The Greengate DS:3 was an early computer-based sampler, used by many noteworthy artists including The KLF. Thanks to a little digital archaeology, we are pleased to bring you the Greengate DS:3 factory samples pack! It includes over 150 8-bit samples, just as they were recorded to floppy disk almost 40 years ago!
First, a little bit of computing history. The year was 1982. The place: Hertfordshire. A group of Apple II enthusiasts meet up, including John Molloy of synth-pop duo Mainframe, graphics programmer Colin Holgate, and hardware hacker Dave Green. Holgate would work with Mainframe creating computer-generated videos, and Green was busy developing an expansion board for the Apple II that would give it multitimbral playback of 8 bit audio - not unlike a Fairlight, but much more affordable. Mainframe were intrigued and began using the sampler. One successful demo and a write-up in Melody Maker later, the Greengate company was born and began producing the DS:3 (short for Digital Sound Sampling Sequencer).
The DS:3 consisted of the expansion board, software, a small audio interface, and a keyboard. It sold for about ÂŁ1500 (plus the cost of an Apple II). By comparison, a Fairlight cost about ÂŁ20,000! Samples were a maximum of 1.2 seconds at 30kHz. Four different samples could be played (monophonically) at once, with up to 12 samples in memory at a time. And it had song mode!
Features were added after the initial launch, including looping sample playback, a digital delay mode, and (then relatively new) MIDI. A revised unit was planned with 16-bit samples and eight voices, but unfortunately hardware issues, combined with the rise of Akai and other samplers led to the swift demise of Greengate.
Fast-forward forty years later to a rainy weekend. I’d stumbled across the DS:3 while reading about something else and was intrigued. A little internet research led to a collection of the software for the DS:3. I thought “there’s got to be some interesting sounds in here somewhere…how can I get them out?” Each floppy disk image had a list of its contents, and sure enough, there were some files that looked very much like the samples! I enlisted my spouse, who is good at computers, to help.
First we had to open the Apple II disk images and get the files out. Fortunately, there’s plenty of tools for working with these disk images. Once we had a few possible samples, we looked at a couple to see if we could work out the file format - was there a header or some other metadata? Just looking at the raw files, we could see a sort of barber pole pattern. Inspecting a hex dump of a couple, we guessed there wasn’t a header. On a hunch, we took a flute sample file and processed each byte, printing a number of hash signs in the terminal equal to the value of that byte. Watching it scroll by, we could see something a lot like a sine wave!
My spouse wrote a short program in Rust to rewrite the Greengate files into .wav files with the 30kHz sample rate we knew from reading about the sampler. We crossed our fingers and loaded the .wav into Audacity, and heard a nice flute sound with a bit of chiff to it! This was really exciting! Soon we had the rest of the samples processed and loaded onto the Digitakt via Overbridge. They sounded great!
So, here are the samples, in a .zip file, for you to use, just as they were recorded on floppy disks! Use them to make something awesome! (Maybe post it for us, too.)
Greengate DS3 samples.zip (1.5 MB)
A few things about these samples:
- Samples are 30kHz .wavs tested on Digitakt and Ableton Simpler.
- All the pitched samples are roughly at A#. According to what we read, users of the original DS:3 should have been sampling pitched sources at A. Given the stated 30kHz sample rate, we suspect that the original hardware would have played these back at A. You can, of course, repitch to suit.
- The sample levels are pretty loud! So you might need to adjust levels to avoid clipping, etc.
- I was surprised by the quality of the samples, but as with all vintage samplers they are a little noisy. That’s part of the fun!
It is pretty incredible what these people were able to accomplish with the limited computing power they had available at the time.
Learn more about Greengate:
Greengate DS:3 : Greengate : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - Greengate software, plus loads of manuals, old ads, hardware teardowns, and more
GREENGATE DS:3 | Applefritter - Thread on Apple forum with hardware pics
Gear - Contemporary articles from various UK music/gear mags
Welcome to the Official Website of Mainframe and Mainframe Music with free Mainframe mp3s. - Mainframe music and information
Fake Plastic Souks: Ancient Geek V.2.11 (Service Pack 2) - Stories from a former employee of Greengate
John Molloy - Mainframe - YouTube - Interview with John Molloy of Mainframe
Greengate DS:4 Sampler Module - Peripheral - Computing History - The DS:4
