Samples

Four tracks that will play anything you give them.

You now have: drums, bass, lead and chords — a full arrangement’s worth of parts.

Firmware note. Parts of the sampling workflow described here are on a development branch. The Rompler, kits, banks and slices work today.

This lesson is being written. The outline below is what it will cover.

Planned outline

  • Tracks 7, 8, 13 and 14 are Rompler tracks — sample players. Tracks 7 and 8 will also run WavPlayer, which streams longer files instead of holding them in memory.
  • The structure: a kit holds 4 banks × 32 slices. One kit is active at a time and every Rompler track draws from it.
  • Page 1 of the Rompler is Bank, Slice, Start, End — choose the sound, then choose how much of it you play.
  • The factory kit’s four banks: DRUMS (kicks, snares, hats, toms, percussion), OTHER (synth stabs, pads, vocal fragments), A4 DUB, and LOOPS — five Amen-style breakbeats at 165–175 BPM.
  • Chopping a loop: put an Amen break on a Rompler track, then use Start and End — with parameter locks from lesson 7 — to play a different slice of it on each step. This is where jungle came from, and it’s four locks’ worth of work.
  • Speed and TStrch on page 2: the difference between playing a loop faster and playing it at a different pitch.
  • A sampler-focused project can turn most tracks into Rompler tracks, laid out across the banks — a completely different instrument for sample-based production.
  • Getting your own samples onto the device: the WebUI file manager, and USB disk mode.

The finished exercise will provide a deterministic sample kit, let the learner choose a loop and its start point, place it on the grid, and Reset the result.

Next: 13 · Space and mix · Previous: 11 · Chords and harmony

Reference: Rompler · Project & settings · WebUI