Nord User Forum

Last night I stumbled upon the AC wall wart adapter for my 30-year old Korg 707, and decided to perform a little sampling experiment with it. Been too long since I've contributed anything to the sample thide of sings.

I am including the source .wav files and .nwiproj files so that 1) anyone can play around with them, and 2) people just beginning to learn how to use Nord Sample Editor can see what settings are used to create them. This exercise was not intended to produce earth-shatteringly quality results. The FM synth being sampled is not particularly high fidelity sound, so no point in getting carried away with long samples. Focus was on keeping the resulting files VERY SMALL and to see how quickly satisfactory results could be achieved. Total time spent about 2 hours to produce 9 samples, plus mp3 demos and then post the whole mess to this forum. Not too bad, I think.

Bubbler and Dubbass are custom voices; the rest are factory.

All sounds sampled in intervals of minor thirds.
Recorded direct to USB drive on A&H Qu-16 mixer at 48Hz in stereo.
Dumped to Sound Forge for normalization, conversion to mono 44.1 Hz, and trimming dead space at beginning and end of recordings.
Added to Nord Sample Editor, mapped, normalized, saved and generated.

NOTE: important to SAVE your work as a .nwiproj file BEFORE you generate and dump to the instrument. If you generate prior to saving (and naming) your work, it will be given the name UNTITLED by NSE software. This is okay the first time around, but when you then generate another file the second time around it, too, will be named UNTITLED and therefore erase your previous work. Saving the .nwiproj file with a discrete name. This name will then be used for the sample file dumped to the instrument.

• 707 bubbler.mp3

• 707 dubbass.mp3

• 707 clav.mp3

• 707 kalimba.mp3

Thanks Pablo!

I'll have a look tonight (can't wait)!

Nicely done Pablo. If you want to make them even smaller you may just sample over minor 5th (tritone) intervals, i.e. 2 samples per octave, which is usually still good enough for synthetic sounds.

Nice work on these! I also agree with the above poster - for these sounds you could easily have used a bigger interval between your samples without losing quality. All synth-samples I've posted here have been sampled in 4ths which gives you the root +/- a whole step on each sample. In a few cases I have used a bit tighter (minor thirds) for the first or last couple of samples in the very low or very high register, depending on the sound.

Agreed that a larger sampling interval could have made these files smaller still. Truth be told, there were a couple of misfiring notes on my aging 707 and I didn't feel like getting involved in the maintenance job to fix them. My sampling interval choice here was affected by this, keeping a consistent interval while handily missing all of the misfiring notes!

Pablo

Pablo, there are threads here about key contact cleaning that might be useful to you. (Couldn't resist!)

Nice one LedB!

I was going to resist including a history/trivia lesson, but since you asked...

Korg 707 and cousin DS-10 were gifts from Yamaha. Apparently Korg was on its last legs and possibly getting ready to fold. Yamaha helped out by selling FM circuit boards to Korg, which then designed friendlier user interfaces for them than the DX series. Just enough to tide Korg over until the M1 release put them back in the black for good. The actions are also Yamaha -- no cleaning possible. The triggering rubber strips are a completely different design. My failing notes are not the result of dirt, but of torn contact surfaces.

Good joke, though!

Pablo

Well Pablo, if the 707 keyboard has issues you can rather play it via an external MIDI master (couldn't resist as well)

lay-zee mee