PLUGIN WEEK 2025: The quest to emulate acoustic instruments reached a tipping point in 1979 with the release of the legendary (and legendarily expensive) Fairlight CMI, the world's first commercially available sampler.
After this moment, all that was needed to emulate, warp or reimagine any real-world sound was sufficient computer processing power and memory, commodities that became increasingly affordable over the course of the following decade. With that lower price tag came ubiquity and democratisation, driving sampling into the heart of every genre of music and sparking new genres and sounds along the way. But, though hardware samplers aren’t held back by the same limitations that they once were, many of the most versatile and powerful samplers in 2025 can be found in the software realm.
