Synthesizer

A synthesizer is a variety of box-type devices connected to each other, and finally connected to a keyboard. When you press a keyboard, a unit containing an oscillator makes a sound, and some other box device, a filter, controls the timbre of that sound. An amplifier will control volume, etc.

Sampler

What exactly is a sampler? In fact, I have mentioned it in some articles before. Whether it is traditional hard sound sources or soft sound sources, their timbres are produced in two ways. The first is the synthesis method, which is the synthesizer. They generate sound through various complex algorithms. As we have said before, in fact, they are artificially creating sound waveforms out of thin air.

The other method is sampling. The sound of the sampler is not "calculated" out of thin air, but comes from recordings of real instruments.

Let me give you a very vivid example. Find a good piano and put it in the recording studio. Find a piano master and ask him to play the piano from the lowest bass to the highest note. Play each key in turn with various strengths, so that every sound is recorded. Then, each sound material will be recorded and assigned to each key of the MIDI keyboard through a software. Finally, I played C on the MIDI keyboard, and the sound coming out of the speaker was the C that the master just played.

This software is a sampler. The sampler is built on this principle. So, if the specialty of a synthesizer is to synthesize a variety of sounds that are present and absent in nature, then a sampler is to perfectly reproduce the true sound of an instrument. In fact, many of the soft sound source plug-ins we mentioned in previous articles, such as Golden Edition Orchestra, are samplers. Even the virtual guitarist and stuff are all samples. It can be said that the traditional timbre of today's sound sources is almost no longer "synthesized out of thin air", but completely uses real recordings. The same goes for many hardware synthesizers.

A few years ago, the sampler was a specialized machine. And the price is very expensive. The reason is simple - computers at that time couldn't handle audio. So if you want to use audio sampling, you must use a specialized sampler.

The price of hardware samplers is so expensive that it can be said that it is not acceptable to ordinary people. Because a hard sampler is actually a computer. Despite this, countless musicians spent a lot of money to buy hard samplers at that time. But unfortunately, in just two or three years, computer performance has developed to the point where playing audio is no longer a problem. Hardware samplers were completely eliminated. The samplers we use now are all software. Compared with hardware samplers, software is not only easier to use, but more importantly, it directly uses algorithms to export audio without the need to record it again like hardware. Therefore, the sound quality is guaranteed to the highest level.