From nothing to musique concrète with Isla Instruments S2400

Sacrée Français … :heart_eyes:

Look mum, no sequencer !

Isla Instruments S2400 is a modern sampler inspired by E-MU SP-1200.
Yes, you can create vintage, lofi and dirty Hiphop/House/Techno with it, but you can also compose modern stuff with neat sound quality. Before the review (i’m still working on it), i wanted to show how to perform a musique concrète-ish track without using the sequencer. Nothing is written before, all the sounds are performed live with pads, faders and filters.

S2400 only, with une pincée de OTO Machine BAM at the end, because there is no reverb in the actual firmware. But i hope it will change (This is a message for Brad and Vlad ^_^).

How it works :

Instead of using discrete and short sounds on each track, i like to use very long recording as a library of sounds, textures and ambiances. With the faders help, i can change playhead position, volume and pitch for each track. Pads are used to trigger and re-trigger sounds, filters to make room for frequencies.

As files bigger than 64MB can’t be loaded in the S2400 editor, changing playhead position needs to be done blind, but that’s part of the fun. You never know what you will trigger next, you need to improvise, and each performance is unique.

19 Likes

Fantastic

Really cool approach…well done for looking at things differently!
It gave me an idea how your concept would apply to this sort of scenario…

Kick drum on track 1, bass line 2 and so on.
The idea… Like yours… Flow through the parts and find sweet spots

Recorded a long kick drum track (2 mins ) simple at the beginning but with lots of pattern variations and ending in crazy…

Then like you… Using loop /slice to move between sections of that track…

I got stuck tho… I couldn’t loop a particular area that I liked… As the track kept playing on If I changed fader position of track 1 it may not be on the beat so it was hard to make it work in a repeatable manner. So I’m back to dumb sequencing /programming… Which I’m so bored of.

But I could see for long flowing pieces it’s cool…

Thanks for sharing!

1 Like