Sampler (musical instrument)

• 1. Introduction

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  The sampler is an electronic musical instrument that records or loads portions of sound, then plays them back under musical control. It is the reason a hip-hop producer in 1988 could replay a four-second drum break indefinitely, the reason a pop record from the 1980s could carry the sound of a real orchestra without hiring one, and the reason the line between recording and composition blurred into something new.

  Before the sampler existed, musicians who wanted to use recorded sound in live performance carried the answer around in a heavy wooden cabinet full of tape. Every key pressed triggered a strip of magnetic tape running past a playhead. Change the sound, change the tapes. The instrument was limited to three octaves at the most. That was the world the sampler replaced.

  The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a technology rooted in a London studio in the early 1970s become the instrument of hip-hop a decade and a half later? What drove prices from $500,000 systems used by professional studios down to the sub-$2000 keyboards that working musicians could finally afford? And what happens when the same device that can capture a dog barking or a typewriter clacking gets handed to producers like Trevor Horn, who used it to reshape the sound of an entire decade?

• 2. Tape to Digital

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  Peter Zinovieff, Peter Grogono, and David Cockerell built the EMS Musys system at their London studio in Putney around 1969. It ran on two Digital Equipment PDP-8 minicomputers and carried 12,000 bytes of core memory backed up by a 32-kilobyte hard drive and DecTape storage. The earliest digital sampling work done on that system was recorded during 1971 and 1972 for composer Harrison Birtwistle's piece "Chronometer," which was released in 1975. That makes a west London studio the birthplace of digital sampling.

  The first commercially available sampling synthesizer came in 1976 from Harry Mendell's Computer Music Inc., a company started in New Jersey in 1972. His Melodian was built around Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-8 computer and could sample at up to 22 kHz using 12-bit analog-to-digital conversion. Stevie Wonder was the first prominent artist to use it, on his 1979 album Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants."

  Polyphony arrived three years later with the Fairlight CMI, an Australian instrument first available in 1979 that sampled at 8 bits per sample and a rate of 24 kHz. It had started life as the Qasar M8, a handwired prototype that, according to those who built it, took two hours to boot. Fairlight Instruments was founded in Sydney in 1975 by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, originally as a manufacturer of video special effects equipment. The leap from video effects to musical instruments was an unusual one. The CMI retailed for around $25,000 and was equipped with two six-octave keyboards and an interactive video display where soundwaves could be edited or drawn using a light pen.

• 3. Japan's Contribution

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  Toshiba introduced the LMD-649 in Japan in 1981, and it represented a genuine technical advance over its predecessors. Engineer Kenji Murata built the device specifically for the electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra, and it recorded and played back pulse-code modulation samples at 12-bit audio depth and a 50 kHz sampling rate, with 128 kilobytes of dynamic RAM for storage. Those specifications put it well ahead of the Fairlight's 8-bit, 24 kHz capabilities.

  Yellow Magic Orchestra used the LMD-649 extensively on their 1981 album Technodelic, building pieces around sampling and looping in ways that were genuinely new. The machine also reached other Japanese synthpop artists of the early 1980s, including Chiemi Manabe and Logic System. Its influence stayed largely within Japan, which meant the broader music world did not absorb its lessons as quickly as it might have.

  Akai's entry into the sampler market arrived in 1984, when Roger Linn, creator of the Linn LM-1, the Linn 9000, and the LinnDrum, partnered with the Japanese corporation to produce affordable instruments. The first result was the S612, a 12-bit digital sampler module. That collaboration would eventually produce the MPC series, which would become synonymous with a particular approach to making records.

• 4. The Price Problem

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  The Synclavier System, manufactured by New England Digital and first released in 1977, set the ceiling for what the professional market would bear. The highest price ever paid for one was around $500,000, though average systems sold for closer to $200,000 to $300,000. That placed the instrument in recording studios and production suites, not in the hands of most working musicians. It competed directly with the Fairlight CMI in that upper tier.

  By 1989, Keyboard Magazine had published a comparison of samplers from fourteen manufacturers, including Akai, Casio, E-MU, Ensoniq, Fairlight, Korg, Kurzweil, New England Digital, Oberheim, Roland, Sequential, Simmons, WaveFrame, and Yamaha. The price range across those 31 units spanned from $800 to $250,000. That spread tells the story of a market in transition.

