People have been breaking glass, clanging lumps of metal, miking up customised vacuum cleaners and otherwise multifariously mutilating items of hardware for decades in an effort to bring new aural form to their music. "Pretentious gits," I hear some of you chide, yet such activities were in keen anticipation of the coming age of sampling. Indeed, the day of the sampler has been long overdue but now it has arrived with a... well, anything you like, really. Noises are becoming such an integral textural part of modern music that now anything that makes a sound is a potential musical instrument. People hardly dare open a biscuit tin or slam a car door these days for fear that some maniacal samplophile might leap out and quantise them.

Outside of the keyboard market sampling first came about as an extension of a delay line's ability to write a programme (a sound) into its digital memory (RAM) and then read it out again a predetermined time later. A sampler simply holds the programme in RAM and reads it out each time it is triggered — either by the touch of a button or by a control signal from another source.

Part of the phenomenal success of AMS digital delay lines (DDL's) has been their ability to act both as a DDL and a sampler. Many producers wouldn't think of starting a session without at least one to hand. The inclusion of full DDL facilities, however, adds considerably to the price and an AMS with a sample time comparable to the Window's would cost around £5,400. So this year, encouraged by the control possibilities of MIDI, a number of companies have brought out purpose-built samplers that have no other purpose in life than to steal other peoples' snare sounds — that is, I mean to sample interesting sounds for musical applications.

Through A Glass Transparently

One particularly interesting example comes from a Swiss company — Giant Electronics — in the form of their Window Recorder. It's a 1U 19" rack mounting unit, using 16-bit linear quantisation and claims an impressive and newly expanded dynamic range of 93dB. It samples at the compact disc Sony 1610 standard rate of 44.1 kHz and has a bandwidth of 20Hz to 20kHz. The model being sold in this country will store up to 12 seconds of program, has an overdub facility, dynamic MIDI control and soon there will be a floppy disk interface for storing a library of sampled sounds. Sounds on disk will have to be loaded back into the Window's RAM before they can be used, but this is a very quick process. Little is known about the specific nature of the impending disk drive, but it is thought that it will cost between £200 and £400. There is a six second version but as the price difference is only about £200 it is unlikely that it will be sold over here. Later this year it will be possible to expand the RAM to 24 seconds.

The 'Window' is nothing more elaborate than a horizontal LED display representing the available RAM. As a sound is written into memory the green LED's trace from left to right as the 12 seconds are used up. Similarly, the LED's indicate present position in memory for read (playback) and edit functions. The input XLR is sensibly mounted on the front panel with an input trim and a single LED to indicate optimum record level — it would have been nice to see better level indication with maybe a three or four LED ladder, but it's a small point. Having been set in the record ready mode, the sampler waits until it sees audio at its input before it starts sampling, and in fact there is a very short (those at UK agents Syco Systems think it's 0.22ms) delay. This delay lends the device another useful role as a very effective phaser: if you record something and then overdub exactly the same thing, somehow the delay between the two signals is swept (nobody seems to know how or why) thus creating the comb filtering effect that we all know as phasing.

Nudge Nudge

Once a sample has been recorded into memory its start and finish points can be edited via a pair of nudge buttons. Each touch of a button will read forwards or backwards another increment the length of which can be adjusted in six steps from 0.22ms — which is extremely slow. This allows you to select the edit points very accurately, which of course is important if you're trying to rip a specific sound off from a complicated arrangement — or even if you're adjusting your own home-grown samples to fit a specific purpose. It works very much like the edit mode on a tape machine where you manually edge the tape back and forth over the replay head to find a precise cut point.

Having topped and tailed the sample it can be triggered to read out forwards or backwards in one of two ways: 1. An audio input — for example a drum machine to trigger a sampled snare sound, or in fact a real mike-up snare played live could be used if the sampled sound is preferred. 2. Via MIDI, which also allows volume and pitch (+/-one octave) to be controlled from a velocity sensitive keyboard, although obviously no touch sensitive filtering is available to give that 'true simulated' response whereby sounds get brighter as they get louder. Pitch can also be altered from a panel control and is actually made to take place by simply changing the rate at which the information is read out — double the speed results in a rise of one octave and a resultant halving of the sample playback time; halving the read speed has the opposite effect. Older models also have a CV and gate trigger facility, but these are to be discontinued.

MIDI

The unit can operate in both Omni and Poly MIDI modes, ie it can be assigned to receive information on any one of the 16 channels. Theoretically this means that you could utilise two or more Window Recorders for multi-sampling, using a mother keyboard with a multiway splittable keyboard that was able to assign the different octaves of its keyboard to different MIDI channels. Even as it stands, however, it would be cheaper to buy a polyphonic sampling keyboard.

In addition to a straight overdub capability it is possible to mark, again very precisely, the start and finish points of a section within the overall sample into which you want to drop another sound. It's not unlike dropping in and out on a tape recorder. It's also possible to create a loop so that as the end of the sample is reached the machine immediately loops back to read from the beginning again — and so on. Using the same editing techniques such loops can be made very accurately, allowing phrases to be repeated continuously without faltering — great for fade outs. However, it would be extremely difficult (in fact generally impossible) to create a continuous sound without a hiccup occurring at the point of flyback.

Listening to an A/B comparison of the playback of a sample of music taken from a compact disc, and the disc itself, the sample actually sounded a little brighter than the original with an apparent presence boost around 5 or 6kHz — which interestingly enough is not dissimilar to the effect of a Sony 1610 recording. I would draw no high-flown conclusions from this, and actually it was probably due to some extent to the fact that the sample was in mono and the original was in stereo — additions and cancellations, etc.

The quality, even after a couple of overdubs, was excellent, and quite as good as the AMS.

Conclusion

For most of us the price of the Window Recorder is still high enough to make it unaffordable as against other less hi-fi forms of sampling, but for those who are AMS sampling addicts, this is a very strong alternative.

MDB WINDOW RECORDER — RRP: £2,995