Pico-8 Music Tutorial #32 – Creating the Pico-8 Multi-Sampler

The Pico-8 multi-sampler is out, files attached below!

What is a multi-sampler? It’s a group of samples, organized musically. In this case, I recorded and edited every possible note + instrument combination in Pico-8 and organized them so they can be triggered using a MIDI interface (like a keyboard). Overall, there are a total of 800+ .wav files. 

Check out the video for a demonstration on how I created this. 

Briefly, the process can be divided into 4 steps:

• Exporting from Pico-8
• Cropping Each Note
• Creating Seamless Loops
• Importing and Organizing in Ableton (or your DAW of choice)

The bulk of the work is at step 3. Each individual file needs to be able to loop seamlessly when it’s triggered by a MIDI note. This means that the beginning and end of the waveform needs to start and end at the zero-crossing. Otherwise, you’ll hear pops and cracks when looping the file. 

Ideally, this could be done directly in Ableton, but unfortunately, Sampler’s “snap” function, (which is supposed to snap to zero-crossings) is very unreliable. So, I used Adobe Audition. 

One thing I didn't mention in the video tutorial is editing instrument 7.  The wave-cycle of instrument 7 is considerably longer than the other instruments. Because of this, I needed to export from Pico-8 at slower SPDs to make sure I capture the full cycles.  However, Pico-8 will only export a max 4:00ish minutes.  So instrument 7 needed to be exported in multiple files.

Once everything was imported in Ableton, I played around with macro controls to try and emulate the effects in Pico-8. Increasing the fade in, fade out, drop and slide time knobs would be like increasing the SPD in a Pico-8 SFX.

There are two files attached to this post. The first is the Ableton project, which contains the Pico-8 Multi-Sampler. In case you don’t use Ableon, the second file is a .zip containing the 800+ Pico-8 samples. This way you can import and organize them in your DAW of choice! 

This is my first time 1) posting big files on Patreon and 2) creating a multi-sampler, so if you run into any problems, hear pops in any of the samples, think something needs fixing, please leave a comment below and I’ll get to it ASAP!

Have fun!