The ASR-10 is one of the oldest pieces of gear in my setup but still holds a very central role. I use it as my main keyboard (the weight of the keys on the 88-keys keyboard is very nice and it feels familiar), and I also use it to add lo-fi character to clean samples.

I grew up on sample-based music during the “golden era” of Hip Hop & House. Due to the technology of the time, those classics that I grew up on included subtle gear noise, bit reduction, and aliasing imparted by the popular samplers of the day (MPC, SP12, ASR mainly). So, for me, the ultra-clean sound of today’s production is – well – lacking something.

Here’s my general process for dirtying up a clean sample:

• Find a clean sample I like and throw it into Ableton Simpler
• Sample the clean version in MONO into Maschine
• Record the clean version through the Soundcraft mixer into my (Technics RS-TR355) cassette tape deck
• Sample the cassette tape version into the ASR (with or without any ASR onboard effects).
• Record the “dirty” ASR sample into a new pad in Maschine
• Link the dirty version and the original clean version pads in Maschine and mix the levels to taste
• Play them together and resample in Maschine to a single pad
• Have fun

With my (Soundcraft Signature 12MTK) mixer this process is pretty quick. The Soundcraft’s multi-track USB audio interface allows any VST/AU/AAX/TDM/RTAS plug-ins to be inserted on any input channel. Then, sending output to the tape recorder is just a matter of turning up a send on that mixer channel.  The output of the cassette recording is connected to a dedicated channel on the mixer and I have a dedicated channel send that sends audio to the ASR.

I find that playing the original clean sample together with the dirty one does much more than adding some unique character. It also obviously fattens up the sound as you’re layering samples. The end results can be much more interesting and (here’s the point!) unique to you.

Of course, you don’t need an ASR to try this yourself, it just ads an extra bit of ASR-10 character that I enjoy! (There are some great plugins like Decimort that include vintage synth emulations including the ASR-10).

You could just use a cheap cassette recorder and/or cheap mixer. The main point is to take things out of your computer and then bring them back in using any gear that is likely to leave a sonic imprint on the original sound.

Curious about the ASR-10? Find out more about why people love it in the short video below.

ASR-10 Specs can be found here.