Guide 8 of 9 · Every Try it box opens the synth with its steps pinned on the rack

Sampling & live sound

Every sound in the guides so far was built from scratch out of waves. But a modular doesn't have to start from an oscillator. It can start from a recording: a drum loop, a voice, a chord, the sound of your own room. Once a recording is inside the patch, it's just another signal, and everything you've learned applies to it.

The sampler: a recording you can play

A Sampler plays back a recording when its GATE goes high, so a keyboard or sequencer can trigger it just like an envelope. Its V/OCT input retunes it, and here's the catch: it does that the old-fashioned way, by playing the recording faster or slower, like speeding up a tape. Higher notes are shorter and brighter; lower notes are longer and darker. That "chipmunk" effect is part of the charm.

ONE-SHOT plays to the end even after you let go; GATE stops when you release.
Drag on the waveform to set Start and End.
REV plays it backwards.
Drop your own audio file on it, or record your microphone with REC.

Chopping a break

Because Start is a knob, it can be modulated, and that opens up a classic producer trick. Take a drum loop (a "break"), trigger it on every eighth note, and let a random voltage choose where each hit starts. Every hit plays a different slice of the loop, so the drums get rearranged on the fly but stay in time.

Try itRearrange a drum loop

A Sampler loaded with a drum break, a Clock, a Sample & Hold and a Scale / Offset, with no cables:

Patch the Sampler's OUT into the Output's MONO.
Patch the Clock's 1/8 into the Sampler's GATE. The break now restarts from the top on every eighth note: a stutter.
Patch the Clock's 1/8 into the Sample & Hold's TRIG too, so it picks a new random number on every hit.
Patch the Sample & Hold's OUT into the Scale / Offset's IN, and its OUT into the Sampler's START. The Scale / Offset fits the random number into range, and every hit now plays a different slice of the loop. Watch the ring on its Start jump with each hit.

Then play with it:

Unpatch the START cable: now every hit plays from the top again.
Move the cable on the Sampler's GATE from the Clock's 1/8 to its 1/16: twice as many, shorter slices, a stuttering drum roll.
Turn the Sampler's Tune down to −12: the break plays an octave lower and half as fast, heavy and dark.

⏻ Build lesson 32 in KablesThe modules are waiting, unpatched. These steps come with you.

The looper: record yourself

A Looper records whatever goes into it and plays it back round and round, so you can layer parts on top of each other: the way solo performers build a whole song live.

Press REC, play a phrase, press STOP: it loops.
Press DUB and play over it: the layers stack up.
CLEAR starts again.

Keep below 100% makes old layers slowly fade away, so the loop keeps evolving instead of filling up.

Granular: sound as dust

Granular synthesis cuts a recording into tiny slices called grains, from a few milliseconds to a second long, and sprays them back out, overlapping, by the dozen or the hundred. Because the grains don't have to come from where the recording is playing, granular can do things that are impossible otherwise: freeze a single moment so it hangs in the air, stretch a word to a minute long, or smear a voice into a shimmering cloud.

Position: where in the recording the grains come from.
Size: tiny grains sound buzzy and rough; long ones sound smooth.
Density: how many grains per second.
Spray: scatters the grains around the position.
Pitch ±: detunes each grain randomly. A little sounds like a choir; a lot scatters the pitch everywhere.

Try itFreeze a voice

A slow LFO scans the Position through a recorded voice. The white dots on the waveform are the grains.

Turn the LFO's Rate up to about 0.3 Hz. Watch the white dots sweep back and forth along the waveform, and hear the voice slide through its syllables as they go.
Unpatch the LFO and park Position: the sound freezes in place.
Now move it by hand: drag along the Granular's waveform and the line follows you. Scrub slowly through the word, like dragging a tape across a playhead.
Nudge Pitch ± up just a little, to about 0.3 (hold Shift for fine control). Each grain is now slightly out of tune with the others, so the voice thickens into a shimmering choir.
Now push Pitch ± past 12 for the opposite: every grain lands on a random pitch, a swarm of robots.

⏻ Open lesson 35 in KablesThese steps come with you, pinned on the rack.

Pitch shifting without the chipmunk

The sampler changes pitch by changing speed. A Pitch Shifter changes pitch while keeping the timing the same, so a voice shifted up still sings at the same pace. Blend the shifted copy with the original and one voice becomes two, in harmony.

Live sound as a control signal

You don't have to listen to a sound for it to be useful. An Env Follower measures how loud a sound is and turns that into a control signal. Talk into a microphone and the filter opens; clap and its GATE fires a drum. It's how producers make one sound react to another.

The vocoder: a synth that talks

A Vocoder combines two sounds. It measures the shape of one, your voice into MOD, across 16 frequency bands, and stamps that shape onto the other, a synth chord into CARRIER. The chord gives the notes; your voice gives the words. The result is the classic robot voice.

What to remember

A sampler plays a recording; its pitch changes by changing speed, like a tape.
Modulating Start with random voltages chops a loop into new patterns.
A looper records and repeats; Keep below 100% lets layers fade.
Granular sprays tiny grains: freeze, stretch and smear sounds.
A pitch shifter changes pitch without changing speed.
An envelope follower turns loudness into a control signal; a vocoder puts your voice's shape onto a synth.