Short loops, drum beats and sound effects, the kind often found on relatively inexpensive sample CDs, are basic tools for laying down most any kind of music track. While work like this is exactly what samplers were designed for, you don't need to invest in one unless you're doing a lot of work with chromatic instruments or strings. You can get the same job done using any Creative Labs soundcard that supports “SoundFonts” and a SoundFont editor program like the Vienna SoundFont Studio.



This combination allows you to use commercial samples, as well as your own, and group them together, create loops, split points, key ranges, allocate layers and more, then pull them into your sequencer – all while blowing past the memory limitations of conventional hardware-based samplers.

Using your sequencer to play your loops is just plain easier and faster than using a sampler anyway and, if you do have a sampler, you can use it for the hard work that your sequencer can't handle like dealing with strings and grand pianos.

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Since you'll be playing the audio sequence files directly from your hard drive, you won't have to worry about sample loading lag-time and your sample lengths won't be limited like they are by the amount of RAM in your sampler. As an added bonus, sequencer audio tracks do not need any extra MIDI ports.

You can also use your sequencer's built-in features and functions to do some knob twiddling until you've adjusted the pitch and tempo to suit your tastes. Typically a sequencer provides sound manipulation features and functions that are much better than those found in hardware samplers anyway.

With so many sample CDs available for just a little bank, you're going to find that loading loops and phrases from CD is not only easier and faster using this technique, but it's going to be cheaper as well.