Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

Hi All......would there be any cheap synthersizers you could recomend as against the sampler option they used.

The strings are so crunchy and lo fi....i know they liked the mirage but you would still need the correct sample to use, unless it was a libary sound.

I was thinking a korg poly 800....im trying to get close with my DX21 but theres nothing going.

Thanks Guys.

Any examples?

I'm confused...if you think the sounds you want are sampled, get a sampler.

Samplers are a dime a dozen these days, For the price of a Poly 800 (which isn't much of a synth anyways) you can buy a very nice sampler that probably cost $2000 or more when new.

I'm really wanting to know, if the strings were samples or not....I'm not sure....people go on about the S950 I take it's because they might have sampled a synth then run the sound through its filters or something....

Perhaps I'm trying to find either the synth they used or a synth that would be a very close sound...that's all...

Another thing is that I don't really like samplers...he he.

In the late 80's and early 90's, house and techno artist for the most part did the opposite of what people do today. Now we have synths play all of the melodic, harmonic, and texture/ambient parts and rely on samplers to do percussion. Then, you would typically find a drum machine doing percussion, and samplers handling the melodic, harmonic, and texture/ ambient parts. I think stuff sounded better doing it the second way, personally. Not everyone did things that way obviously, but chances are if it's in that late 80's early 90's time range, the answer is "sampler." Especially something like strings or choir sounds and things like that. Artists that were more part of more mainstream genres, or had more money would probably use more of the new digital synths, but it would be a few years before the more "underground" artists would stop using their samplers for strings and bases and things that synths could do as they became more affordable.

One of the main string sounds, the sound in the song strings of life for instance, is a mirage factory sound. There's also a choir and piano sound on that disc that will get you 2/3rds of the way toward your average every day house tune from that era. For that crunchy lo fi sound you're talking about, is all about the aliasing, bit rate, and filters (in that order?). which is a sampler thing...

And that Mirage factory string sound is two samples, reduced in length and relooped, from EII Marcato Strings. At least, that's what's on my disks here- all copies, no originals (my guess is previous owner backed them up. Lots of duplicates).

I take it then that a Akai S 950 or 900 would be the samplers to get hold of....

It's a beautiful string that mirage sound....I guess that we have so much choice now and they just used what they had available and tried to modify it to fit...