What's the purpose of having layers in an instrument? Thanks.

gives you a lot more flexibility with the sounds. most sounds on synths are already layered anyways, but the ASR makes it a little harder (although more flexible).

To make this answer as short as possible, layers allow you stereo samples for the most part. Left channel is on one layer, right channel on the other. That's only 2 layers. So, you have 6 more that you can add. Layers are not instrument dependent, either. THat means, if you have enough memory to have 61 DIFFERENT samples on each key, you can go to another layer, and add another sample on top of all of those samples, and so on and so on... Different layers can let you set which samples will play dependent on velocity, or whether the key is up or down. For instance, if your key up layers are 1 and 2 for a sample, and different sample can be assigned to those same keys on layers 3 and 4, thus, when you let up on that same key, it will play the samples on 3 and 4. There are so many other things you can do with layers, and what I said isn't even scratching the surface of what you can do.

Hopefully some more people on this forum can give you some other examples.

GOod Luck.