An evening in the studio

Sampling and interference

Here's a little story from tonights studio session:

Having borrowed a Roland MKS-50 from a friend of mine, I finally came around to sample a few sounds from it. It has these nice preset-toms that Stock, Aitken & Waterman (one of the most famous britsh producers of the 80:s) used on several tracks with f.ex. Mel & Kim, and some other nice sounds as well.

Anyway, as I started to sample, I noticed that there was some interference noise in the samples, where it was supposed to be silence (or atleast plain noise). It proved to be the sound of my computer at work (CPU etc) so I started to look for ways to eliminate this noise. After a while I found out that disconnecting the serial cable between my MIDI-interface and my computer lowered the noise significantly. Seems there must be a loop of some kind running both through the MIDI-cables and the audio-cables in my studio.

This is one of the things I hate with making music with hardware-gear; if you care about quality of your work - it may be perfect timing or clean sound - you have to invest a lot of time and money to get a good result. Time you could have spent on making music. In software you get perfect timing and clean sound by default. Of course there are other gains with creating music with hardware gear, but to me this is one of its drawbacks.

In the end, I worked it out by disconnecting the serial cable and went on sampling the the MKS-50 to gain a nice result. The midi-interface (Unitor-8) can be used without interaction from the computer, so it all resulted in some nice samples anyway.

It's odd, but I think I will use the sound of the MKS-50 better from these samples than if I had the MKS-50 sitting in my studio. I think it all depends on how I think, my ideas and how I create music - probably has a lot to do with my background with trackers as well.