, the Instant Replay uses knobs instead of sliders, which means less accurate adjustment of relative levels and tempos.

As for the "occasional" keyboard triggering, the IR needs a carrier tone of 1000Hz fed into the External Frequency jack while the actual signal is being sampled/recorded. This note is not audible on the recording as it acts merely as a locator against which the keyboard identifies the pitching of the Instant Replay's signal (1000Hz is C, two octaves above middle C, and the IR signal is playable for an octave on either side).

In spite of EH's reticence, this method of triggering from the keyboard works quite efficiently. It demands a pure tone from the keyboard to drive it properly, and will take no nonsense from chords and their ilk (the sound disintegrates). Obviously it is not as lush as the Super Replay, which benefits from the multitracking available on the pricier machine, but it does also work. So, if you want to know what "Three Blind Mice" sounds like sung by a fart, then this could well be the machine for you.

Although their frequency responses do not exactly take your breath away, these two digital replay units are important machines. They will bring into the price range of the ordinary musician opportunities to exploit new sounds, opportunities that previously were only open to very, very rich people. There is a danger that they could be treated as mere gimmicks, which would be a great shame as they have the potential to change the sound of that most potent of potents, cheap music. My only hope is that the mind of the cheap musician can cope with these imagination-expanding devices.