One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris samples his coughing and puking on an E-mu Emulator II, and plays them back to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz. The exact same technology is used on the soundtrack by Yello for their song “Oh Yeah.”
Vocalist Dieter Meier recorded the words “oh oh, chicka chicka” and “oh yeah” at a relatively normal pitch into the sampler, and keyboardist Boris Blank played them back lower and slowed down. There are also some cool sampled Tarzan yells and Lord Of The Rings synthesized men’s chorus. This track could have been recorded last week.
We think of sampling as this high-tech modern practice, but analog sampling keyboards go back to the early fifties. The first one was the Chamberlin. It played short tape recordings of a few different instruments when you pressed the keys. The Chamberlin has a much more famous descendant (some might say ripoff), the Mellotron. Here’s a little branding 101: don’t name your invention after yourself, unless you have a cool name like Robert Moog. Pick something retrofuture and groovy. The Mellotron sounds like something from Sleeper that you use between the Orb and the Orgasmatron. The intro of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” is Paul McCartney playing sampled flutes on a Mellotron.
Analog tape isn’t a great sample medium. The mechanisms are delicate and bulky. The tape decays over time. The little motors have to be running at exactly the right speed for the notes to play back in tune. Sampling keyboards didn’t really take off until the invention of inexpensive digital audio. Now that computers can play back audio recordings and perform all kinds of strange mathematical operations on them in real time, anything with a processor and a sound card can act as a sampler. Even high-end cell phones can perform the same functions as Ferris Bueller’s E-mu.
Some sampled instruments work better than others. A MIDI interface can only capture certain aspects of your performance: which note you played, how loud you played it, how long you held it. You can add some other performance data with the sustain pedal, with the pitch or mod wheels, and maybe with a few other parameters. That’s not nearly enough data dimensionality to convey all the infinitesimal nuances of the way a violin bow or guitar pick grips and releases a string. Stringed instruments sound extremely fake when played on a sampling keyboard. The fakeness has its own charms, but that’s a whole different instrument unto itself. Piano works well as a MIDI instrument since it practically was one to begin with. Any keyboard instrument translates well to MIDI. Massed orchestral instruments work better than solo ones. Horn samples can work okay if you don’t mind monotonous phrasing. Again, sometimes the robotic sound has its own quality. I mostly prefer more purely electronic sounds like abstract synths and samples of other songs.
One of my most entertaining experiments with sampling was called the Sikoratron. It’s a Reason patch I made using samples of Catherine Sikora, who I played with in a jazz group. To build my sample library, I recorded every member of the horn section doing solo improvisations. Catherine recorded these long, angular Coltrane-esque sax lines. By mapping different phrases to different regions of the keyboard, I could play my own far-out Catherine solos. The results were unpredictable, since the tonality of the phrases didn’t necessarily match the key that triggered them. The Sikoratron gave the best results when my non-keyboard playing friends explored it intuitively with their index fingers.
The full surrealism of MIDI is only just revealing itself. You can map sampled sounds to just about any physical action. Jerry Garcia used a MIDI guitar to play synthesized flute and such with the Grateful Dead. MIDI guitar such a cool idea in theory, since the guitar is already an amazing analog synth controller. Unfortunately, you can’t just slap a MIDI pickup unto an electric guitar, because it won’t track as accurately as you would want. You need to get an expensive special guitar made of a futuristic carbon composite. Fine if you’re Jerry Garcia, lame if you’re a normal person.
When I play electronic music live, I do my sample triggering with a video game controller. It’s more limited than a full MIDI keyboard, but for my stuff that’s a virtue. I see the future of MIDI belonging to game controllers. Check out this Synthtopia post on the world’s strangest MIDI controllers. Behold the Drumpants:
Other videos show people controlling synths and samples using pennies, a laser, a robotic exoskeleton, a sheet of paper, a driver’s license, hamsters and other odd things. Music looks like it’s going to continue to be fun in the future.