Amiga Samplers (technical) - FutureSound / Master Sound / Stereo Master

g'day everyone and welcome to a two-part special on a mega sampling technology now I've already done a video that brushes over the techniques for making a track start to finish using tracker software but I wanted to look at what you get in the box with these our old-school samplers because there was a lot of promise about what you could make just with this sampler and for instance the floppy disk that came with the box will also open up some of these samplers and have a bit of a look at how they got them so cheap it's going to be a bit of a technical journey but that's all part of the fun of looking at amiga samplers let's go down that rabbit hole now a good place to start is with one of the original Amiga 1000 sample is because this is how you should build a sampler it retailed for a hundred and seventy five dollars and was hand assembled in Massachusetts USA so the Future Sound was one of the very first Omega sounds capture devices as far as I'm aware and you can see it has a gain control on the front as well as a line in socket and a microphone socket and in fact it shipped with the microphone as part of the package and you could also leave your printer plugged in this is a pass through which meant you can have whatever device was usually plugged into your parallel port and that would go off to your printer for instance and when you were using the future sound you would tap the little button that would light up and the future sound would operate and when you tapped it off again it would go back to being the printer now in the case of this I've just plugged in a MIDI device so you could use your synthesizers plugged into this and you could have your future sound just tap in when you need it so here's the Future Sound software and I've got it emulating because I don't own an Amiga 1000 but you'll be able to see it's a very developer style tool and when you go to open a file you'll see a whole load of folders with development tools for different platforms and what we're gonna do today is open one of the samples that came with the future sound take us back the way we're supposed to be mr. Sulu Bob back to one wow I wonder if they cleared the copyright on that one so let's have a very quick look in the future sound I really do love these old boxes they're so elegant with the way they work and it will just flip off the top will flip off and there we go well you can see that we got it upside down look at that even if you don't know much about electronics oh you can probably look at this and see that there's some pretty gorgeous design in here and we're not cutting costs at this point you've got your mic socket there which of course feeds into your your op amp here this is a quad up amp so you've got four of them in here and you'll see a bit of the repetitive circuitry around the outside here we've been got the ADC here which converts from your analog signal over here into a digital signal that can be sent to your parallel port and you can see a bit of switching logic down here and a eight-way flip-flop here as well and I assume that is for the on/off button so that when you tap that button it hijacks the pins that it needs for the circuit and when you put it into bypass mode it just passes them back out to the the real world out here so apart from that there is a chip here that is missing and I would say that this is a multi-purpose board and might have a video sampler or something like that either way this is how a sample should be built in particular with the preamp circuitry that's sitting on the top here this is what's going to be missing I'm guessing once we start looking at the cut-price samplers that are coming next so remember that that's how you should build a sampler now let's see what we get with a cheap sampler all right so first in the Box editions here we've got the master sound by a company called micro deal these guys do a whole bunch of software and things back in the day but one thing they had a crack out pretty early on was a sounds sampler solution which is right here and you can see on the back of the box it promises a bunch of things but the most interesting one here is this is simple to record as tapping Keys on the computer's keyboard and it allows you to play back your own secret sounds from the sequencer while displaying an iff picture file great for creating your own public domain disks I think I know what I'm doing today and inside the box as you'd expect the floppy disk for the software a semi comprehensive manual here with information on how the sequence of works which might come in handy later on and the sampler itself with a little socket on the top I would assume this is mono let's pop the top off and have a look so getting inside this thing is quite interesting it's just got these little tabs here that basically break open there we go no screwdriver required oh and what is in the box nothing okay so this is oh it's broken but this is obviously a mono input but have a look at this it's a stereo jack you can see it's actually here it's got the pin there that's unused it's a stereo jack and just has a mono input and here's our money shot this is the 80 75 76 from the 18th week of 1991 I might get a bit geeky for a second and talk about this chip this chip is very common to sampling technology in the 1980s it was made for many many years in fact you can still buy a derivative of this chip now and what this chip does is it runs in two modes unipolar and bipolar mode unipolar is where it will take the value 0 and return a 0 bit and it'll take whatever the maximum voltage is in return a value between 0 and 255 depending on your voltage now we obviously are going to run in what's called bipolar mode because when you have a speaker if you think at it it's a bipolar device it pushes out and it pulls back and if in fact it rests in the middle but when it's moving it's moving in and it's moving out and this is also known as AC voltage it pushes into the positive and it pulls into the negative so it has a positive and a negative swing and if it's sitting in its middle position doing