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Originally Posted by
rids
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So what features are you finding are able to mangle the samples? The effects are top notch for sure and the quality from the AD convertors are fantastic. The sound is magic in a box for sure. Lots of button pressing to edit samples though. Ensoniq was a great company. Someone definitely needs to bring back this quality of a sampler that more hands on.
I hear ya on bringing sophisticated samplers back, a keyboard could be cool too.
The ASR is really a sample based synthesizer. Its built upon Ensoniq's transwave synthesis, which is more or less wavetable synthesis.
Basically, you can assign any available modulation source to sample start, end, loopstart, loopend, or loopposition. So say for example, you have a sample that goes hello, with loop position controlled by the mod wheel. You can move the loop frame forward and back through the word while you have a key pressed down. For example you can loop on the H, then move the modwheel to the L, then to the O, and back to the E. Or you could use an LFO and make it go hellollehellollehellolleh....
To my knowledge, no other hardware sampler can do that. Not sure about software, as I haven't kept up with the scene. Anyway, glitch is childs play with the ASR-10, and its not always easy to get smooth results, but you usually can with some effort and the right waveform.
(By the way, the EPS16+ also has transwave functionality. As does the TS-10/12, which can't sample but can load ASR format samples.)
Also, as mentioned by someone else, the ASR has several crossfade looping algorithms which, when used on the sources suggested by the manual are highly effective. But I also wanted to mention the algorithm called synthesize loop. This takes bits and bobs of the sample and constructs a loop out of it. They could have called it the 'loop-anything' algorithm, because it can...
I love the ASR-10 and I doubt I'll ever part with mine. But my personal favorite Ensoniq sampler (despite being the inferior machine) is the ASR-X. Its just soooo fast workflow wise and I value that.