Osterhouse Sounds Note Sampler is a new MIDI plugin that lets you record playable MIDI clips to your keyboard keys.
Some of my readers may be familiar with the sound designer Ben Osterhouse, who offers some beautiful orchestral libraries for Kontakt (full). They are available at Loot Audio.
Ben has also been making plugins for some time now and released his second very exciting plugin this week. Osterhouse Sounds Note Sampler is a new, unique MIDI plugin that upgrades your keyboard with creative sequencing.
Osterhouse Sounds Note Sampler
Note Sampler is a new MIDI plugin for macOS and Windows described as a playable sketchpad. It lets you record MIDI snippets/clips on the keys of your piano. The plugin aims to make combining MIDI note sketches more open and fun.
Instead of dragging clips around with the mouse in your DAW, Osterhouse Sounds Note Sampler lets you play back, mix, and match ideas with your MIDI keyboard.
The workflow is super simple. Select a key, hold the record key, and play something, and you have a ready-to-play MIDI snippet in that key. You can record live or in step-recording fashion with step playback. There is also a step editor to make editing easier.
Note Sampler also gives you the option to loop MIDI snippets with a custom loop length. You can also overdub existing MIDI snippets on the fly.
Getting Creative
Exciting is the way you can combine functions. First, you can combine regular MIDI keyboard playing with the MIDI snippets. For example, you have loaded various MIDI loops from C0 to C1. You can still play the synth or piano normally on the other keys.
This opens up new possibilities for jamming and performing. You can also bake a combination of ideas together onto new notes. Osterhouse Sounds built a resampling function into Note Sampler that captures the MIDI loops you play.
Neat, it also has clip-launch quantization, so your combined clips lock rhythmically, as well as key snapping so the clips stay in a desired key.
You can also go crazy with the plugin and use the cascade mode by stacking up to three keyboards inside one instance. Turn it on, and the notes one keyboard plays trigger recordings in the next, which trigger recordings in the next, and so on.
Note Sampler also ships with a MIDI monitor that you can drag into your DAW at any time to get back anything you played.
First Impression
Over the past few months, we’ve been truly inundated with new plugins. A lot of them feel like recycled ideas. But with Note Sampler, my immediate thought was: what a brilliant idea! Recording MIDI clips on keys and looping them on their own is an inspiring feature.
The fact that you can combine these by playing and then record them again as resamples makes the whole thing even more fun. I hope Ben from Osterhouse Sounds keeps developing the plugin and eventually adds MIDI parameter recording in a later version.
Osterhouse Sounds Note Sampler is available now for $29. It runs as a VST3 and AU plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows.
More information here: Osterhouse Sounds
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