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Although memory is not as precious a commodity as it used
to be, it still pays to be as economical as possible. Always
remove any silence at the start and end of a sample.
It can be difficult to locate the start of a sample if you do not
have the ability to display the waveform. A good technique is to
play the sample transposed down a few octaves. Because the sample
plays much slower, any silence at the start becomes obvious as a
delay in the time between playing the sample and hearing the sound.
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When you loop a sound always play it at the highest note you intend
using it at to check for clicks that are less obvious lower down the
scale.
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Because most modern samplers are stereo it is easy to become
complacent and use stereo samples where mono ones will suffice
(and often improve!). The same is true of recording samples. Why
sample a sound in full stereo when it is going to be barely audible
in the mix or panned to one side? Using stereo unnesseccarily is a
huge waste of a sampler's resources.
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It sounds obvious but you should always record a sample at a relevant
sample rate or re-sample it after recording. If you have a large
capacity hard drive it is easy to be lazy and record everything at the
highest sample rate, but when your hard drive is full or you run out
of Zip disks, I bet you'll wish you hadn't sampled all those reggae
bass guitars at 48K! In fact by using excessively high sample rates
you are likely to capture more noise.
Bear in mind that sampling or re-sampling at very low rates can
introduce aliasing noise.
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Keep your song files as small as possible by deleting samples that
are not being used, but are stored as part of a preset. For example,
if you are using a piano preset that contains ten samples, but you
are only playing four notes that use two of the ten samples, delete
the unused samples from that song file.
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