We show you how to build a simple sampled synth instrument in Presence XT.

Did you know you can build your own sampled instruments in Studio One? Presence XT has an Editor with the power to let you build multisampled, multi‑velocity, multi‑articulation, scriptable instruments. You may not have encountered it before because it’s not included by default; you must buy it as an add‑on. However, as many people now receive their PreSonus software products through the Studio One+ subscription, you might find that you already own it.

You’ll find Presence XT Editor under Studio One Add‑Ons in your online My PreSonus products list.

Sampling and building your own software instruments and sound libraries can be an interesting, if sometimes tedious, undertaking. If you’ve used any orchestral library or other intricately sampled software instrument, then you’ll have some idea of the complexity and level of detail these things can run to. There are often multiple samples for every note, in every articulation, with some sustaining, some retriggering and some only happening on the release of a key. There’s a whole artform to it, and a world of possibility.

For this workshop we’re going to start with the small and simple stuff. Our aim is to capture the sound of our favourite MIDI synth patch at a handful of velocity levels across a couple of octaves. You could ask why we’d do such a thing when we could use the synth as a sound source? There are several reasons why you might sample your synths. You may not have the room to have them set up all the time; this lets you use your favourite sounds without digging the hardware out. It might be a monosynth, but you’d like to play it polyphonically. You might have borrowed it from a friend. Or, for our purposes, it gives us a chance to learn how to make instruments in Presence before we go to the trouble of miking up acoustic instruments. 

Sampling Strategy: 3 Notes

To keep this simple, we’re not going to sample every note at 127 velocity levels. A modern sampler is quite capable of pitch‑shifting to cover a number of notes without it sounding ‘sampled’. So, I suggest we sample C, E and G across two octaves. We can sample each note at four velocity levels, to give us some dynamic variation in the sound. The beauty of sampling a MIDI synth is that we can set up the notes and velocity levels in a sequence that will play the synth exactly how we need for the sampling. With an acoustic instrument, you’d have to play the notes yourself with different strengths that you’ll have to decide upon and try to replicate consistently with each note. That’s not easy to do.

So, in Studio One, create a track for your MIDI synth, create a clip and open the piano‑roll editor. When sampling any instrument, you want to give yourself the best chance of capturing something that will be easy to isolate, replicate, edit, sustain and play. You’ll have to decide how long you will hold the note. That might depend on how the sound evolves and modulates and whether the held note has a suitable portion that could be looped to sustain the sound. You should also be aware of any release and fade to the sound. I’d recommend turning off any effects on the synth, as these can be added back in later with the effects engine in Presence XT, so you’re not waiting on reverb tails or delay taps to fade away into the distance.

With those things in mind, enter the notes C2, E2, G2, C3, E3, G3 and C4 in the piano roll. Leave space between each one to make room for the release and to make slicing up the samples easier. In my example each note is a bar long, and I’ve put half a bar between each one. Select all the notes and set the velocity down to 32 (25 percent); this will be our first velocity level. Copy and paste the clip, select the notes in the new clip and set the velocity to 64 (50 percent). Do the same for a velocity of 96 (75 percent) and 127 (100 percent).

You should now have four runs of notes at four different velocity levels. Great! Let the sampling begin!

Sampling The Goods

Create a new audio track. Plug the output of your synth into your audio interface ready for recording. Hit Record, and the sequence will play the notes and you’ll sample the sound of those notes, played by your synth, onto the audio track.

Take the knife (Split) tool and isolate each note. We can always edit them more precisely once we’re in the Presence XT Editor. I find it helpful to delete any empty clips around the notes so that everything is nicely defined.

If you put the name of the note into the name of the sample, then Presence XT will place it automatically onto the right note in the editor.

Here’s the tedious bit where we have to name all the individual samples. Although I can’t find this documented anywhere, it appears that if you put the name of the note into the name of the sample, Presence XT will place it automatically onto the right note in the editor. Coming up with naming conventions is generally a really helpful habit to develop and stick to. So, for our samples, I’m going to give them the patch name, the velocity level and the note name. Right‑click each in turn and call it something like ‘Synth V32 C2’, and then the next note ‘Synth V32 E2’, and so on. Notes in the next velocity layer would then be labelled ‘Synth V64 C2’, and so on.

