[Yoozer]

Another few questions now that I can type on a proper keyboard instead of my phone:

Originally Posted by bartholomewpro

Im pretty good with midi but im jut sick of the logic midi setup

In what way?

and the lack of fatness and sounds that suit me.

Well, that's why plugins have knobs. You're supposed to do something with that, you know

also how do you modualte samples in logic to build whole keyboards of one sample?

You don't. The word "modulate" means something different; it means changing something during time. This can happen only once after hitting the keys - that's what an envelope does - or it can happen continuously - which is what an LFO does. The "something" that is changed is the modulation target; what causes the change is the modulation source.

Anyway, back to sampling. Imagine a sampler's setup as a rectangular graph. From left to right, you go from the lowest note to the highest note. From bottom to top, you go from the lowest velocity to the highest velocity. Velocity is the speed you hit your keys with; the reason it's called velocity is because the harder you hit the key the faster the key moves down, and the sensor can only register speed, not force.

See http://www.tweakheadz.com/images/exs-editor.jpg

When you drag or open a sample into EXS24, you can set it up that it stretches the entire keyboard. This is shown in the column Keyrange (Lo/Hi). If you pick Zone #1 and load up your sound, just set Lo to C-1 (minus one) and Hi to C6 or something.

However, what you then get is an (often undesired) side-effect, called the munchkin effect (try doing this with a vocal sample; higher pitches sound like munchkins).

If your sample was that of a single note on a piano, the lowest notes will sound dull, and the highest notes will sound far too bright - plus they'll quit playing. A sampler is nothing but a digital tape recorder, and playing back tape faster means you run out of it faster, too.

If you want to sample realistic instruments, you have to sample them at several pitches so you can mask or eliminate (by sampling each note separately) the munchkin effect. Because the notes were laid out horizontally, it means putting several samples next to eachother, each with their own small key zone.

If we take the piano as an example again, another thing that changes is the character; hit a key on a real piano harder (or a snare drum on a drum kit) and the sound changes; it becomes brighter, more pronounced. So, volume is not the only thing that changes. The solution for this is similar to that of the munchkin effect, only in the vertical direction; you stack samples on top of eachother, telling one to play back only when the velocity of the key is in its range. That's denoted by the Vel. Range in the screenshot above.

If you'd sample a real snare drum, you'd have to sample it several times; even though the actual note is just a single note (keyzone from D2 to D2 for instance) you have multiple velocities to add realism.

The above is classical sampling theory and it's been used to build libraries of realistic instruments. Study the included presets in EXS24 to get an idea.

However, the way Justice uses samples is different again.

As a demo, I've taken a fragment of George Duke's "Love You More" which you may know as "that one track Daft Punk used for Digital Love".

http://www.teartcore.com/music/pogo.mp3

I have chopped this in smaller parts, all the same size. I have removed every second part, and simply copied the first; that gives you the "stu ttering" effect. Justice's technique does not differ a lot from this - just listen to YouTube - The original version of Justice-Phantom. The sample. - it's a beat, bassline and fragments of the original track. The art is in picking the right (obscure) track and revamping it.

The way to do this in EXS is to simply cut down the fragment you want to use, and assign each fragment to a single key. That's by far the easiest way.

edit: argh, stupid smilies ruining things