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Thursday 26 June 2014

Using Zampler to create a PitchFall Sound Design Patch



I have recently installed Zampler, the absolutely free plugin from PluginBoutique.com. Having watched the introduction video I was pleasantly surprised. Besides being a sfz player, there is a host of features that can spice and freshen up our old and dusty sfz collections.

These include fully automatable parameters like filters, ADSR and envelope controls, and effects like reverb, chorus, distortion, delay, and phasers. We can choose to make the instrument polyphonic or monophonic too. On top of that, we can also configure note gliding resulting in portamento.

The three main things that seal the deal and truly sets this virtual sampler apart, are:
LFO section(!) - 3 LFOs with 4 selectable waveforms can be used to modulate parameters. These are host tempo aware too!

Arpeggiator - An arpeggiator has been added with controls for pitch and velocity per note value. This would truly transform those

Mod Matrix - As if the earlier 2 features were not enough This third major feature alone makes it worth the while to incorporate Zampler into your workflow. This is a mapping section or virtual patch-bay to hook up almost any parameter's output (note pitch, note velocity, LFOs, mod wheel, pitch wheel, expression pedal, arpeggiator velocity(!), arpeggiator note pitch(!), or any randomly generated value) to any other parameter's output (volume, pan, pitch, ADSR, Filter Params, LFO rates, FX dry/wet levels, etc)

In my obsession with creating more pitch drop sound design patches, I decided to test Zampler out, and within minutes I have successfully used LFOs to modulate my pitch, and using my modwheel I could further affect the pitch in a playable manner. by using a second filter I could create a gating effect on top of the pitch drop. With automation I could automate the rate of the LFOs over time.

Watch the video and try this beast of a sampler out for yourselves!