Importing Into Presence XT

Drag Presence XT from Studio One's Browser to create an instrument track. The Editor exists as a separate page in Presence XT and is accessible from a button at the top right of the front panel. 

The Editor has a few different layout view options, but the general gist of it is that at the top you have a Description panel where you can fill in all sorts of details about the instrument and who made it. In the middle, we have our layers and zones, which is where we’ll spend most of our time today. Beneath is a bunch of synth‑style parameters we can apply to our samples, and with the click of the Wave button, we can edit the sample itself.

To start building our instrument, we need to pull in our samples. We can do that remarkably simply by selecting them all in the arrangement and dragging them into the Zones window. If you’ve added the note names as I suggested, then with a bit of luck, Presence XT will put all the samples onto the right notes for you. If not, then it will simply start at C1 and spread them about with no regard for the pitch of the actual sample. This is why we name them properly.

Whatever you do, don’t at any point click Undo if you make a mistake in the editor: it will unload the instrument and all your editing could be lost. If this does happen, quickly hit Redo to rescue things. 

In The Zone

Click on the Grid button to get a visual representation of your sample placement. You should see a blue column for each note. We’re not currently seeing the individual samples for each velocity layer; at the moment, they are overlayed on top of each other. To form the basic structure of our instrument, we need to widen the note range of each sample and separate out the velocity layers.

Select the first column and drag the right‑hand edge so it cosies up to the next column, effectively extending over notes C#, D and D#. Do this for each column so that each sample covers a number of notes and we have something to play over the whole two octaves. Give it a play with your MIDI keyboard, and you’ll hear all four velocity‑ranged samples playing together across the notes. So, let’s split them up. This is probably done much more easily in the List view, but indulge me because the Grid view is far more visual.

If you click on a column and then click again you should see that the writing is no longer jumbled by the names of all four samples, and you’ve selected a single sample. In my case, it’s the V32 bottom velocity layer. Drag down from the top of the column until the top of the blue box is at a velocity of 32. In the bottom left corner is a list of parameters, one of which is ‘High Vel’. That’s where it needs to say ‘32’. Click twice in the column above the V32 square and you’ll select the V64 sample. Drag the top down to 64 and the bottom up to 33. The same applies to the next two samples, setting them to their respective velocity layers. If you lose track of a sample, it’s probably stacked with another one. Check the List view and you should be able to locate it. Don’t undo!

Now you’ve got the hang of doing one column, we can save time by doing the rest in one swoop.

Click twice in the next column to select that first sample, then hold Shift and click in the last column to select all the samples in between. It should select the same sample in each column. Then pull the tops and bottoms to set the right velocity for each, and they’ll all move together. You should now have a grid of note‑mapped and velocity‑layered samples that offer a certain amount of dynamics to your playing.

In practice, I find it quite hard to trigger the V32 samples; I can’t play gently enough. So, maybe it would be better to use a single sample all the way up to a velocity of 64 and then have more variation in the top half, where it might be more effective. You could set this up with the samples we already have or, to do it more properly, you could go back and sample your synthesizer at a different range of velocities.

Sustain: Set Loop Points

One last thing to bring our freshly made instrument to a sense of completion. When you strike a note, it only plays for the duration of the sample and then stops. What would be nice would be to have the note sustained indefinitely while we are holding the key. We can do this by setting loop points on each sample.

Select a sample in the grid and click the Wave button. At the bottom, you’ll see your sample laid out, with a few parameters on the left. Above the waveform window is the name of the sample. Alongside the name is a little play button, which will play the sample as if you’ve played it with the keyboard. In the parameters section, turn the Loop Mode to Sustain. A loop range will appear above the sample, and what we’re trying to do is find a section of the sample that loops in such a way that you can’t hear the join. So, drag in the handles in from the left and right and see what you can find. The success of this will greatly depend on your sample and the sort of effect you’re after. You can try to do all your samples at once, but I’ve found that you can’t rely on it to be the same point for every sample. 

Don’t forget to save your preset by clicking the tiny little button that looks like a sheet of lined paper at the top left of the interface, next to the bypass button. There doesn’t appear to be any way to create a user folder or anything, so you’ll just have to go with the categories that are there already. If anyone finds out a way to make your own, let me know!

There’s plenty more that Presence XT can do to help you craft interesting, sampled instruments. I hope this introduction to the Presence XT Editor has given you a useful starting point.