Sampling at home
Recording an instrument for creating a synthetizer sound of it, is called sampling. Sampling at home is quite the same as in the studio. You should be aware of environmental noise. The windows of the room must be closed. Airconditioning, computer itself, neighbours, dish- and washmachines etc. are all sources of disturbing noise. Your own ears are the best meter to check if there's audible environmental noise on your recordings or not.
When sampling you don't play a whole song but invidual notes or sounds, depending on the instrument. There are melodic insruments that play notes and non-melodic instruments that generate noise-like sounds (e.g. drums). Many times the instrument can be played in different ways. A violin can be bowed with different force, plucked, etc. A snare drum can be struck hardly to it's center, gently with the stick to its frame keeping the other end of the stick on the membrane (side stick), and so on. You should make it clear what you want to record.
When played, the synthetizer lowers and raises the sampled sound according to the key you hit. If the amount of lowering or raising is too big, the sample doesn't sound original anymore. That's why the samples must be recorded at different pitch levels. Vibrato should not be used, because it can be given afterwards with the SoundFont parameters. In all, getting good samples is not so easy. As with many other jobs, practising makes the master also here.
The recording can be made with any program capable to store the sound as a WAV-file. The way of calling recorded instrument sounds as samples is a little bit misleading. A whole WAV-file consists actually of an innumerable amount of very small parts called also samples. They are so small that they can't be heard individually. They represent the state of the sound at a given moment of the time. When put together and played as a series from the beginning to the end they can be heard as sound. An ordinary taperecorder stores the sound continuously without dividing it in small samples. That's why they are called analog recorders. A WAV-file contains the sound in an incontinuous, digital form. The computer, the soundcard and the software form together a digital recorder. Note: DAT-recorders, though using a tape, are digital recorders and make use of similar sampling technique than computers.
AWE comes with a quite versatile audio program, the WaveStudio. It's good enough for most of the purposes. It's capable to record and play back 8-bit and 16-bit audio, mono or stereo, with a speed up to 44100 samples per second. Stereo gives the sound a feeling of ambient. Although AWE is capable to produce stereo, I recommend not to use stereo samples before you understand troughoutly the operation of your AWE.
The sampling speed of 44100 samples per second is said to be the lower limit for high quality sound. For an ordinary user a speed of 22050 is enough. You can record the same sound with both speeds and compare them. There's not so big difference. The difference between 8 and 16 bits can be heard more clearly. So, at least in the beginning of our sampling career, we can use 16-bit resolution and 22050 sampling speed. It saves memory. I'm not saying that sampling with 22050 samples per second gives you high quality sound, but it gives an acceptable quality.
After you've read this article the practise is the best teacher in recording and sampling. There are many good books of the subject. Few of them are listed in the references.
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