Thats right, a DIY 8 bit sampler.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/05/01/wheres-the-party-at-bendable-open -source-8-bit-sampler-now-shipping/

http://narrat1ve.com/

I fancy having a go at that once i've finished my amp I have no real use for one, but its cheap and looks like fun to fool around with.

Paul

--------------------
Paul

First post!

This looks like the perfect DIY project to add to my studio. I grew up with the C64 and still love the sound of 2,4, and 8-bit samples

Ordered one straight away - here's hoping I can assemble it before the 2012 Aporkalypse.

Nice I saw a little video of the prototype doing its thing, and it looks like huge fun, and really quite versatile. Definitely crunchy!
I emailed the guy last night about postage costs to the UK. If its reasonable, i'll get me one

Paul

--------------------
Paul

Looks like these will be popular, and from what I read he's only made 200 kits, so i just ordered one
It will have to wait to be built until my amp project is finished however.

Paul

--------------------
Paul

Hey Paul,

Do you have a link to the vid?

ken

--------------------
I'm All Ears.

Quote Ken Long:

---

Hey Paul,

Do you have a link to the vid?

ken

---

I don't blame you for asking. The guys website looks like it was hurled together by a blind quadriplegic 4 year old toddler. Although he's written everything in quite an amusing manner
I only found 2 vids, and 1 of those I couldn't get to play.
Vids should all be in here: http://narrat1ve.com/LejendaryAdventures.html

1: http://narrat1ve.com/images/WTPA_095_vs_The_Knife.mpg
2: http://www.narrat1ve.com/images/WTPA.mp4

There could be more vids lurking in there that I didn't find yet??

Paul

--------------------
Paul

Thanks Paul,

Yes, that website is a bit of a mess so thanks for digging these out.

ken

--------------------
I'm All Ears.

Well the rest of my amp bits still have not arrived, but the sampler kit is here! So im gonna get busy with that today. Cant wait to give it a go..

Paul

--------------------
Paul

Done! Works a treat too..



I'll add the midi sockets once I decide how to mount the board and connectors. At the moment it works great as it is. Imagine a very grungey 8 bit loop pedal.. I'll post up some audio examples sometime It sounds even grungier(?!) than I expected from 8 bits. But in a cool way, for the most part.
The only thing I changed was to swap out most of the red leds for blue ones.
Im looking forward to fooling around with this thing some more!

Paul

--------------------
Paul

Now stuffed into a suitable case. The case being a handy Sennheiser microphone case that I had knocking about. Talk about luck, it fits in there perfectly!
The worlds first Sennheiser sampler...




Paul

--------------------
Paul

Im not sure many folk are really interested in this stuff here, but just in case..
Since I made this, there has been 2 soft/firmware updates. The most recent is pretty nifty, as it adds some more features that even most decent hardware samplers never had back in the day.
The main one being looping, but with the added ability to shuffle the entire loop window back & forth. I believe the old Ensoniq Mirage sampler could do this. But few, if any others. This is clunky to do via the samplers existing controls as they are crude, but it all works via midi too, which is far more effective.

Todd (Its creator) is working on a new version of the sampler which should be available by the summer too. It will still be a glitchy 8 bit mono sampler, but with more tricks up its sleeve

Paul

--------------------
Paul

Hi Paul,
I'd love to see a little vid of you tweaking this beast, as the ones around don't really advertise the musical applications very well.
It loads multiple samples, yeah? Do they interact rhythmically? I can hear the bit-reduction stuff happening, but what does the window function sound like?

--------------------
Adam Inglis
Funboys

Hey Adam,
I don't really have video recording facilities im afraid. But im sure I can rustle up an audio demo sometime, like I did for the x0xb0x recently. I need to smooth out how to work it via midi first though! (the midi side of the WTPA is straightforward, but im new to in depth midi in Logic)
It can work with 2 samples at a time. But so far, I only use it with one at a time (then mangle the living daylights out of it!). But one of the effects does work on both sample banks simultaneously. I'll paste that section of the manual here:

OUTPUT RECOMBINATION = Hold S5 and press S2. This takes an input value from 0-3 (from the pot) and affects the way BOTH banks work. The different values do this:
0 = Sum the banks during output. This makes normal audio.
1 = Multiply the two banks together for output. Modulates and saturates, and requires two samples to be playing back (ie, multiplying by 0 is always silence).
2 = Bitwise AND banks during output. Crusty. Requires valid samples in A&B.
3 = Bitwise XOR the banks. Doesn't sound weird with only one sample.

To be blunt, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Im sure i'll understand whats going on better once I try it!

Also, this version of the WTPA has no feature for saving and loading samples. You kinda have to do it all on the fly. But thats all part of the charm of the thing. You'll never get the same sound out of it from 1 day to the next. That said, the next version should have some kind of flash ram storage function on it I believe.
As for what the window function sounds like.. It's a little hard to describe, but it's pretty radical sounding to my ears! Put simply, you are just moving the start and end loop points in sync with each other, while the sample is playing. So you can move the loop window around to hear any part of the sample you want. When I get around to doing some kind of audio demo, i'll be sure to try and get this in there too

In short, it's a glitch sampler. Designed and built to screw with samples in the rawest most digital way possible. It also works a lot like a loop pedal, so you can get some pretty crazy loops out of the thing. You rarely get out of it what you thought you might get out of it. But it is one of those "Happy Accident" machines. IE, Keep messing with it, and you'll get something silly cool and useable out of it eventually!

Cheers, Paul

--------------------
Paul