Back when I only made music in the context of working with a band, the keyboards that I used were really of the what’s-the-maximum-number-of-sounds-I-can-get-out-of-it variety. Like the Proteus MPS and the JV-2080. During a rehearsal it’s much easier to pull up the Farfisa patch than to try to cobble one together using sine waves, envelopes and a filter.
Lately, I find I’m using equipment that’s quirky or complicated. It’s because unlike in 1998, there are an infinite number of ways to get immediate, pre-programmed sounds. Say I want a detuned, sort of honky-tonk piano sound. Today, I might fire up a software sampler like Kontakt, where I found…
Here’s one.
…a fully customizable detuned piano instrument. So pretty much any normal sound you need is ready to go.
Because that’s boring, I think it’s also helping drive the current fascination with old analog polysynths. For example, the Roland Juno 106, released in 1984 for $1095, dipped in price to about $350 in the ’90s, and you’ll shell out about $1300 for a pristine one, today. Check out ebay…
The #4 synthesizer? Really?
You can’t get a realistic detuned piano sound out of it, but you can fuck around with the sliders for a while to get something kinda sorta similarish. Meanwhile, the drummer went to have a cigarette, and he’s probably not coming back because he’s a drummer and got lost.
Anyway. People are overpaying for analog hardware because the sound design part is really fun, and there’s no longer any need to spend time replicating natural instruments when they’re already just there to use. The main culprit? Samplers.
Samplers are essentially machines that play loops of pre-recorded audio. One of the earliest drum machines (c. 1949) was actually a sampler, which played drum loops on literal loops of magnetic tape: The Chamberlin Rhythmate.
Chamberlin also made tape-based string/organ sampler, which was copied/stolen(?) for the more heavily marketed Mellotron:
Just as digital replaced tape elsewhere, samplers soon became electronic instruments. Not surprisingly, they also progressed from very expensive to relatively inexpensive.
- Synclavier: 1980, $250,000, see Francesco Zappa
- Fairlight CMI: 1982, $70,000, see Peter Gabriel (1982)
- E-mu Emulator II: 1984, $10,000, see Black Celebration
- Akai S900: 1986, $3,700, see everything released in 1987
By the time we get to the end of the ’80s, the sampling craze has pretty much ended. Once you’re sampling at 48kHz with a bit depth of 24 (better than the human ear can discern), and infinite sampling length (thanks to hard drives), there wasn’t much more to sell to musicians and studios.
The final nail in the coffin for hardware samplers seemed to be the ROMpler. This was a sampler that no longer had the ability to record new samples, but just played back professionally recorded, processed and looped samples. Since someone had already sampled the shakuhachi, we really didn’t need to do it over again. Why not just use a synth that had it pre-loaded? Enter the E-mu Proteus in 1989. For $999. The end.
Here’s what Sound On Sound said:
The number of people like me who wanted to sample was limited. Most people just wanted to get on and write music with their computer sequencer, and that is what the Proteus let you do, in a go-anywhere format… Sampler sales would take a dive and never quite recover, because the Proteus did what most people were actually using samplers for back then.
Ten years later, electronic musicians are using (computer based) samplers for everything, thanks to products like Nemesys Gigasampler (1998), Sonic Foundry Acid (1998) and Ableton Live (2001).
Will the hardware sampler live again? Yep…