Make Awesome Sample and Hold Style loops in Absynth 5

Last week we’ve looked into some of the granular options that Absynth 5 has to offer by looping a sample in granular mode. This week it’s time to take this concept a bit further and look into a cool new trick to make sample and hold style loops in Absynth 5.

The sample and hold devices that you’ll find in old analogue synths works on the principle of capturing a voltage for a pre defined amount of time, it freezes this part of the signal until it moves to the next step. Therefore the continuously changing signal underneath gets chopped up in little pieces, every piece sounding different, this gives a stuttering choppy effect and is used allot in ambient and glitchy electronic music. Absynth 5 just happens to make this an incredibly simple process.So if we apply this technique to a sample in Absynth 5 we can freeze a specific point inside the sample and sync this to the hosts tempo.

If you never experimented with this before you will be amazed about the amount of sounds hiding in a few seconds of audio!

Once we’ve set this up and created our rhythmic sequence we can add other melodies and perhaps a bass line to make the patch complete. Alternatively you can try to load 2 others sample oscillators and give them different rhythms and  melodies!

Have fun and let me know when you’ve discovered something fresh!
Jorgalad