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Romplers – then and now
Romplers — sample players where the sample is in ‘ROM’ built into the machine or whatever — have been around since the late 80s, the first one I had experience of was when the first Emu Proteus was released and I bought one and loved the usability of it (I already had an SY77 but is that a rompler? I suppose it partly was too – the Proteus was only rompler, nothing else)
Later I also had a Korg 05R/W but some years ago gave it away to a friend, because I already had Korg’s iM1 on the iPad, giving the 05R/W was made a bit easier because I learned at that time that it was only 32KHz sampling (whereas who knows what the iM1 is, internally)
This got me wondering – if you put aside attributes such as sample rate, sample depth, specific hardware DAC characteristics etc, the question is, are samples in a 90s rompler any different to samples in a software rompler today? There’s no real technological difference, I suspect – the samples are made in the same way, the formats probably haven’t changed, the technology to separate initial portion from the loop portion is probably either the same or totally ignored – I suspect romplers today are no different to romplers in the late 80s early 90s etc (other than as I say, things like sample rate/depth, DAC stuff)
Comments
ROMplers appeared as soon as ROM chips could be made cost effectively. And grew in storage size as cost permitted. So a pseudo-ROMpler like the D50 has less storage than an M1, a Proteus 1 has less than a Proteus 2000, etc. I believe this trend has continued to date. DACs will be really clean now, less so then.
Welcome to the once-owners of 05R/W club 😆
All I know is that I realize that romplers in the 90s were super optimized. With a few KB of samples, you could achieve pretty good results… Today it sounds better but at the cost of several 100MBs.
I have owned a Roland MC505 Groovebox, which uses the JV1080 synth engine. The engine uses for a patch 1 to 4 tones. The tone is a waveform that is used as an oscillator.
When I look back the raw bare bone synth sound was very weak, awful. The only advantage was the polyphony, 64 notes possible, 8 channels at the same time.
I also owned at one point a EMU XL7 Command Station, but the synth engine was a bit too cryptic for me, and I did not have much spare time left for this hobby, so I sold it too.
I think (IMHO) when you have enough CPU power for virtual analog, you don't need a rompler these days.
Rompler would be anything that uses samples as oscillators, so JV1080, Proteus and its clones.
SY77 was half synth, half rompler. You can layer rompler patches aka AWM with 6 operator FM patches. The FM engine had sine waves and other waveforms from TX81Z. 4 elements or layers at a time, any combo. Similarly, JV and XV Roland synths had 4 layer per patch and 16 parts total. I have rack version of SY77, a TG77.
Romplers were replaced by Kontakt libraries, Omnisphere, etc. but yeah basic concept is same. Romplers used a single sample for oscillator, whereas sample libraries today contain multiple samples. Depending on library this can get crazy with multiple layers of samples per note and velocity.
I still prefer old school sampling approach even on iOS and desktop.
Old school samplers also used 16-bit or lower quality samples. Many sample libraries use 24-bit samples.
I’m another once-owner of an O5R/W in the end I sampled the waveforms I liked and sold it
I think there’s a few advantages today’s software samplers have to ROMplers in the past. Things like round robin, key triggered articulations, much greater velocity expression, vastly more choke groups, etc.
One of my favorite “genres” of synth is ROMplers, especially the classic ones with surprisingly deep modulation capabilities. SY77, D50, M1, WaveStation, etc. Always was a big fan of the Triton as well. Korgs workstations were the best, imo.
App wise, Modules Triton expansion, iM1, iWavestation, and the PSP expansions are great.
Early romplers faced excruciating restrictions in technological lack of abundance of, well, rom, and models such as the MT-32 used what Sound on Sound magazine kept on calling “S+S”, standing for ‘sample + synthesis’, because the attack part of the sound gave the greatest psychoacoustic clue as to what the sound is supposed to be – hence, the attack of a given sound was often constructed in the form of a very short one-shot sample followed by a looped synthesised sustain portion, all put through modifying other envelopes to make the overall sound more convincing
I know S+S is a fudge, but I think it was an admirable achievement of the day
Talking of MT-32, this should be mentioned:
https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi
56GB for a single sampled synth a call it a day
My sister had one before I did:
She wouldn’t let me take it apart to see how the ROM’s worked. Maybe it was a TAPE-ler. Lot’s of IAP’s which was a game changer for “spoken word” artists.
