aholidayatthesea wrote:Curious to see some interesting volcasample stuff. The aesthetics and size made me want to buy it, but I already have an MPC so it was hard to justify. Can you do any cool real time manipulation of the samples?
Yeah, I had an Octatrack on the way while I was debating whether or not to keep the Sample.
It had a lot to do with my doubts.
But I found the Sample to be its own little thing, and worth having both.
Regarding real time manipulation, yes and no.
It's light on punch-in effects that you can pop in and out on the fly.
Just reverb and reverse (and a badass loop function I'll get into below).
So manipulating samples within a sequence is hairy, because you need to know how to get them back to how they were.
(Unless you're cool with letting the sequence mutate throughout the performance).
You do have the option to jump to particular steps of a sequence, or quickly deactivate steps.
The latter is cool, I feel it could be pretty useful with a bit of practice.
BUT, the whole appeal of the Sample is tactile sample tweaking.
All of the Sample's parameters has a dedicated knob, no menu to dive into.
And you can motion sequence most of them.
I've been getting beautiful results motion sequencing the speed of the sample, combined with panning.
And it has some tricks.
That loop function: You can pop that in and out for individual samples, which will loop for as long as you set them to.
The cool bit is that if you decrease the length of the sample you can get these sputtering glitches.
You can also use it to make drones. And all kinds of shit really. It's beautiful.
Combined with motion sequencing, you can use it to cause normal samples to wig out for a set period of time.
I think if you're using it to trigger samples, it's amazing.
(Though it only has 4mb of storage capacity).
As a sequencer, it's limited, but in ways I find inspiring.
As a drum machine, it's killer.
I keep winding up with loops that sound like old Wu Tang instrumentals.
Not something I would ever do on purpose.
So that's cool.
