The original article is wrong to use the term "samples". That only applies when making a digital representation of an analog signal by "sampling" the amplitude thousands of times a second. These are recordings.
The Mellotron is still alive and well, both as a mechanical instrument still supported and made by Streetly Electronics, and in digital form by the official plug-in versions from GForce Software like https://www.gforcesoftware.com/products/m-tron-pro/ . I suppose with the plug-in virtual Mellotron the sounds really are samples.
A as musician, technologist, and sample user of many years I disagree.
Your usage of sample is correct, but there are other usages of the word which are alos correct, and the term "sampler" isn't specific to the literal digital signal sampling.
I have bought and made plenty of sample packs, to be played back by various sample players, over the last 25 years. A "sampler" refers to how the device works with recordings, not the individual digital samples that it makes up- as far as I understand it anything that allows you to recontextualuze short recordings is a sampler,
A mellotron very much is a mechanical sampler, though very limited compared to its current digital counterparts.
I am open to being wrong. But your claim is a bit odd. While I'd be stoked to see some evidence in the philology of the term that says I'm wrong, I just don't think that is something you'd find.
I don’t think sample really implies it has to be digital at all. “Sampling” can mean what you said, but I think a mellotron is very much a sampler by most definitions. It plays back a chunk of a pre-existing recording.
More than that, it plays back a particular snippet of audio recording, over and over, upon pressing a particular key. Play a different key and you get a different recording, and they're not meant to be heard once, they're meant to map to the sounding of a particular note, whether that be played staccato (playing only from the attack) or legato (playing the full length of the sample).
The Mellotron is an analog multi-sample sample-playing instrument. It's just that working in analog makes everything way more cumbersome.
Sampling in the analog world happened for millennia before computers. It's a perfectly good use of the word here. It does not in anyway only apply to digital.
The term sampling is used in DJing and music production for a short “sample” of a whole, long before digital recording technologies were used. You’re too ridgid in your definition. (I am also surprised why this specific “well akshully” comes up - it’s not like DJ sampling or hip hop sampling is obscure.)
I believe the term "sampling" was introduced with the Fairlight, which was digital.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_CMI although I would refer to previous analog work as sampling, since a sample is a generic term.
Yes, sample is generic, which is why I admit a little bit of skepticism with the claim that Fairlight coined the term and that it wasn't used prior to 1979 by turntablists/DJs earlier in the 70s, or with analog tape sampling.
I think we agree that it's irrefutable that the use of the term sample in the past 30 years is unrelated to digital vs. analog both on wikipedia and numerous scholarly and printed works. That doesn't speak to origin of the term of course. The OED doesn't cite uses prior to 1985, FWIW.
Edit: Ok that was pretty easy to debunk with Google Books. Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology Volume 8, UCLA School of Music from 1974 refers to sampling: "the sounds (or "samples") are not created within the instrument itself but are recorded sounds from some external source which are fed into a sampling instrument". There are some other usages from around that time-frame.
I'd say the part of a sample being "a digital representation" is correct, however there's a fun exception to that rule: circuits called bucket-brigade delays that perform "analog sampling", using capacitors. They're still used a lot in musical contexts.
Those are traditionally regarded as being analog, although in recent times I've seen people claiming they're not, since they use discrete instead of continuous signals. So they're kind of halfway.
The Mellotron is still alive and well, both as a mechanical instrument still supported and made by Streetly Electronics, and in digital form by the official plug-in versions from GForce Software like https://www.gforcesoftware.com/products/m-tron-pro/ . I suppose with the plug-in virtual Mellotron the sounds really are samples.