Digital SamplesThe most significant event in the history of the sound sample happened with the release of the Fairlight. New digital synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 were becoming widespread and the brash sounds of Eighties electro-pop rejoiced in new technology, but the Fairlight was a different thing altogether. Any pop band that had made it big usually dragged theirs into the Top of the Pops studio, perhaps because they cost as much as a house and you didn´t have one of these unless you really had made it.
With the Fairlight you could record a sound, any sound, such as a clink of wine glasses and immediately it would process that sound so that you could play a tune on the keyboard using the wine glass sound. This was amazing and when used with a sampled musical instrument such as a trumpet, the result could be far better than any synthesized trumpet sound.
The origin of the term ´sound sample´ comes from the way in which a keyboard like the Fairlight records the sound. Rather than try to take in the entire sound, as a recording onto tape would do, a ´sample´ of the sound would be recorded every fraction of a second.
In this way a single trumpet note would be recorded as a rapid series of snapshots of the sound. This is similar to the way that high-speed photography captures the movement of an object. When all the snaps are played back at the right speed the result sounds indistinguishable from the original. The speed at which the snapshots are taken is called the ´sample rate´.
How sampling works>>
