I’ve been sampling my old drum machines to recreate them with different flavors in the S2400 - here are some things I learned along the way.
authentically recreating a ‘vintage’ drum machine’s particular quirks in the S2400:
-
When sampling old drum digital machines or using samples from other sources, look at the original manual to see which sounds cut each other off due to limited polyphony and set them up in choke groups. Any sounds that choke each other should use the same output.
-
Look at how its level and accent system work and model that as best you can in the S2400. For example if you have a TR-909 kit (I love the TR-909), on the 909 there are 4 levels of accent: Normal, Accent, Normal with global accent, Accent with global accent. So, set up 4 volume levels on in multimode when programming and think about how you might program the beat on a 909: are you going to put global accents on the downbeat, or on the offbeat? Or somewhere else? How would that translate to the S2400? Etc. If you want to be really pedantic, look to see what percentages the different swing modes work at. You could take the same paradigm and use it with different kits, emulating how (for this example) a TR-909 in Ext Inst sequencing mode would work a rack mount sampler.
Sampling drum machines
-
Make several recordings of each sound using the different inputs, sample rate mode setting, and varying how hard you hit the interface to get a nice variety of different tones. . Drum machines sounds are generally already rather compressed so they peak at the same place, and you’ll get consistent levels for every sound, so you can record all the sounds into one sample and then chop them, which is faster than one at a time and makes them all peak as they relative to each other in the original machine, as a starting point. PS There is a magical sweet spot between where you just barely begin to see square waves but will still get a ‘good sample.’
-
Monitoring sampling through the s2400 rather than monitoring the source is a must since it sounds very different depending on how you hit the inputs and which inputs you use. I learned a trick from someone else here about using Y cables to the inputs so that one stereo send goes to both input 1 and input 2, letting me just select from within the S2400. It’s half normalled to outputs from my audio interface. This is the most flexible way I have found.
I would love to hear techniques other people have come up with along these lines - in particular I haven’t settled on a consistent way to lay out similar sounds that share outputs across banks. If anyone has a way that they are really attached to I’d love to hear it.