I still use my JV2080. Yes the samples are tiny, but they had plenty of tricks and effects to make it sound better.
Without wanting to turn this into an attempt at self-publicity, my 'Moon Child' track a few months ago used the JV2080s 'Jazz Guitar' sound as lead instrument processed just with a black hole reverb. It still sounds lovely to my ears!
I have owned a Fantom X, same family as the JV. It was the only synth I had at the time so had to dig into programming the sort of sounds I like and grew to love romplers for what they are. Currently have a K2000RS and a K2600XS, which, like the Fantom, do a lot more than just romple. I use the old rom samples a lot all the same. Who cares if they’re tiny, they sound good and have their own flavour.
Flavour is a significant thing with early ROMplers, they can’t be realistic so they end up their own thing (M1 piano anyone?).
As someone who owns more romplers than I should, I think romplers often get flak for being hard to program, but they weren’t intended for sound designers. Usually they were designed and programed to cover a lot of standard sounds from real instruments to commonly used synth timbers so that a gigging band could cover a lot of sonic territory. They were and still are popular for use in studios as well. The presets could often achieve convincing sounds despite the technology limits, but good romplers were able to sound really close to a real instrument in a mix. Maybe solo presets wouldn’t fool a studio musician who can play that instrument, but when used well you are hard pressed to hear that a sound in the mix sounds “off.” There is a skill to doing that of course. I think romplers found their way into a lot more music than the public will ever know.
I’ve got a few ROMplers. I still have them, by the time I stopped using them they weren’t worth anything!
I started with an MT-32 which I got along with a Yamaha FB-01 and my keyboard was a Casio CZ-3000. I also had a Yamaha QX-21 sequencer (it had a 2 digit LED display and 2 tracks!) and an RX-21 Drum machine.
Later I got a Proteus 1XR and that was as a huge leap in quality. It had emulator samples but no filters. In fact none of my synths at that time had a common or garden filter! (I have just remembered I initially had a MacProteus which was a proteus on a Nubua card. Kind of like an early plugin
I sent it back and swapped it for the rack version which was lucky as not long after our office was broken into and the Mac was stolen. And the proteus still works! I doubt I’d still be able to fire up the MacProteus…
I added a Protologic upgrade to it which was scary to install. It required major internal surgery to the Proteus!
Then finally I bought three Roland ROMplers and they were the most ROMplery of all. The proteus had a proper synth engine and you could program some pretty cool sounds with it.
The Roland trio were preset only devices out of the box but sounded pretty cool.
I had the Vintage synth, strings and Drum and Bass modules which were based on expansion cards for the JV series I think.
They were all definitely of their time. The sounds are OK from a nostalgia POV but not really anything i would turn to today.
The Roland strings ROMpler for example cant hope to sound anything like say a Spirfire string library but it was the best thing I had for strings at the time.
I’ve recently autosampled the odd preset from some of them into Logic. Running it hot through a mixer sounds like the 90s. The drum kits are useful and I’ve dumped a bunch into Atlas maps and might end up using the odd hit in the future.
Anyway. That was me reminiscing through my journey through getting new sounds.
I went for years with just the sounds from those devices. At the peak of my Midi + tape machine home studio I had them all running at the same time into a mixer all sequenced ‘live’ synced to guitars and vocals on tape.
I loved that setup. Recording a song with tape was a great way to commit. You’d write a song then map it out on the midi sequencer then record the vocals and guitars and stuff so were completely locked in to the song structure. I used to get loads of songs done in those days.
My sister had one of those (I think it was a knock off brand though) and it eventually stopped working so my dad took it apart while I watched and was really surprised to see a miniature blue vinyl record inside.
I can’t remember if he managed to fix it, but I remember at the time thinking it was really technologically advanced (I was probably something like 10 years old).
It was vinyl! No wonder it sounded so warm.
Who remembers when magazines could contain a flexible “plastic” record?
I suppose the one significant improvement that a 2020s hardware rompler could offer is to use 32 bit float samples (freshly sampled of course), which would allow a lot more manipulation in terms of envelope modification etc
Another might be to sample in spatial in eg ambisonic, so as to allow to position the sample spatially in the end result, which would be interesting if there were some sort of object based way of getting a sound out of a hardware box of sounds such as a rompler, and maintaining the spatial objectness all the way through the production process, including all the ambient clues there in the original sampling exercise