nothing it means that this is going to be value 127 and that would mean if you had this sample of plugged in and you pulled it out it would suddenly drop to zero and your Omega would go bang or wouldn't go banging speakers we've got bang and the value would just slam down to zero as the bits disappearing as you put the back in as well it would go crack and jump back to the 127 value this is called signed data where your zero-point is effectively your halfway point through the bite and you can go positive 127 and negative 127 and you've got your zero point in the middle so that's what this circuitry around here is doing it's providing a reference voltage one of these will be a reference pin I think it's this one this has no level controls or anything like that at what you plug in is what it gets and you have to set the volume externally in order to set the volume on this but let's put it back together and have a look and put this wire back on far on solving iron pre-cell to the tip and I'm just sorry that's a terrible bit of soldering there but that'll hold and it's funny because it naturally wants to sit this way up but you actually have to flip it and it sort of sits like this look at this there's no screws it basically holds and strain relieves itself from these little plastic tabs here on either side there's nothing holding this piece of metal or anything it's purely just the bit of plastic and the bit of plastic here pushing down on top that holds it together it's very clever in the fact it's so cheap there we go there's our master sound restored and ready to roll so we simply plug it in the Omega and put the floppy disk in with the software and we're right to go it'll come up with a splash screen yeah always click on that and then the software will up here 1989 thanks fairy and Paul first we need some wave form so I'll hit record on one of my old house tracks and we'll see what it sounds like [Music] and what we're listening to now is the loop through the Omega and so if we stop the recording and press play we should hear something very similar so that's a playback on what we just recorded now it's a little muffling so what I'm going to do is crank up the sample rate look at this the sample rate goes right the way up to fifty five point nine kilohertz which is really high even by today's standards and nineteen eighty nine this would have been huge and it's a bit muffling so what's going to do is jump in and turn the filter off [Music] even though we run out of memory in seven seconds you can hear the clarity in that recording it's fantastic even if we drop the sample rate so even at thirty kilohertz I mean that's a really good sounding recording especially for a super cheap sampler a feature of any waveform editor is to be able to set an in and an out point and you can see here I've got my two points if I can click them and that will allow me to select a region and I can zoom in once I've selected a region and get a much cleaner view set and in and an out point and try to loop it so another feature we have here is a double speed button and if we click at least double the speed what it's going to do is half the length and double the speed of the sample but we can counteract that by turning the sample rate to exactly half [Music] and it still sounds pretty good so this was a trick you would half the sample rate to get more memory but if you go too low and you can start to hear the crunch come back in there so yeah we've also got features like reverse and fade in and fade out and that's pretty much all the features you've got you do have a spectrum analyzer that looks super cool and an oscilloscope as well both that just analyze the input but they don't pass through the audio or anything so you can't actually hear what's going on and you've also got this sequencer [Music] excellent so we'll switch to our sequencer and you can see this is our virtual sequencer here and we're going to isolate a kick drum and we're going to program that into position number one and you can see it thinks about it and then in the grid on the right hand side here you can see it's in memory that little square symbolizes that and we'll put our snare in and we'll put a hi-hat in as well all right let's have a listen to all our samples so I'm selecting which sample we want to listen to using the numeric keypad and triggering it using the keyboard so yeah a little tricky but let's try adding some parts this is verse ly a hi-hat part and we're going to record them to channel 1 and hit record on our virtual tape recorder and do a live tag and then we're going to switch to channel 2 and drop in a kick drum [Music] we're going to overdub a snare drum and you can hear the timings all over the place and that's partially because I'm doing it live but also because it snaps it to the nearest 125th of a second that's not a lot of resolution put a bass line in there as well [Music] and we'll finally put some chords in alright let's have a listen to what we've got just press rewind there on our virtual tape machine and that is as much as you can do in the sequencer you can hear the timing is all over the place I think I was being a little too ambitious so if we're gonna make this public domain demo disk let's maybe keep it to one channel with some largest slabs of audio so something that was really exciting back in the day was when you got a floppy disk that had a long-form audio track on it and because he didn't have enough memory to fit a full track on a floppy disk what you would do is sample a track and take the verses and the choruses and loop them in special ways like I'm doing here and I was quite surprised with how good this was sounding and then I hit a pretty serious show-stopping problem ah that must be all the memory we've got Oh No ah so devastated all right just chopping at the end there buddy we have to swap the disk and I've prepared a disk here which should allow us to save master seek it's EQ all right here we go [Laughter] I'm so excited right now this sequencer really sucks aw we've saved alright let's test it so we've got an Amiga booted and fingers crossed it should work looks like it's