Simpler vs. Sampler - What's the Difference?

Ableton Live comes with two main sample based instruments simpler and sampler but what's the difference between them and which one should you be using well let's find out hey friends Matt AKA Martin here and welcome back to another video today we're going to be taking a look at the differences between Ableton Live's simpler and sampler devices what they're each designed for how they work and how you can use them before we get started make sure to leave a like and a comment down below subscribe if you're new and if you really enjoy my content consider supporting me by buying me a coffee I'll leave a link in the description where you can do that okay so let's jump into Ableton Live and take a look at the differences between simpler and sampler okay so the biggest difference between simpler and sampler is that simpler is designed to work with a single audio file as a sample where a sampler is designed to work with multiple audio files or samples and turn them into a single cohesive instrument in this sense simpler is used to turn a single sample into a whole instrument like this foreign [Music] is used to turn multiple audio files into a single instrument [Music] but this isn't really the whole story so let's take a look at the core features of simpler and how we can use it to turn a single sample into an instrument so here I have a blank simpler instrument loaded up and I'm just going to use the same sample that I used to create that instrument in the example which sounds like this foreign drag this sample into our simpler and now we have that sample mapped across the entirety of our midi keyboard if I play different notes it's going to re-pitch this sample up or down based on how far away it is from middle C or C3 [Music] and in this sense it works basically like a synthesizer except the oscillator is our sample in and of itself this isn't super exciting so what I'm going to do is now turn this into an instrument I'm going to leave this on classic mode for this example but we do have two other modes here to play around with classic Mode effectively puts a standard adsr attacked K sustain release envelope onto the sample so that whenever we play a key or send this simpler a midi note the amplitude of the sample changes based on how long we hold down the note for if I change this to one shot this means that when I press the note it's just going to play back the entirety of the sample and if I change this to slice mode now it's not going to re-pitch the sample instead it's going to slice up this sample into multiple little slices that are each triggered by different midi notes but I'm getting ahead of myself so let's go to classic Mode here and I'm going to change the start position of this sample to a point with a single note foreign the end position of this sample so that I keep that single note so you'll see that when I press a key it's playing from this start position here and whilst I hold down the key it's playing through the sample until it reaches this end position at which point the sample stops playing and I can now use this to my advantage to effectively play an instrument [Music] so now we've mapped this sample across our keyboard to create some kind of re-pitching vocal instrument I could turn this onto Loop mode so that I can hold it out indefinitely I could decrease the length of the loop and increase the fade right here so that it crossfades between the start and the end of the loop and if I want to make sure I'm playing in key I could use something like Ableton Live's tuner device and when I hold down a c I can see that I'm playing an a sharp here so I can go to my control section and transpose this up two semitones so that when I play a C on my midi keyboard it's playing a C back as the sample and now if I play around with my adsr controls I can increase the attack increase the release maybe decrease the sustain a little bit and increase the output volume and now we've got some kind of vocal pad sound [Music] as I mentioned simpler also offers us a few different modes which are designed primarily for working with different types of samples one shot mode is really useful for working with percussive samples such as kick drums or snares and slice mode is really useful for working with longer samples say entire vocal phrases I might do another video in the future going through all the different functionality in simpler but for now it's a little bit beyond the scope of this video we just need to know exactly what simpler does and that is that it works with single samples now as I mentioned sampler is actually designed to work with multiple samples and turn them into a single cohesive instrument that's not to say you can't work with a single sample inside of sampler but it's not the workflow that it's geared towards for example we could create a realistic sounding piano instrument using sampler by recording each of the individual notes of a piano importing those recordings into sampler and mapping it so that when I played a note on my midi keyboard it played back the recording of the corresponding note of the piano in fact let's do this now I've just gone ahead and actually recorded some sounds coming out of my Nord keyboard and here we have a few different notes from the piano sounds of this Nord keyboard we have a C1 the shop one an F sharp one an A1 and a C2 I'm gonna go to my sampler here and I'm actually going to go to the Zone tab here I'm going to unfold this and now we get to see our zones here of our sample which allows us to see all of our different samples that we've loaded up into our sampler instrument so that we can then map them across our keyboard accordingly I'm going to import all these samples and now if I play a note it's actually going to play back all these samples at once it's actually playing a diminished chord but now what we can do is make it so that when I press C1 we only play this C1 sample