Any recorded sound can be played. A field recording, a held note, a word someone said, a chord off an old record. You load it into a sampler, tell it one thing, and it stretches that one sound across the whole keyboard so every key plays it in tune.
Applies to any sampler and any DAW. The ideas are the technique. The instrument at the end is just the fast way to run it.
It means taking a single recording and making it playable across the whole keyboard, in tune, held for as long as you want. A sampler is the tool that does it. You give it one sound, tell it what note that sound is, and it repitches your recording for every other key.
The engine underneath is simple. Press a higher key and the sampler plays your recording back faster, so it comes out higher. Press a lower key and it plays back slower and lower. One recording becomes eighty-eight pitched versions of itself. That is the whole trick at the root of sampling, and everything else on this page is about making that trick sound musical rather than like a sped-up tape.
What you feed it does not matter. A cello note, a slammed door, a sung vowel, a synth chord, a puddle. If it is a sound, it can be a sample, and a sample can be an instrument.
You set the root note. You tell the sampler the exact pitch of the recording, and from that one fact it works out how far to move the sound for every other key so they all land in tune.
The sampler has no way of knowing what note your recording is until you tell it. If you sampled a note played at A, you set the root to A. Now the key marked A plays the sound at its natural speed, and every key around it is repitched exactly the right distance from there. Get the root wrong and the keyboard is still in tune with itself, but in the wrong key, so it fights everything else in the track.
If the source is a little sharp or flat, there is a fine-tune control, usually in cents, to nudge it onto the note. And if the sound has no clear pitch at all, like wind or a cymbal or rain, there is no correct root. You pick whatever sits well and treat the keyboard as a way to shift the texture up and down rather than to play a tune.
Repitching changes length as well as pitch. A high key plays your sample fast and short, a low key slow and long. For a short hit that is fine. For a note you want to hold, it is a problem, and the fix for it is the next section.
You loop a sustained portion of the sample. You mark a stretch in the steady middle of the sound, and the sampler plays that stretch round and round for as long as you hold the key. A two-second recording can then hold for as long as you like.
First decide which kind of sound you have. A one-shot plays the sample once, start to finish, and stops, whatever you do with the key. That suits drums, hits and stabs, sounds with a natural beginning and end. A sustaining sound is different. A pad or a held note has to last as long as your finger is down, and no recording is long enough for that on its own, so you loop it.
Find a section after the attack and before the sound fades, where the tone is steady, and mark a loop start and end. The sampler plays up to the loop, jumps back, and repeats that stretch until you let go. The skill is picking points that do not click or pump. A clean loop crosses zero at both ends and matches in tone and level, so the join is inaudible and the note seems to hold by itself. A short crossfade across the join smooths over whatever is left.
On top of the loop you shape the sound over time with an envelope, usually attack, decay, sustain and release. Attack is how fast it fades in when you press the key, release how long it takes to fade out when you let go. A slow attack turns a sharp recording into a soft swell. A long release lets notes overlap and bleed into each other. The recording is the raw material; the envelope is how it enters and leaves.
You stop it repeating the same way. A raw looped sample is static, and after a few passes the ear catches the loop and switches off. You keep it moving with time-stretch and granular playback, layering, filtering and slow modulation, so the sound drifts and never quite lands in the same place twice.
Normally pitch and length are locked together, which is why low notes run long and high ones run short. Time-stretching separates the two, so you can hold a sound out far past its recorded length without dropping its pitch. Granular playback goes further: it chops the sample into tiny grains and replays them as a cloud, so you can freeze on a single moment and stretch it into a slowly shifting wash. This is how a one-second recording becomes a texture that lasts minutes.
Stack the sample with a copy of itself an octave down, or with a second, different sample, and it gains a body and depth one recording cannot give on its own. Detune the layers a few cents against each other and they beat gently and breathe, which reads as something alive rather than a fixed sound.
Put a filter on it and move the cutoff slowly, and the tone opens and closes over time. Add slow modulation on top, a gentle wobble on pitch, on level, on the filter, with the rates all slightly different so nothing lines up, and the loop stops sounding like a loop. The rule from generative music holds here too. Things that move slowly, at rates that never sync, read as a living texture. Things that move on the beat read as a repeat.
Tape did it by accident. A loop of tape run round and round never plays back identically, because the tape wows and flutters in pitch, picks up dust, and drops out in worn spots. Every pass is a little different. That imperfection is exactly what keeps a looped sample from sounding dead, and you can put it back deliberately.
SILT is this last step built into an instrument. It is a generative tape-loop player: drop any sound in, a field recording, a held note, a voice, a chord, and it loops it on worn tape. Wow and flutter bend the pitch, dust and dropout eat at it, and the loop comes round a little different every time. A static sample becomes an evolving bed that never quite repeats. It runs as an Audio Unit, a VST3, an AAX and a standalone app.
The point of it is that you skip the manual looping and modulation. You give it a sound and it does the wearing-out for you, so you get the moving texture without building the system by hand.
No download and no signup to try it. Everything above still works by hand in any sampler, which is rather the point of writing it down.
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