Operation Manual

NN-19 SAMPLER
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To sample real instruments accurately requires a lot of hard work. Firstly, you need the original instrument, which
should be in perfect working order. For acoustic instruments you need a couple of good microphones, a mixer or
other device with high quality microphone preamps, and a room with good acoustics. You need to be meticulous
when recording the different samples, so that levels are smooth and even across the range etc.
Fortunately Reason provides a wide range of high quality multisampled instruments, so much of this hard work has
already been done for you.
In our experience, most people don’t use samplers only for playing sampled versions of “real” instruments. Very often,
single “stand alone” or single samples are used. Maybe you wish to use different
sounds for every key zone. Or you
could have complete chorus and verse vocals plus variations assigned to several “one note” key zones. Or use sam-
ples of different chords that play rhythmic figures to the same tempo, and use these to build song structures etc. The
possibilities are endless. When you use samples in this way, the keys on your keyboard that play the samples do not
necessarily correspond to pitch at all, the keys are simply used to trigger the samples.
About audio file formats
The NN-19 can read audio files in the following formats:
•Wave (.wav)
• AIFF (.aif)
• SoundFonts (.sf2)
• REX file slices (.rex2, .rex, .rcy)
• Any sample rate and practically any bit depth.
Wave and AIFF are the standard audio file formats for the PC and Mac platforms, respectively. Any audio or sample
editor, regardless of platform, can read and create audio files in at least one of these formats.
SoundFonts are an open standard for wavetable synthesized audio, developed by E-mu systems and Creative Tech-
nologies.
REX files are music loops created in the ReCycle program (see below). The NN-19 lets you either load REX files as
patches or separate slices from REX files as individual samples.
About the Sample Patch format
Reason’s Sample Patch format (.smp), is based on either Wave or AIFF files, but includes all the NN-19 associated
parameter settings as well.
• The audio files may be stereo or mono. Stereo audio files are shown with a “S” symbol beside its name in the
display.
Loading a Sample Patch
When you create a new NN-19 device, it is empty. That is, the “Init patch” in the NN-19 does not contain any samples.
For NN-19 to produce sound, you need to load either a sample patch, or a sample - or sample a sound yourself using
the Sampling function (see “Sampling”).
A patch contains “everything”. All the samples, assigned key zones, and associated panel settings will be loaded.
Loading a sample patch is done using the patch browser, just like in all other devices that use Patches.
Open the folder that contains the NN-19 patch you wish to load, select it and click open.