EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

Garth Hjelte wrote: I understand that playing an open hi-hat with repeated strikes sound like the hits fall into each other, and thus SOUND polyphonic. I still think your premise isn't the best, but if you want it that way... try this:

Zone 1  Open Hat        D2-D2   Group 1 (assigned 1 voice)
Zone 2  Open Hat        E2-E2   Group 2 (assigned 1 voice)
Zone 3 Closed Hat       B1-B1   Group 1 (assigned 1 voice)
Zone 4 [null]           B1-B1   Group 2 (assigned 1 voice)

You can play the open hats on different keys, which will sound like they fall into each other on repeated hits. B1 will cut both off.


This or the other solution, having silent notes that is only used to achieve whatever polyphony you have chosen, are great workarounds. If only it wasn't so irritating selecting all samples under a certain note I would say that there wasn't really much of a problem at all. I have used the workaround described above for a long time and I never really thought of it as a problem. I do agree that some features in the EXS are annoying but to me this is not the worst.

NB I had a S5000 until 3 years ago when I bought the EXS and to me it was just so much faster to work with so I don't miss anything from that machine.

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Garth Hjelte wrote:
> This was the part of the mystery that I didn't get. How is it that hi-hats
> played polyphonically sound better? Doesn't that mean there are two sets of
> hi-hats (which in a drum kit isn't the case)?

*Any* ringing one shot sample will sound better when being polyphonic.
Best example might be a cymbal or triangle. You usually hit them hart at some accents and continue playing them softly between those
accents. It's not as if the loud ringing cymbal would stop all of a sudden, just because you hit it softly.
Just give it a try, you can use any ride cymbal and play a typical swing pattern with a few rather hard accents. When being
monophonic it will instantly sound like crap.
You do need mute groups for those as well, as you may want to emulate hand stops. This simply won't work properly with the EXS (and
with a lot of other samplers it won't either). Ah well, the beauty of DR-008...

> Standard "mute-groups" work like this under the hood: every sample
> reference assigned to a mutegroup only gets one voice for allocation. They
> cut each other off. If you a two sample references assigned to the same
> mutegroup assigned to the same key, only one will play. Pretty simple.

See Steve (Hollowsun)'s comment. Apparently the AKAI is offering polyphony for single keys routed to exclusive groups.
The (simple) problem being that on the EXS the mute group functionality is based on polyphony (or limiting polyphony, for the
matter) instead of being a note-based feature - which is what the DR-008 (and apparently AKAIs too) is doing.

Should be something VERY easy to adress, yet most sampler developers simply don't care.
When I requested this to be changed during the DR-008 beta test it took Angus like half an hour to implement it into the sampler
modules. When I requested this to be changed in the EXS it took like, hm... 5(?) years and still hasn't been implemented. And no,
it's nothing esoteric or whatever, it's just how every sampler should work like.

- Sascha

HKC wrote:

> If only it wasn't so irritating selecting all samples under a certain 
> note I would say that there wasn't really much of a problem at all. 

There is however an assignable key command for selecting all the zones 
which are associated with a group. You can also select several groups 
and use this to select all zones for the several groups.

Regards,
Murray