J. Anthony Allen shows how to use the zone editor to map different samples across key ranges and velocity layers. High-end multisample libraries use many samples per note and multiple velocity layers to create realistic instrument sounds, rather than transposing a single sample.
Okay, so if in the sound I click on zones, I'm going to get a magical new window coming up, new area, right? There's only a few things that have access to this little area, and sampler is one of them. Okay, so what I have here is a single zone. Okay. I have first one. That's the name of the audio file that we're using. And in this sampler, there's only one audio file. Okay, so what this is telling me is that this audio file gets triggered when I play any key. Okay? So that green bar means any key. And I can also say velocity. So quietest note to loudest note, any velocity, and I can say on any selection. Okay, so the selection is just where this teal bar is. And I can control that using kind of anything I want. If I control click or right click on it, I can go edit MIDI map or you can just press command M and I can map this to some parameter. If I have a MIDI controller or a knob or something like that, I can map it to that. I'll show you why you'd want to do that in a minute. But let's go back to key. So this sample is going to play when I trigger any key from low to high. But what if I wanted a different sample to trigger when I was in a higher notes? That's easy. I just do this. Let me get that back. Okay, Now I'd add another sample and say only trigger the other sample on the high notes. Right. So that way I can have two samples triggered on the same sampler. One for the low notes and one for the high notes. Right. Let me show you what that would look like. I have another preset here called chill outs. Okay. It sounds like this. Much more complicated sample. So let's look at the zones for this one. Okay. This one has five different zones. Okay. So it's going to play this audio file this high vowler F1 when I play low notes all the way up to looks like B1. Then it's going to play this audio file when I play anything in the C2 to B2 range here and then this audio file when I play anything in this range, this one on this range and this one on this range. Cool. So it's going to trigger a different audio sample based on what note I play. Now I can look at the velocity and see if they've set up anything for velocity mappings. They have not. So what this means is that all of these key all of these samples happen at all velocities, which is cool. That means that it's just not velocity sensitive. That's okay. And the selection probably isn't configured in any special way either. No matter where this is, all the notes play. So only key mapping is set up here. So I could change it so that, you know, let's say when I play C3, we want multiple notes to happen. You just drag this bigger. I can just do that. Now all of these are gonna get two notes because this one's gonna trigger all the time. Let's go up here. Right. So now I'm getting multiple notes and I could swap these out. This little thing I just did is a note crossfade. If you grab this little tiny bar up here, you can crossfade. So now it's going to cross fade these two samples in these keys that can set up some really nice sample libraries. So point is, if you have a big sample library, it has a lot of samples in it. That's what makes them big and that's what makes the kind of more expensive ones. So it's not just one sample that you're going to transpose all over the place. Because the more you transpose a sample, the less real it sounds. So you're going to have different samples triggered. If you buy like a really high end, like piano library, you're going to have a sample for every single note. And you might have multiple samples for every single note. You might have a different sample triggered for each note and four, maybe five samples based on how hard you hit that note. Right. The more samples in it, the more accurate it is when it comes to creating like real sounds, recreating real sounds. So let me show you an example of that.
