The usefulness of a good sampler in your production toolkit can\u2019t be underestimated. It\u2019s great for everything from developing your own custom sounds to consolidating your favorite samples into a single instrument. Back in the ’80s, dance and hip-hop pioneers could put together an entire track using a hardware sampler with just 2 MB of memory (that\u2019s MB not GB). On it they\u2019d have all of their drum samples, bass and keyboard sounds, even guitar phrases and backing vocals. Working this way, with just a few MIDI sound modules and very limited RAM really forced you to be creative, to write solid beats and killer songs. Unlike today, you weren\u2019t in a position to dazzle listeners with layers upon layers of neatly produced sounds because, frankly, you just didn\u2019t have the tools (such as one of our modern super computers). Instead, you had to focus on the basics, where every part that you played was integral to your song\u2019s arrangement. You couldn’t waste an iota of your sampler’s memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a lesson to be learned here. It\u2019s such a privilege to have all this production power in our computers and at our fingertips, but having all of this power is no guarantee that we\u2019ll be able to write good music. As an exercise in my Producing Music with Reason<\/a> <\/em>course, I demonstrate the unbridled power of Reason\u2019s NN-XT Sampler and what you can do with it when you truly understand how to milk it for all it\u2019s worth. Students generally find the lesson to be an eye opener, but because it\u2019s such a different way of working and thinking about arranging it can be a confusing lesson. So, in addition to the online lesson material, and the assigned reading, I\u2019m posting a nine minute video that follows me through the entire process of constructing a custom NN-XT patch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n