(Fr. échantilloneur; It. campionatore).
An electronic musical instrument which has no sound of its own, but whose sounds are entirely derived from recordings. The term is borrowed from the technique of analysis that forms part of a digital recording process, in which sound waveforms are sampled in minute slices (typically between 40,000 and 50,000 times per second). The earliest such digital samplers were constructed during the 1970s. The term has recently been additionally applied to earlier analogue instruments based on any form of recording mechanism, of which the best-known is the magnetic-tape-based Mellotron; other less well-known analogue sampling instruments date from the 1930s. A digital sampler normally contains the following features for editing sections of stored samples: transposition (sometimes by means of a built-in or external keyboard), looping, reversal, insertion and removal. Since the mid-1980s self-contained ‘black box’ samplers without keyboards have been manufactured, often optionally linked to a microcomputer for ease of editing samples, while during the 1990s, with increased computer memory and storage capacity, this also became possible entirely within microcomputers.
From around 1980 a number of digital synthesizers began featuring sampling in addition to or instead of synthesized sounds, sometimes offering users the possibility to create or edit their own sound samples; this trend has become more common in a wide range of synthesizers and other electronic keyboard instruments, to the extent that it is no longer straightforward to distinguish between a sampler and a synthesizer, especially when an external Controller is linked to the sampler via MIDI.
See also Electronic instruments, §IV, 5(iii).
H. Davies: ‘A History of Sampling’, Experimental Musical Instruments, v/2 (1989), 17–20; enlarged in Organised Sound, i/1 (1996), 3–11
K.C. Pohlmann: ‘Fundamentals of Digital Audio’, The Compact Disc: a Handbook of Theory and Use (Madison, WI, 1989)
C. Roads: The Computer Music Tutorial (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 22–44, 117–33
M. Russ: Sound Synthesis and Sampling (Oxford, 1996)
HUGH DAVIES