  The E-mu Emulator arrived in 1981 as a response to exactly this problem. The company had suffered a complete failure with its earlier Audity, which carried a price tag of $70,000, and the Emulator was built to bring sampling within reach of a broader audience. It came in 2-note, 4-note, and 8-note polyphonic versions and featured a maximum sampling rate of 27.7 kHz with 128 kilobytes of memory. E-mu dropped the 2-note version due to limited interest. The name itself came from a search through a thesaurus. The Emulator brought the price under $10,000, but the genuinely affordable moment came in 1985 with the Ensoniq Mirage, followed the next year by the E-mu Emax, which sold for under $2,000.

• 5. Hip-Hop and the MPC

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  The E-mu SP-1200 was released in August 1987 and changed the relationship between samplers and popular music in the late 1980s. Its 12-bit sampling engine gave instruments a warmth and gave drums a gritty punch that producers found preferable to cleaner digital alternatives. It carried ten seconds of sample time split across four sections of 2.5 seconds each. Those technical constraints became aesthetic preferences that persist today.

  Akai built on that momentum with the MPC60 in 1988, a machine that Roger Linn helped shape. It was the first Akai sampler not mounted in a rack and the first to feature touch-sensitive trigger pads, the design that would define the MPC line for decades. The MPC60 became the most influential sampler in hip-hop music. That same year Akai also released the S950, an improved version of the S900 with a maximum sample frequency of 48 kHz.

  Akai had already pioneered techniques that changed how producers worked with recorded material. Crossfade looping smoothed the transitions at the points where a sample repeated. Time-stretch allowed producers to make a sample longer or shorter without changing its pitch, and pitch-shifting allowed the reverse. Those capabilities turned a sampler from a playback device into something closer to a compositional tool.

• 6. Trevor Horn and the Fairlight Sound

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  Trevor Horn, described in the source as the "Man who invented the eighties," first applied his sampling techniques on Adventures in Modern Recording, the second studio album released under the name of his project The Buggles. Horn said he was "quite fascinated by Fairlight brass and all of those kind of things that Geoffrey and I had started messing around with before he went off to join Asia." The Fairlight CMI's sound was baked into his working method from the start.

  Those techniques he developed on Adventures would carry forward into records he produced for other artists. Slave to the Rhythm by Grace Jones, Art of Noise's The Seduction of Claude Debussy, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome all bear the marks of that Fairlight-centered approach. Art of Noise themselves were notable Fairlight users, as were Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock, Yello, Pet Shop Boys, Jean Michel Jarre, Duran Duran, and Kate Bush.

  The Fairlight's capabilities grew through successive models. The Series IIx raised the sampling rate to 32 kHz and added basic MIDI functionality for the first time. The Series III, released in 1985, brought the instrument to CD quality at 16-bit, 44.1 kHz, and added SMPTE time code support. That progression from the 8-bit, 24 kHz original to CD-quality audio in six years reflects the speed at which digital audio technology moved during that period.

• 7. Memory, Cost, and Modern Use

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  Memory shaped everything about early samplers. A full piano sampled at standard quality, with 22 samples per layer across three layers at 44.1 kHz in stereo, with an average sample length of ten seconds, requires roughly 120 megabytes of storage. Using loops to shorten the average sample length to two seconds could trim that footprint to 24 megabytes. A modern piano sample library can run anywhere from 500 megabytes to 18 gigabytes.

  In 1989, a review of 31 samplers found that only four could expand beyond 10 megabytes of memory: the E-MU Emulator III at 16 megabytes, the Fairlight CMI 3 at 28 megabytes, the NED Synclavier at 96 megabytes, and the WaveFrame AudioFrame at 120 megabytes. The cost of 32 megabytes of RAM in 1989 was $7,500. By 2009 the same amount cost 38 cents. By 2019-32 gigabytes cost $90 and 32 megabytes cost a fraction of a cent.

  By the 2010s, the music workstation had absorbed sampling so thoroughly that most modern instruments perform complex sample editing as a matter of course. Samplers and traditional Foley artists share responsibility for the sound effects heard in film and television. Pitch-shifting and other alterations that once took many hours of tape work can now be accomplished with digital techniques in a fraction of that time. The Synclavier, which cost up to $500,000 in its day, remains in use in many studios even now.