right here so in my key section in my zone selector I can just click and drag these little bars so that C1 is mapped to C1 D sharp one is mapped to D sharp one F sharp one is mapped to F sharp one a one to A1 and C2 to C2 now I'll only hear these samples when I press the corresponding notes on my midi keyboard foreign however they're not currently playing back at the right pitch and that's because we need to tell sampler what pitch these notes were recorded at and so to do this we need to give sampler the root note of the recorded samples so I can go to my C1 sample and come down to the root note section here change this to C1 likewise with the D sharp one F sharp one A1 and C2 so now when I play those notes it should play back those samples at their original recorded pitches but we don't have any samples mapped to the notes in between these samples if I press those we get nothing so what we can do is actually map these samples to more than one note maybe one note either side so that we get a full octave of piano samples able to be played back via our midi keyboard so I can map C1 to play C1 and C sharp D sharp to be D to e f sharp to be F to G A to be G sharp to a sharp and C to be B to C now I have a whole Octave of piano recordings foreign [Music] and this allows us to create a more realistic representation of that recorded instrument rather than having to quite drastically alter the speed or stretch the sample in order just to re-pitch it across our midi keyboard we can now go and we can go to potentially our filter Global section and change the overall adsr envelope for all of our samples maybe add a little bit more release here maybe even increase the volume to Velocity so that we have some velocity sensitivity and now we have a somewhat nice sounding piano over an octave foreign also offers a whole lot more features than this VOA of velocity layering and chain selecting and some other cool stuff but this is just the bare bones of how it's designed to work as I mentioned though just because sampler is designed to work with more than one sample at once doesn't mean it can't work with just a single sample and in fact I did a whole video on some really cool sound design techniques using sampler which you can check out with the card above or I'll link down the description below and hopefully that video shows you just how versatile sampler actually is so aside from the intended functionality of each what are the actual core differences between simpler and sampler well the main things that set simpler apart from sampler are the one shot and slice modes sampler does not offer us the ability to automatically slice up a sample in the same way that simpler does nor does it allow us the ability to play back and Sample in its entirety based on the triggering of a midi note simpler also gives us the ability to warp a sample inside of the device which is really useful for say if you import a loop and you want to keep it in time with your sessions tempo even if you're changing the tempo wildly throughout but what about sampler well of course the biggest difference between sample and simpler is that sampler allows us to load multiple samples inside of a single instance of the device this allows for the realistic emulation of acoustic instruments through recorded samples as well as opens up some interesting creative possibilities sampler also offers us way more in the way of modulation than simpler does by giving us a auxiliary modulation envelope and three different lfos that we can map to a variety of destinations inside of the device we also have a whole host of midi functionality built into sampler which is super useful as well for performative instruments sampler also offers us a really interesting and unique modulation oscillator which can be used for either amplitude modulation or frequency modulation and opens up a whole variety of awesome creative sound design possibilities one thing to note is that you can actually convert any instance of simpler into an instance of sampler by simply right clicking on the device title bar and going simpler to sampler this will carry over any of the available settings between simpler and sampler but obviously you can't carry over things like one shot and slicing you can also reverse this and convert the sampler into a simpler device by also right clicking on the device title bar and going sampler to simpler however this takes away the ability for you to actually manipulate the sample using the sample editor inside of simpler regardless of whether or not you had more than one sample loaded up in the sampler beyond that there are plenty of other little differences between simpler and sampler the idea behind this video is just to give you an overview of the functionality of both so that you can get an idea of why you might choose one over the other so hopefully this video has cleared up any confusion you might have about the differences between simpler and sampler let me know in the comments if this video helped you out leave a like and make sure to subscribe if you're new and if you really enjoyed this video consider heading over to my buy me a coffee page where you can support me by buying me a coffee becoming a member and getting some really cool stuff in the process check out this video here to learn some more about some cool sound design techniques using sampler and until next time have a fantastic day I'll see in the next video

Channel: Martiln

Views: 38,562

Keywords: ableton live tutorial, music production tutorial, electronic music production, edm tutorial, ableton certified trainer, ableton tutorial, ableton simpler vs sampler, ableton simpler, ableton sampler vs simpler, ableton sampler tutorial, ableton live simpler vs sampler, ableton live sampler, ableton live simpler tutorial, sampling in ableton, working with samples in ableton, ableton live simpler

Id: DW6dio92nBM

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022