working to me let it off look at that [Music] so there we go you can hear the verse loop there and who are the grand prix well that's actually a bands I playing so I use this track because there's a lot of repetition in the verses and the choruses and it just seemed that it would loop quite well and exit out to eat the mouse button and it says write to us for a fan pack so that's about it for the master sound the only final thing to do is to listen to the demo that came on the disc I can't listen anymore of that it's it's seagulls with Run DMC like I don't know there's no words to describe this demo no I can't listen to it alright say yes this is very version one software I mean no one in their right mind would ever try to use this sequencer for anything they would use a tracker ah and and do all their music in that but this was really about what comes in the box because it's supposed to come with at least the minimal amount of software to be able to do something and I guess it's really is the minimum but this whole tape counter logic and not having an events list or anything where you can tighten the timing up or quantize anything to get it in a grid it's real minimal but micro deal kept working on their software and within a year that come up with a new sampler look at this that wins prizes I reckon for one of the best ever box designs for any audio product ever how can you not buy that you just have to it's amazing it's the stereo master you can see we've got the software as you'd expect the cartridge which this time has a stereo input and you can see compared to the master sound behave managed to slice a good part of the the cartridge you've got here the manual as well and this has got quite a lot of information in it do you got a cable with it and of course more importantly a nice color brochure for all the other software so that's inside the box let's have a quick look inside the stereo master and it's another one of these clip boxes obviously all the rage for budget electronics in the name no we're in like Flynn as they say ok so this is the rear master and it's an even smaller board I think than the master sound but at least it's stereo you can see it has three cables and we have an extra chip in here alright let's have a look at what we got well that's how you do stereo on a budget kids look at this this is great we got the same mono converter here this is um the same converter we had in the master sound here but what we're doing instead of having two converters for stereo one for left and one right we're using a switch here which is a bilateral switch or quad bilateral switch and that's taking the left and right input and it's switching between left and right every time it samples so it'll sample from the left hand side it'll sample from the right hand side left hand side something from the right center switches back and forth depending on if it's in order and even sample because if you had two ADCs the problem would be that you still knit you can only still send one at a time to your output so you would have to have a sample and hold in each one and then dump one out and then call the next one so you'd still be switching between the two anyway except you could obviously manage your ADC a little bit better if you did that but the thing is this chip is the most expensive chip in the whole lot in fact this chip is probably worth more than almost everything else in this package of part from the connector so this chip was a very cheap way of being able to do stereo but it half's your sample rate so that's always worth keeping in mind if you even if you sent it a mono signal find your left channel would be slightly different to your right channel that's getting very nerdy but just trust me when I say this is a very cheap way to do stereo but it's ingenious you know I'll give that but of course what we really want to be ingenious is the software so let's have a bit of a look and you can see our friends Fairy and Paula back with another iteration of their software and there's that logo again ah I love it all right we're in and you can see they've improved things first of all they've tidied up the interface they put a lot of the key features as buttons down the bottom so let's crank that sample rate and hit record and we get an error so it's telling as it can't sample over 20 7.9 kilohertz which is still pretty high so let's go with that and that is your sample time but if you think about it it's about right because in stereo you're using double the amount of memory and this Amiga even though it has an expansion of half a Meg only has a total of 1 Meg of memory there's no graphics card either and when you consider that it's having to use the main memory of the system for graphics as well as the operating system and the program data and the sequence data for the notes plus when you put a sample into the sequencer it actually copies it again in memory so yeah that's not a lot of sample time is it so you can hear this as a series of drums and I'm gonna show you an alternate display mode which is my favorite feature of this program check that out it's like the old Fairlight and you can see that it's showing you frequency versus time and you can see each of those samples plotted out in front of you let's zoom into that very last sample and if we listen to it slowly you can see that donk at the start of it and then the way it just ferries out into a sort of a lower bandwidth sound as it trails into the distance arts gorgeous but as pretty as that looks let's get technical with how things sound I'm recording a frequency sweep from 20 Hertz to 40 kilohertz and let's have a listen on the Omega whoa what happened at the end there let's have a listen to that again something is definitely going crazy here so you can see how logarithmic sweep going there and just when you think it's over all of these additional sounds start coming up I mean what are these sounds let's have a bit of a look at this and you can see there's some things here that you would expect mayn't um for instance you know that's the plugs and things that are my room causing a bit of harm you'd expect that and then