First off, I want to warn you this is a ghetto way to do this, BUT IT WORKS!!! I've created tons of presets using VITAL and Massive (and any other standalone synth) Yes, its has to have a stand alone version or it wont work. One last thing, this ONLY WORKS ON A COMPUTER, NOT MOBILE!!! Lets begin....(in this example, we will be using VITAL) This also works if you want to sample any sound off of YouTube or basically anything that plays on your computer, a video game, dvd, etc...
*If you are confused, I will link a YouTube video at the bottom showing how this is done.
#1. First, open VITAL and connect your MIDI controller. Make sure its working and pick a stock preset or better yet, create your own patch!!! This works best with shorter sounds but you can use long sustained notes as well. Now that you have your sound selected its time to open Caustic.
#2. Open up the WAV Editor and hit record. A pop-up will show and give you an option to select your driver. I'm using Windows 10 with its default audio driver called "Realtek High Definition Audio" but yours might be different. Do not use the "Microphone" option!!
#3. Once your audio driver is selected, you can now hit record. You have a couple different options now. Depending on how much of an octave range you want, you now must play your midi notes that you want. As soon as you hit a button, you will notice that the audio is now being recorded into the WAV editor!!!
#4. This part is important! Make sure you know what notes your are playing and in what order. I suggest starting with C and skipping up 3 steps with each note, so the next note will be D sharp, followed by F sharp then A and then you will be back on C again for your next octave. This method works good enough so you dont have to sample every note and it makes the process much faster (but you are more that welcome to sample every note).
#5. Hit stop and now you will have all of your recorded notes in the editor. It records in stereo so it you are sampleing an 808, convert it to mono but we don't really need to get into this. Whats important is that you correctly save each note. Move the loop cursers to your first note (be careful to get it perfect, right at the beginning and at the end). Now go to File>Save selection and name it whatever you want but make sure you lable the note it is, so an example could be Cyberpunk Bass C2. Go to your next sample and repeat the process, this would be called Cyberpunk Bass D sharp, etc...
#6. Once you have all of your samples, you can open up the PCM synth and start assigning all your samples to their respected slots in the sampler. Now you have your very own preset made with VITAL!
YOUTUBE VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/1jBAIOhBB9o?si=6mSXcJUePQzcCTq5
This can easily be done with any VST regardless if there's a standalone version or not, and if you don't have a midi keyboard or controller.
Anyone using VST's probably uses them in a DAW. Just load up the VST synth in the DAW. Enter the notes you want played by recording the notes from a controller, keyboard, virtual keyboard or just using your mouse/computer keyboard or the piano roll (or seq. grid) etc.
Render to an audio track & export, if desired, and then you can chop them up and save using Caustic's editor or any wave editor you choose.
It might in fact be easier to do in the DAW. If each note is set to play at the beginning of a measure (quantization or entered with snap to grid etc.), usually you can set the DAW cursor to snap to grid in the DAW's sequencer timeline. You can set the cursor at the measure where any note starts, it snaps to exactly the beginning and you split the audio there, continuing till you split all the notes. Some DAW's allow exporting these all at once and/or using other batch processing options.
Another method to export the individual notes is, once split, drag and drop each to a seperate track. Pretty much every DAW will allow exporting each track as a seperate audio file or "stem" (including Caustic).
One benefit here is that it's very easy to control the exact length of every note. And quicker/easier to find the beginning/end of each "sample"/note you create. You can also use any fx from the DAW or VST effects. You could create samples that layer as many synths together, with/without effects, as you like.
And of course once saved if you upload to a cloud service or hook a mobile device up via USB you can copy the samples, or already made PCMsynth instruments, onto the device to use as well.
You can save the DAW file as a template & reuse as many times as you like, simply swapping out the VST/fx.
https://soundcloud.com/stoons-1
https://soundcloud.com/st-csound
https://youtube.com/channel/UCGhwmkS1uWmX6mhTIQ0IDsg