Synths vs Samplers (in Reason)- very basic beginner question

[doubleplus]

Hello. Brand new here, so please let me know if I should put this somewhere else. I didn't see a beginner's forum.

I just got a new desktop and threw Reason on it a couple weeks ago (I have no previous experience with electronic music), and have been reading/watching tutorials and playing around with it every day. While there is plenty of material out there explaining how to use the synthesizers (Subtractor, etc) and samplers (NNXT, NN19), I've been unable to locate any high level explanations of why one would choose to use one or the other.

Samplers allow you to take a sound and play it back on your keyboard, manipulating it with filters, envelopes, LFO, polyphony, etc. That appears to be the exact same thing that I would do with a synthesizer. In both, I can load up some sound, play with it, play it into the sequencer. I see that with a sampler, I can layer and play different sounds on the same key based on velocity. So in situations where I'm not looking to do that, it doesn't appear I would need to use the sampler. Right? I just think I'm missing something.

background: I ultimately want to play around with various genres of dance music and maybe some experimental a la Coil, and am not concerned with being able to play "live." I don't anticipate recording my own sounds.

Yes, I'm reading the manual and have poked through various FAQs. None of them take a high-level/birds-eye approach... they just explain how to use things outside of context.

Thanks!

-dp

[EdisonRex]

Hi and

Generally speaking, and this is not limited to Reason, the difference between the synthesizer and sampler is the sound generation source. a synthesizer tends to use a more basic sound generation method (an oscillator or two, or some kind of basic waveform generation); a sampler uses any "sample" of audio as a source.

So a synthesizer can "synthesize" musical timbres by combining waveforms to make harmonic output, optionally using filters to modify timbre. A sampler basically plays back "sampled" audio, transposing the fundamental pitch across the key range.

So it depends on the sound you're trying to get, which one to use. Want "realer" sounds, use a sampler, want "electro" sounds, use the synthesizer, unless of course you're using the digital waveform generation or you are sampling analogue synthesizers. It's not terribly cut and dried.

This sort of discussion can devolve quickly.