One of the most astonishing musical innovations in decades is the digital sampler. A sampler records any sound — say, a clang of pots, or a cough, or a guitar strum on an old 78 — and lets you play that sound across a keyboard in several octaves. You can walk around the house recording what you find, or take stuff off TV commercials. You probably wouldn’t want to, but it’s possible to play Bach on the cough. Other fun things you can do include looping the sound so it plays back continuously (until you’re loopy yourself) or reversing it to make your own back-masked Satanic messages. Depending on your sampler, you can tweak the sound in the usual ways synthesizers do, by adding harmonics, or distorting