there's the harmonic distortion you expect that we're going in and out of analog sockets but this at the end is where the mystery starts to happen although if you look at it and you look at the frequencies which these dips are happening at you'll notice that it's a multiple or a division of our sample rate and our sample rates 14 kilohertz and there are those frequencies at 7 14 and 28 and you can see that's where each of these dips out into a a weird land of void but of course this is known as aliasing and all aliasing means is if you don't have enough sample points to join the dots and your dot start getting slower than your frequency it's gonna start generating new frequencies and this is what you're hearing ultimately what's happening is we're not averaging out our sound at the higher frequency domain so what you do is put a pass filter on anything that you sample before you sample it but the sampler is cheap enough not to do that and so you get this but do you actually notice it [Music] [Applause] not on everything but let me give you three more examples for a kid playing around with the sample app you'd probably get away with it but there's something a little bit more serious for me and that is that the stereo master is filtering out audio in the low frequency domain and it's doing it by a fair bit that's a good 9 decibels at the start there so that means that a nice beefy bass is kind of being cut out [Music] this did mean that when I was previously playing with the stereo master I was consistently cranking up the base and also sampling out of the headphone socket and this was because of another issue due to the fact we didn't have the preamp have our more expensive sample is you can see that the input on the stereo master is actually really low especially compared to the master sound and this is using a consumer Lian level device which you know tape decks and CD players were all set to consumer level it was a standard and it should be giving a really chunky audio and that's why in the previous video I had all my audio sampling out of a headphone socket so I could really get a massive voltage into the stereo master but it's way higher than any line level should be giving so technically the stereo master is way out of spec but whatever let's have a look at the sequencer for starters you can use the numeric keypad to enter notes directly without having to choose a pitch as well and you've got an events list finally and a tempo control check this out so what this means is if you insert a bunch of notes and unfortunately there's no automatic way of doing this you just have to hammer them in with the insert button but eventually you get enough notes in there that you can press play and get yourself something with locked timing that you can jam on top of so let's add some drums to that now those drums were pretty tight they weren't perfect but they were very close so let's replay that and you can hear the timings change and this wouldn't matter if you could change the notes in the sequence but you can't edit anything in the sequence you have to play it live and then on my third attempt the software crashed but when I rebooted I decided I would make a drum beat by entering each note in manually and it took a while but this is what I ended up with let's hand it terrible that is painful oh dear I was having a good old time there you can hear one of the problems I had was that I was down to two voices of audio so I did drums and I did bass and then that's it because that's my stereo sound used up and that was one of the issues with recording in stereo you use two channels instead of one because use left and right and normally you'd be using those as mono channels and you'd end up with four channels instead of two channels and there is a bit of an elephant in the room and it is this and testing okay I've got this microphone running through the stereo master and you should be out of here there's a little bit of fuzz as I stop with my words and give a bit more space that fuzz in the background is the 8 bits bottoming out so we're only getting a few values in that quiet range and this is particularly noticeable for voice but it is the reason why a lot of people didn't take these 8-bit samplers so seriously but I think as I sort of showed in the last video if you have nice loud chunky samples and you make sure that your level controls are set right and you layer those samples together you don't really notice as much that it's 8-bit audio because your output once you're making music is or 8-bit sounds together stacked on top of each other and those together will make something that sounds generally a lot cleaner [Music] while we've got this microphone plugged in there is one final thing I can show you it's got a twist as well what you're listening to now is my voice running through a real-time effects processor I can choose a fence like coarse and I can even change the way that sounds like crazy cool and I can make crazy robot voices can pitch my voice up much more voice their own but even though I've got all these cool effects I can only preview them and I can't apply any of them to the waveform they're just something I can listen to and that's it so there's a reason you can't apply those real-time effects of the audio and that is because micro deal wants you to go out and spend money on their professional product which a lot of people said no we're not gonna go give money to micro deal we're gonna go out and buy the DSS 8 instead and we'll be looking at all of that in part number two when we check out mid-range samplers for the Commodore Amiga Wow we made it through part number one did we go through the rabbit hole too far I don't know but leave me some comments give me some feedback and I'm putting the stereo master back in its box for now sure it really does make you appreciate modern sampling technology I'll see you in the next episode bye [Music] [Music]

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Views: 81,304

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Id: 5gTWf6IGCJM

Length: 30min 58sec (1858 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020