Thursday 22 January 2015

Digital Recording tips - Sampling


Sampling

     Sampling for those who don’t know by now is the conversion of analogue sound into a digital format that is to say for those who remember cassettes and tape recorders, sound on a tape, is stored as electromagnetic information as a continuous strip which is picked up as it passes a coil of wire (the Playback head) and boosted to an audible level through an amplifier. Sampling effectively cuts the “sound strip” up into thousands of small sections almost like cutting the strip of tape into a thousand or more pieces and then converts each section into a number, over a one second period, anything from a few thousand to usually 44100 (44.1 kHz ) sections (or samples) a second is common for CD quality.

       Studios can operate at 48 kHz or more for initial recordings for higher quality capture of sound, converting down to 44.1 kHz when eventually mastering onto CD. From personal experience, I could tell the difference between 44.1kHz and 48kHz when recording and playing back, but at 48kHz, nobody could tell the difference between someone talking live and the same voice being played back after recording it!. Can anyone remember that phrase “Is it live, or is it Memorex”? Well I was caught out many a time thinking a voice recorded was singing or talking live and vise versa.

      These days Sampling usually means copying a drum loop or piece of music from someone else’s music, or using a sound such as a bowed string, capturing a small snippet of it and then looping the sound so it is a continuous note when played back, then using a master keyboard, triggering the sound to play and/or pitching up or down the sound to make different notes and harmonies by playing 2 or more notes (triggers) at the same time.



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